The Telegraph 500 Must-Read Books war and history history of the Peloponnesian War / Thucydides (c400 bc)

The Savage Detectives / Roberto Bolano (1998)

Born in Santiago in 1953 - "the year that Stalin and Dylan Thomas died," he wrote - dyslexic Bolano lived a fractured, wanderer's life which may have fed into his playful, non-linear fiction. The poet-hero of his masterpiece is called Ulises.

Like Water for Chocolate / Laura Esquivel (1989)

"Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves," writes Esquivel in this sumptuous, magical realist Mexican melodrama. The heroine Tita's emotions spill into the delicious food she prepares.

THE BEST OF THE REST

The President / Miguel Angel Asturias (1946)

Pedro Paramo / Juan Rulfo (1955)

The Death of Artemio Cruz / Carlos Fuentes (1962)

Labyrinths / Jorge Luis Borges (1962)

I, the Supreme / Augusto Roa Bastos (1974)

CLASSICS FROM ANTIQUITY
The Iliad / Homer (c775BC)

The theme is war, for sure, but really it's the wrath of Achilles, and what it's like to work with an unstable killing machine. Each death is separately crafted; the gods mourn their favourites; and even Achilles can show us how to act with dignity.

The Odyssey / Homer (c725BC)

Here is Odysseus, returning from the war. But this is a poem less about travel and monsters than it is about identity - how the wily hero disguises himself even among his family. This is conflict on a domestic scale.

Metamorphoses / Ovid (8AD)

The Metamorphoses are all over the walls of the National Gallery. This was the most read book of Latin from the Renaissance onwards, and its tales of transformation, punishments fair or unfair, and the mythical roots of the universe, shape our aesthetic outlook even now.

The Symposium / Plato (c385-380BC)

This is Greek prose writing at its best. A dialogue about love at a party that the handsome Alcibiades crashes is deliberately drunken and confusing, to show that no one, not even Socrates, can say what love is.

The Art of Love / Ovid (2AD)

Men - how can you woo women and keep them?Women - how can you impress men and stop them wearing your clothes? Ovid's tips on love are sometimes classy, occasionally crass, but always revealing about the intricacies of Roman living and loving.

Phaedo / Plato (c385 - 380BC)

The death of Socrates is enormously moving for the tremendous calm he shows. He claims this is because he will see the world beyond this one, where things assume their perfect forms. And yet this is a powerfully human portrait of Socrates from his student.

The Symposium / Xenophon (360BC)

This other Symposium is notable not for its philosopohical rigour, but for the way in which Socrates turns into Dr Johnson. "What should we eat?" "Onions." "Why?" "Our wives won't think anyone would snog us." "So what is the best perfume?" Etc.

Poems / Sappho (born c612BC)

This won't take long - many of the poems contained in her nine books have been lost or destroyed - but what survives is stunning - intimate, utterly original and wise. Anne Carson's edition, If Not, Winter, is a perfect place to start.

Parallel Lives / Plutarch (before AD120)

Plutarch composed these detailed portraits of Greek and Roman greats long after the events, but scholars find him staggeringly well informed. It's also amazing to note how many images in Shakespeare's Roman plays are really Plutarch's.

The Aeneid / Virgil (19BC)

The tale of Trojans founding Rome goes far beyond propaganda (although it's there). Virgil is the master of pathos, commemorating victims more than victories. And the failed romance between Aeneas and Dido is the ancient world's best love story.

The Confessions / Saint Augustine (AD398)

As St Augustine struggles excitingly with temptation, one of the most tempting things for him is the Classical world itself, so rich in the rhetoric he would use for his own preaching, but with which he would bid the ancients goodbye.

On the Nature of Things / Lucretius (before 55BC)

Lucretius leaned on the Greek philosophers to create this investigation into how the universe works: it is run by atoms, can you believe, and gods are disinterested. Lucretius can write sensually as well as entertainingly.

Works and Days / Hesiod (after 750BC)

Many of the myths of ancient Greece that seem so natural to us now first appear in Hesiod - for example, how the gods appeared. In Works and Days he is more down to earth, advising on agriculture, but not before he's offered a frank assessment of mankind from golden age to iron.

