 | Complete Poems of John Keats (Wordsworth Poetry) (Wordsworth Poetry Library) by John Keats
Buy new: £3.76 / Used from: £0.73 Keats' genius was his ability to make the reader feel the same emotions he had felt, just through words on the page. He was the greatest poet of the greatest generation of poetry.
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 | Anna Karenin (Classics) by L.N. Tolstoy
Buy used from: £0.01 The best book I have ever read. Tolstoy 's understanding of the human mind was astounding and Anna is the ultimate heroine.
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 | The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Dover Thrift) by Oscar Wilde
Buy used from: £0.01 This incredibly moving with the jovial rhyme scheme becoming strangely eerie after a while.
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 | Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Buy new: £4.97 / Used from: £2.20 The greatest war parody ever, not to mention extremely witty.
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 | Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems by Thomas Hardy
Buy new: £12.28 / Used from: £11.03 Better known for his prose but his poetry is fantastically ironic, amusing and satirical in one respect and demure, atmospheric and tragic in another.
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 | Middlemarch (Oxford World's Classics) by George Eliot
Buy used from: £0.01 Eliot's greatest work.
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 | Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £1.68 Plath's poetry was amazingly sad and moving. 'Daddy' is wonderfully powerful.
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 | The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
Buy new: £5.23 / Used from: £1.15 Classic Amis. Fantastic portrayal of adolescent relationships and very funny.
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 | Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" (Casebook)
Buy new: £12.74 / Used from: £0.01 This is perhaps the most simplistic aspect of Blake but it contains some of the most beautiful and savage verse ever written.
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 | To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Buy new: £4.30 / Used from: £1.72 I defy anyone to read this book and not be touched by the message and style.
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 | War Poems of Wilfred Owen by Wilfred Owen
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £1.48 Wilfred Owen was the greatest writer of the horrors of war - bar none.
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 | Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (Vintage classics) by Patrick Hamilton
Buy used from: £3.40 This is three novels combined into one by the much overlooked Patrick Hamilton. His genius was his understanding of the underclasses of London. A 20th Century Dickens.
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 | Selected Poems (Penguin Modern Classics) by William Yeats
Buy new: £6.25 / Used from: £3.99 Read the 'long-legged fly'.
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 | Animal Farm: A Fairy Story by George Orwell
Buy used from: £0.01 Brilliant both as an allegory for the corruption of revolution and simply as a story.
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 | Penguin Great Ideas : Why I Write by George Orwell
Buy new: £3.47 / Used from: £0.48 His essays give a better understanding of Orwell himself. It is rare that a book truly changes the way one thinks but this did.
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 | Selected Poems by T.S. Eliot
Buy new: £6.47 / Used from: £0.01 T.S. Eliot wrote hauntingly of human nature.
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 | Selected Poems by W.H. Auden
Buy new: £7.77 / Used from: £2.37 He wrote brilliantly of all aspects of society and was wonderfully profound.
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 | Heart Of Darkness : by Joseph Conrad
Buy used from: £0.01 An amazing chronicle on the effects of imperialsm, human nature and the subconscious. Read in tandem with T.S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men'.
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 | Macbeth (Penguin Popular Classics) by William Shakespeare
Buy new: £2.26 / Used from: £0.01 Shakepeare always appers on lists such this, and for a reason. Macbeth, for me, his his most atmospheric, passionate work with some extraordinary verse.
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 | A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Buy used from: £3.98 Tennessee Williams was the greatest playwright of modern times and the power, lust, desire and fantastic analysis of human weakness and superficiality in this, make it his finest work.
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