 | Middlemarch (Penguin Classics) by George Eliot
Buy new: £5.94 / Used from: £1.00 All 19th-century England is here. Brilliant plot: immerse yourself and marvel how it all fits together.
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 | To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Buy new: £4.56 / Used from: £1.50 Deeper than Mrs Dalloway... read it and understand how unbearably tragic, yet ineffably beautiful, life is.
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 | The Handmaid's Tale (Contemporary classics) by Margaret Atwood
Buy new: £4.97 / Used from: £0.01 The most important book of its kind since 1984. Forget the science-fiction label. Everything here could happen, some of it already has. Stunning.
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 | Wuthering Heights (Penguin Classics) by Emily Bronte
Buy new: £4.23 / Used from: £1.41 Forget the melodrama label. Just muse about how something so weird and wonderful could have been written in the midst of all that 19th-century realism.
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 | Beloved by Toni Morrison
Buy new: £5.07 / Used from: £0.01 Dont be put off by the first few pages. A terrifying story, yet like listening to music. There was no hope for the film version.
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 | The Essence of the Thing by Madeleine St.John
Buy used from: £0.01 Booker-shortlisted in 1997, but unjustly overlooked otherwise. Shows what friends are for when the bottom drops out of your life. Love is like marmalade...
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 | Daughters of the House by Michele Roberts
Buy new: £5.49 / Used from: £0.01 Also Booker-shortlisted, in 1992. A wonderfully effective bringing to life of a creepy family past.
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 | Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Buy used from: £0.01 This one won the Booker. Few writers handle the persistence of the past in the present with such consummate skill.
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 | No Night is Too Long by Barbara Vine
Buy used from: £0.01 The best of the Ruth-Rendell-writing-as-Barbara-Vine psychological thrillers. Passion and horror superbly melded.
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 | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin Modern Classics) by Muriel Spark
Buy new: £5.86 / Used from: £1.76 Ingenious use of flashback to conjure up a mythical figure from several peoples pasts.
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 | The Black Prince (Vintage Classics) by Iris Murdoch
Buy new: £6.96 / Used from: £1.99 Iris Murdoch blew hot and cold over the years, but this one is an undisputed masterpiece, with a devastating twist in the tail.
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 | Pride and Prejudice (Oxford World's Classics) by Jane Austen
Buy used from: £0.01 You have to read this some day. Or read it again. Age cannot wither it.
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 | Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Buy used from: £0.01 Youll see the elderly differently when youve read this. And a good thing too.
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 | Have the Men Had Enough? by Margaret Forster
Buy new: £5.05 / Used from: £0.01 Another one for those whose elderly relatives get on their nerves. Read this and think more carefully before you condemn.
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 | The Custom of the Country (Twentieth Century Classics) by Edith Wharton
Buy used from: £0.01 The custom of the country is getting divorced. Absolutely merciless satire. Jane Austen meets Henry James. More like her than him, though.
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 | The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood
Buy new: £6.47 / Used from: £0.01 I have to include her twice. Zenia is the one of the most detestable - and fascinating - characters in contemporary fiction.
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