The Histories / Herodotus (c450-420BC)

Was the father of history even a historian? He did recount the events of the war against Persia, to rally the Greeks once more, but the anecdotes, sketches of other cultures, and his accounts of mummification suggest he's something more interesting still.

The Georgics / Virgil (29BC)

"The best poem by the best poet" in Latin, said the 17th-century English poet John Dryden, and he was completely right. Virgil picks up on Hesiod's advice for farmers, but knows better how to structure his work, and his range of language helps him to treat the earth as a living organism.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Odes / Pindar (from 498BC)

The Apology / Plato (c385-380BC)

A History of Rome / Livy (before 17AD)

On behalf of Caelius / Cicero (56BC)

Pumpkinification / attributed to Seneca (before 65AD)

The Civil War / Lucan (before 65AD)

The Satires / Juvenal (before early 2AD)

Daphnis and Chloe / Longus (2AD)

Metamorphoses / Apuleius (2AD)

The Politics / Aristotle (before 323BC)
ROMANCE
Les Liaisons Dangereuses / Choderlos de Laclos (1782)

The self-made and sexually cynical Marquise de Merteuil and arrogant Vicomte de Valmont play a cruel game with a pure young woman in this tense epistolery novel driven by lust, power, seduction and revenge. A wicked and sophisticated treat.

Pride and Prejudice / Jane Austen (1813)

This perennially delightful romantic comedy gives us timeless lovers and sly social satire. "You could not shock her more than she shocks me," wrote WH Auden, who thrilled to read the "English spinster of the middle class/Describe the amorous effects of 'brass'".

Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte (1847)

"I will be myself." the passionate and moral governess tells her saturnine employer. "Mr Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me - for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you."

Wuthering Heights / Emily Bronte (1847)

Disdained on publication for its "vulgar depravity" and difficult characters, even the sniffier early critics acknowledge the "rugged power" of the romance between Catherine Earnshaw, and adopted gypsy Heathcliff with whom she feels a love eternal as the rocks beneath the moor.

Madame Bovary / Gustave Flaubert (1856)

A kindly but unexceptional provincial doctor marries a woman whose expectations have been raised unrealistically by reading too many romantic novels and, perhaps inevitably, things end badly.

The Portrait of a Lady / Henry James (1881)

On his deathbed, Isabel Archer's cousin Ralph gasps, "Love remains. I don't know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out." But readers still argue over the nature of her affection for her cruel and oppressive husband.

A Room with a View / EM Forster (1908)

Amurder in an Italian piazza and an unexpected kiss in a field of violets shake muddled Lucy Honeychurch out of her repressed middle-class life in Surrey. Forster, says Zadie Smith, allows the English comic novel to exist "as a messy human concoction".

Le Grand Meaulnes / Alain-Fournier (1913)

A recent poll of French readers placed Fournier's novel sixth of all 20th-century books, just behind Proust and Camus. Julian Barnes called this nostalgic tale of lost adolescent love: "magical, high-hearted, yet never sentimental".

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept / Elizabeth Smart (1945)

Loosely based on the Canadian author's destructive, 18-year affair with the British poet George Barker, during which she bore him four of his 15 children, Angela Carter reviewed this astonishing, infuriating prose poem as "Like Madame Bovary blasted by lightning".

Gone with the Wind / Margaret Mitchell (1936)

So hefty that its vintage erotica-aficionado author used parts of her manuscript to prop up the couch on which she wrote, this Pulitzer Prize winning CivilWar epic pits flouncing Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara against the "dark sexuality" of roguish Rhett Butler.

Love in a Cold Climate / Nancy Mitford (1949)

When the remote and lovely Polly returns from India and reveals she wants to marry her lecherous uncle she sets the cat among the inter-war, upper-class pigeons in this deliciously sharp and funny novel, a companion piece to The Pursuit of Love.

The End of the Affair / Graham Greene (1951)

"Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel; sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust," writes Greene in this novel of agonisingly restrained passion, set amid the shattered stained glass of wartime London.

