Best Fiction of the Last 2000 Years
Explore the greatest fiction books of the last 2000 years with our curated list of 2000 must-read novels. Discover timeless classics, hidden gems, and literary masterpieces that shaped history.
Book
David Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
When David Copperfield escapes from the cruelty of his childhood home, he embarks on a journey to adulthood which will lead him through comedy and tragedy, love and heartbreak and friendship and betrayal. Over the course of his adventure, David meets an array of eccentric characters and learns hard lessons about the world before he finally discovers true happiness. Charles Dickens’s most celebrated novel and the author’s own favorite, David Copperfield is the classic account of a boy growing up in a world that is by turns magical, fearful, and grimly realistic. In a book that is part fairy tale and part thinly veiled autobiography, Dickens transmutes his life experience into a brilliant series of comic and sentimental adventures in the spirit of the great eighteenth-century novelists he so much admired. Few readers can fail to be touched by David’s fate, and fewer still to be delighted by his story. The cruel Murdstone, the feckless Micawber, the unctuous and sinister Uriah Heep, and David Copperfield himself, into whose portrait Dickens puts so much of his own early life, form a central part of our literary legacy. This edition reprints the original Everyman preface by G. K. Chesterton and includes thirty-nine illustrations by Phiz.
Book
Tom Jones
by Henry Fielding
Tom Jones is widely regarded as one of the first and most influential English novels. It is certainly the funniest. Tom Jones, the hero of the book, is introduced to the reader as the ward of a liberal Somerset squire. Tom is a generous but slightly wild and feckless country boy with a weakness for young women.
Book
The Sun Also Rises
by Ernest Hemingway
A group of expatriates travel from Paris to the Pamplona bullfights.
Book
Cyrano de Bergerac
by Edmond Rostand
Translates the classic French story of the master swordsman whose unpleasant appearance prevents him from courting the beautiful woman with whom he has fallen in love
Book
Midnight's Children
by Salman Rushdie
The story of Saleem Sinal, born precisely at midnight, August 15, 1947, the moment India became independent. Saleem's life parallels the history of his nation.
Book
Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York—and about Sully, one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years—is a classic American story. "Remarkable.... A revelation of the human heart." —The Washington Post Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous. Nobody’s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith. Look for Everybody’s Fool, available now, and Somebody’s Fool, coming soon.
Book
Far from the Madding Crowd
by Thomas Hardy
After an unfortunate marriage to Sergeant Troy and an affair with Farmer Boldwood, Bathsheba Everdene finally becomes the wife of the man who has always loved her, in an authoritative edition of the uncensored 1912 text. Reprint.
Book
The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
'The novel has everything: an absorbing melodrama, with a supporting cast of heroes, villains and eccentrics, set in a London where vast wealth and desperate poverty live cheek-by-jowl' Jasper Rees, The Times When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless after his father's death, he appeals to his wealthy uncle to help him find work and to protect his mother and sister. But Ralph Nickleby proves both hard-hearted and unscrupulous, and Nicholas finds himself forced to make his own way in the world. His adventures gave Dickens the opportunity to portray an extraordinary gallery of rogues and eccentrics: Wackford Squeers, the tyrannical headmaster of Dotheboys Hall, a school for unwanted boys, the slow-witted orphan Smike, rescued by Nicholas, the pretentious Mantalinis and the gloriously theatrical Mr and Mrs Crummels and their daughter, the 'infant phenomenon'. Like many of Dickens's novels, Nicholas Nickleby is characterised by his outrage at cruelty and social injustice, but it is also a flamboyantly exuberant work, whose loose, haphazard progress harks back to the picaresque novels of Tobias Smollett and Henry Fielding. In his introduction Mark Ford compares Nicholas Nickleby to eighteenth-century picaresque novels, and examines Dickens's criticism of the 'Yorkshire schools', his social satire and use of language. This edition includes the original illustrations by 'Phiz', Dickens's original preface to the work, a chronology and a list of further reading. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Book
Le Morte Darthur
by Sir Thomas Malory
This English version of the stories of King Arthur, "Le Morte D'Arthur" was completed in 1469-70 by Sir Thomas Malory. Malory charts the tragic disintegration of the fellowship of the Round Table, destroyed from within by warring factions.
Book
On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac’s classic American novel of freedom and the search for originality that defined a generation “An authentic work of art.”—The New York Times Inspired by Jack Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope—a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
Book
For Whom the Bell Tolls
by Ernest Hemingway
A book about love and courage and decency and glory. It is written with a wisdom that washes the mind and cools it. With an understanding that rips the heart with compassion.
Book
Orlando Furioso
by Lodovico Ariosto
"Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (1532) is the culmination of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France, a brilliantly witty parody of the medieval romances, and a fitting monument to the court society of the Italian Renaissance which gave it birth. In a kaleidoscope of scenes and emotions, three principal stories are developed: the love of Orlando for Angelica; the war between the Franks and the Saracens; and the love of Ruggiero, a Saracen, for Bradamant, a Christian. Enlivening and unifying the whole work is the vital personality of the author, endlessly teasing his readers and dropping casual asides about his contemporaries. Though highly serious in purpose and sophisticated in design, Orlando Furioso displays to the full Ariostro's remarkable sense of the absurd. This unabridged prose translation faithfully captures the narrative entire and renders meaning in its lightest shadings."--Back cover
Book
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
by Salman Rushdie
A captivating fantasy novel for readers of all ages, by the author of Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses “This is, simply put, a book for anyone who loves a good story. It’s also a work of literary genius.” —Stephen King Set in an exotic Eastern landscape peopled by magicians and fantastic talking animals, Haroun and the Sea of Stories inhabits the same imaginative space as The Lord of the Rings, The Alchemist, The Arabian Nights, and The Wizard of Oz. Twelve-year-old Haroun sets out on an adventure to restore his father’s gift of storytelling by reviving the poisoned Sea of Stories. On the way, he encounters many foes, all intent on draining the sea of all its storytelling powers. In this wondrously delightful story, Salman Rushdie gives us an imaginative work of extraordinary power and endearing humor that is, at its heart, an illumination of the necessity of storytelling in our lives.
Book
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
In 1327, finding his sensitive mission at an Italian abbey further complicated by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William of Baskerville turns detective.
Book
Cannery Row
by John Steinbeck
Vividly depicts the colorful, sometimes disreputable, inhabitants of a run-down area in Monterey, California
Book
The Iliad
by Homer
The great war epic of Western literature, translated by acclaimed classicist Robert Fagles, and featured in the Netflix series The OA A Penguin Classic Dating to the ninth century B.C., Homer’s timeless poem still vividly conveys the horror and heroism of men and gods wrestling with towering emotions and battling amidst devastation and destruction, as it moves inexorably to the wrenching, tragic conclusion of the Trojan War. Renowned classicist Bernard Knox observes in his superb introduction that although the violence of the Iliad is grim and relentless, it coexists with both images of civilized life and a poignant yearning for peace. Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Robert Fagles, winner of the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and a 1996 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, brings the energy of contemporary language to this enduring heroic epic. He maintains the drive and metric music of Homer’s poetry, and evokes the impact and nuance of the Iliad’s mesmerizing repeated phrases in what Peter Levi calls “an astonishing performance.” This Penguin Classics Deluxe edition also features French flaps and deckle-edged paper. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators. 9780140275360
Book
The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas
In seventeenth-century France, young d'Artagnan initially quarrels with, then befriends, three musketeers and joins them in trying to outwit the enemies of the king and queen.