1. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (for setting the record straight)
2. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (for his celebration of lying)
3. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee (for its pessimism)
4. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (for its optimism)
5. Middlemarch by George Eliot (for insight and wisdom)
6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (for its call to arms)
7. A Passage to India by EM Forster (for its symphonic perfection)
8. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass (for his imaginative courage)
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison (for her emotional clarity)
10. Stories of Flannery O'Connor (for unerring narrative focus)

by Jim Crace