Oscar and Lucinda / Peter Carey (1988)

A Devon vicar's son bets the woman he loves that he can build her a glass church in the Australian outback. Jonathan Miller once described this vivid, Booker Prizewinning novel as "a sort of science fiction set in the past".

Doctor Zhivago / Boris Pasternak (1957)

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (incensing the Communist Party which had refused its publication in the USSR) Pasternak's tale of a rich industrialist's son who embraces the revolution takes a dark turn when the woman he loves is exiled.

Norwegian Wood / Haruki Murakami (1987)

Roughly five per cent of the Japanese population bought a copy of Murakami's haunting and original debut novel, in which 37-year-old ToruWatanabe (a man neither uchi or soto - inside or outside - of his milieu) hears a song which recalls a formative college encounter.

Atonement / Ian McEwan (2001)

In the heatwave of 1935, Robbie Turner accidentally sends his benefactor's daughter an explicit letter via her sister Briony, who later implicates Robbie in a crime. And Briony is "possessed by a desire to have the world just so".

Bonjour Tristesse / Francoise Sagan (1954)

Written when Sagan was just 17, this sultry, lyrical novel captures the confusion of a girl on the cusp of adulthood, meddling with others' romantic affairs with disastrous consequences.

The Swimming-Pool Library / Alan Hollinghurst (1988)

Hollinghurst's beautifully controlled and sexually explicit debut is 25-year-old William Beckwith's account of summer 1983, during which he was "riding high on sex and self-esteem". Cruising in a public lavatory, he saves the life of an octogenarian peer.

The Remains of the Day / Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Seeking a recognisable English myth, Ishiguro chose the English butler, saying Jeeves was a big influence. But Salman Rushdie notes that "death, change, pain and evil invade the innocent Wodehouse-world". And the butler wants the former housekeeper back.

The Well of Loneliness / Radclyffe Hall (1928)

A pioneering lesbian novel, in which an upper-class "invert" falls for another woman, judged obscene because it promoted lesbianism although the only sexual reference is: "that night, they were not divided".

THE BEST OF THE REST

Women in Love / DH Lawrence (1920)

The Blue Flower / Penelope Fitzgerald (1995)

The Go-Between / LP Hartley (1953)

Death in Venice / Thomas Mann (1912)

The Graduate / Charles Webb (1963)

The French Lieutenant's Woman / John Fowles (1969)

The Far Pavilions / MM Kaye (1978)

The Piano Teacher / Elfriede Jelinek (1983)

Foreign Affairs / Alison Lurie (1984)

The Lover / Marguerite Duras (1984)

The Passion / Jeanette Winterson (1987)

Possession / AS Byatt (1990)

The English Patient / Michael Ondaatje (1992)

Music & Silence / RoseTremain (1999)

The Reader / Bernhard Schlink (1995)

MONEY AND POWER
The Art of War / Sun Tzu (4BC)

Beloved of Bond villains,Mafiosi and business leaders worldwide, you have to read this if only to be able to start a sentence "Sun Tzu says..." and finish it with something sound. Spying and deception are the keys to victory.

The Prince / Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)

Like Sun Tzu, Machiavelli is more often quoted than read, which is a shame, since although his name has become an adjective for the acceptance of the necessity of immoral acts for the accomplishment of one's aims, there is more to it than that.

The Wealth of Nations / Adam Smith (1776)

What would Adam "The invisible hand of market forces" Smith say about the Libor scandal? This is the first enquiry into the division of labour, productivity and the freedom of the market.

Of the Social Contract / Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)

"Man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains."Why should this be? This is Rousseau's magnum opus, an investigation into the legitimate - or otherwise - power of kings over their peoples.

Das Kapital / Karl Marx (1867)

Marx's book reveals the mechanisms by which capitalists fix the means of the production and the markets for their own benefit. If only everybody did not want to be one of these capitalists, then this would have been even more influential.

The General Theory of Employment / John Maynard Keynes (1936)

Central to Keynes's theory is the idea unemployment will be low if money is spent, high if it is not. Therefore spend money. But where does that money come from? Borrow it. In the long term we are all dead.

