 | Mysteries by Knut Hamsun
Buy new: £6.91 / Used from: £1.34 Astounding claim but Henry Miller was right. This is the best book ever written.
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 | Père Goriot (Oxford World's Classics) by Honoré de Balzac
Buy new: £7.99 / Used from: £1.68 A compendium of Humanity in all it's shades. Worth it for the Rastignac, Vautrin conversation alone.
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 | The Earth (Classics) by Émile Zola
Buy new: £8.44 / Used from: £0.24 The peasant soul that dwells within us all. Not pleasant.
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 | By the Open Sea (Classics) by August Strindberg
Buy used from: £19.50 Strindberg cuts through his subject matter with a misanthropic precision.
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 | The Man Who Watched the Trains Go by (Penguin Modern Classics) by Georges Simenon
Buy used from: £1.20 There is no Truth, no Right or Wrong - just other people's ideas of these things.
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 | My Childhood (Twentieth Century Classics) by Maxim Gorky
Buy new: £6.77 / Used from: £4.00 Autobiography at it's best. Be prepared to be transported back into 19th century Russia.
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 | Tropic of Capricorn (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) by Henry Miller
Buy new: £5.96 / Used from: £3.00 Break the Machine. Live like Miller.
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 | Main Street (Dover Thrift) by Sinclair Lewis
Buy new: £3.43 / Used from: £0.19 An oft forgot gem. A woman escapes the stricture of small town values. Still relevant.
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 | Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood
Buy new: £5.88 / Used from: £1.68 Painful but beautiful.
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 | Coming Up for Air (Penguin Modern Classics) by George Orwell
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £3.72 Orwell spots the trends early, as consumerism sweeps aside all that was good, calling it progress.
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 | The History of Mr. Polly by H.G. Wells
Buy new: £4.55 / Used from: £1.50 With a struggle, the little, Everyman finally escapes. Mr Polly is Spartacus.
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 | I am a Cat (Tuttle classics) by Soseki Natsume
Buy new: £9.90 / Used from: £6.99 A Japanese cat's eye view of the pettiness of people. A worldwide problem it seems. Sad.
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 | Martin Eden (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Jack London
Buy new: £6.49 / Used from: £4.08 So you want to be a writer? Read this then. I dare you.
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 | The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes) (Penguin Classics) by Henri Alain-Fournier
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £3.00 Magical, ethereal, spellbinding. This one will become part of you somehow.
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 | Effi Briest (Penguin Classics) by Theodor Fontane
Buy new: £5.73 / Used from: £1.99 Why don't They dramatise this instead of more Austen? Too real?
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 | Winesburg, Ohio (Penguin Twentieth-century Classics) by Sherwood Anderson
Buy new: £4.24 / Used from: £0.01 The original tale of small town angst. Frighteningly dark in it's own particular way.
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 | Bel-ami (Classics) by Guy Maupassant
Buy new: £6.46 / Used from: £2.92 This is how people are. Disturbing death scene and even more disturbing responses to it.
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 | Therese (Penguin Modern Classics) by Francois Mauriac
Buy new: £8.44 / Used from: £4.00 Female friends ask how a man got inside a woman's head like this.
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 | Journey to the End of the Night (New Directions Paperbook) by LF Celine
Buy used from: £8.46 Mr Unpopular himself blows the cover on what it is to be people - using himself as the main object of study. Intense: will blow your mind.
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 | The Wayward Bus (Penguin Modern Classics) by John Steinbeck
Buy new: £9.26 / Used from: £3.32 Steinbeck, in darker mood, gets beneath Society's veneer of civility.
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 | Njal's Saga (Penguin Classics) by Robert Cook
Buy new: £6.48 / Used from: £4.00 The ultimate saga. Historians call it fiction. I don't think so. See what you think.
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 | Atomised by Michel Houellebecq
Buy new: £5.19 / Used from: £0.01 Love him or loathe him: he's the only one out there looking for why it's all got so broken.
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 | Selected Stories (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by O. Henry
Buy new: £7.14 / Used from: £1.39 A joy! Master of the short story. He'll get you on the first page, every time, guaranteed. And you'll learn about people too.
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 | The Big Sleep and Other Novels (Penguin Modern Classics) by Raymond Chandler
Buy new: £7.79 / Used from: £6.08 Be more hard boiled but stay soft in the middle, like Marlowe. Brilliant narrative; evocative and enlightening.
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 | The Plumed Serpent (Wordsworth Classics) by D.H. Lawrence
Buy new: £1.99 / Used from: £0.01 The great DHL. The answer you seek is in this book.
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