Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a spellbinding and dazzlingly innovative portrait of a woman haunted by the past.

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh (1993)

Illustration © Vintage Design

We start off with high hopes, then we bottle it.

Trainspotting defined a generation and changed the face of British fiction. Published in 1993, Irvine Welsh's debut novel burst on to the literary scene in all its dark, raw and exhilarating glory.

Its cast of characters, including Renton, Spud, Sick Boy and Begbie, grapple with the meaning of life and heroin addiction in Edinburgh at the end of the 1980s – all told in a dazzling, funny and inventive vernacular style.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (1948)

Illustration © Aino-Maija Metsola

Noble deeds and hot baths are the best cures for depression.

I Capture the Castle tells the story of seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain, who lives with her bohemian family in a crumbling castle in the middle of nowhere. All their lives will soon be transformed by the arrival of new neighbours from America, and Cassandra finds herself falling in love.

Funny as hell, charismatic, deliciously eccentric, Austenesque and utterly charming, I Capture the Castle is an enchanting novel about growing up.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)

Illustration © Tara Anand

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

Born at the stroke of midnight, at the precise moment of India's independence, Saleem Sinai is destined from birth to be special. For he is one of 1,001 children born in the midnight hour, children who all have special gifts, children with whom Saleem is telepathically linked. But there has been a terrible mix up at birth, and Saleem's life takes some unexpected twists and turns.

At once a fascinating family saga and an astonishing evocation of a vast land and its people, Midnight’s Children stands apart as a brilliant work of fiction.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)

Illustration © Peter Judson

What harbour can receive you more securely than a great library?

You go into a bookshop and buy If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. You like it. But alas there is a printer's error in your copy. You take it back to the shop and get a replacement. But the replacement seems to be a totally different story. You try to track down the original book you were reading but end up with a different narrative again.

This remarkable novel leads you through many different books including a detective adventure, a romance, a satire, an erotic story, a diary and a quest. But the real hero is you, the reader.

Stoner by John Williams (1965)

Illustration © Reed Wilson

For a few moments in the evening, then, they talked quietly and casually, as if they were old friends or exhausted enemies.

The eponymous William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century, and although initially sent to the university to study agronomy he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life.

John Williams’s luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero.

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter (1979)

There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer.

Angela Carter was a storytelling sorceress, the literary godmother of Neil Gaiman, David Mitchell, Audrey Niffenegger, J. K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction.

In her must-read masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

He was going to live forever, or die in the attempt.

Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army — if Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22.

When a book title becomes a phrase in everyday life, it's a good sign you should read that book. Darkly hilarious and absurdly enjoyable, Catch-22 is a rite of passage to be read by all.

The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1983)

For I see that then I was still all in a state of innocence, but that innocence, once lost, is lost forever.

Arthur Kipps, a junior solicitor, is summoned to attend a funeral of the sole inhabitant of Eel Marsh House. The house stands wreathed in fog and mystery, but it is not until he glimpses a wasted young woman, dressed all in black, at the funeral, that a creeping sense of unease begins to take hold...

The Woman in Black is gothic horror at its finest, a truly terrifying classic English ghost story that will give you goosebumps.

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