Atlas Shrugged / Ayn Rand (1957)

Set in a dystopian future, Ayn Rand's sprawling, slightly crazed novel champions unfettered greed by showing how awful life would be for us all if people were not rewarded for their productivity.

The Ascent of Money / Niall Ferguson (2008)

Ferguson's book on the history of money from the Babylonian clay tablets missed out on the most recent disasters, but this is a solid and finely crafted piece of scholarship charting and explaining all previous booms and busts.

Who Moved my Cheese? / Dr Spencer Johnson (1998)

Good question. It is actually a best selling book about adapting to change to find and keep happiness, couched in a rather charming allegory involving two super mice and a couple of dozy humans stuck in a maze, seeking their share of the cheese.

Whoops! / John Lanchester (2010)

For a summary of what we knew had gone wrong with the financial markets (not including all the other stuff we've since discovered), there can be no better guide. Short, pithy, even jokey, it will inspire futile rage.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Leviathan / Thomas Hobbes (1651)

Freakonomics / Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner (2005)

Capitalism and Freedom / Milton Friedman (1962)

The Road to Serfdom / Frederick Hayek (1994))

The Great Crash of 1929 / John Kenneth Galbraith (1954)

POETRY
The Selected Poems of Li Po / Li Po (c750 AD)

Remarkable for their succinctness and apparently throw-away insights, these poems delighted their Chinese readers in the 8th century and, in the hands of various interpreters in the 20th, such as Ezra Pound, brought new life to English poetry (as well as to Mahler).

Sonnets / William Shakespeare (1609)

These are considered the best sonnets ever, and the best love poems ever. The poet puts his craft to situations that call for all his musicality and reason; the results attain a kind of perfection.

Paradise Lost / John Milton (1667)

The brainiest poet to write in English could somehow wrench the language around and still make it speak in sonorous, memorable cadences: his ambition in Paradise Lost is breathtaking, but so is the fact that he delivered.

Lyrical Ballads / William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798)

This collaboration set out to change poetry, and while it remains easy to mock, the authors pulled it off. If elaborate, over-fussy classical references seem out of place next to more straightforward observations and tales, Lyrical Ballads heralded the change.

Don Juan / Lord Byron (1819 - 1824)

For all Byron's reputation as the great Romantic, he was actually devoted to clever jokes and attacks on his peers worthy of Alexander Pope for their smartness. Don Juan is a triumph of this style: a narrative following a journal on which trouble is the only predictable thing.

Eugene Onegin / Alexander Pushkin (1825)

Pushkin's masterpiece is a novel in verse, about love badly timed, rivalries and loneliness - but with highly entertaining digressions and vibrant characters. (Vikram Seth's The Golden Gate is a joyous narrative poem about San Francisco in the same form.)

The Man with Night Sweats / Thom Gunn (1992)

Gunn brought a diction and smartness to 20th-century poetry that recalled the Metaphysicals such as John Donne. The grim theme of his penultimate collection almost demanded it: the impact of HIV and Aids on the gay community he had hymned in earlier books.

Leaves of Grass / Walt Whitman (1855)

It took a while for America to realise how vital Whitman's exuberant, potent and frank outpourings would be to its national identity. His status is now secure, and at least Whitman himself never doubted it.

The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson / Emily Dickinson (pub 1890 onwards, posthumously)

Emily Dickinson spent much of her life at home in Amherst, but also in a kind of ecstasy: her tiny but explosive poems dazzle with colour, alongside insights into fame, mortality and the soul. Her work became more known when her sister discovered it after her death.

The Waste Land / TS Eliot (1922)

Eliot changed poetry for ever when he drew on his personal pain to account for the wreckage that was Europe after the Great War. His mishmash of styles, voices and references are seductive and clever, but pointed to the cultural problems he identified.

Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems / Allen Ginsberg (1961)

Perhaps more than Howl, Kaddish is Ginsberg's intense, intimate confession. It is a harrowing account of his mother's death, and decline yields to an exultant version of the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Birthday Letters / Ted Hughes (1998)

Throughout his life, Hughes said nothing about his marriage to Sylvia Plath until these poems. A memoir of a relationship that could be sustaining as well as troubled.

Dart / Alice Oswald (2002)

Dart follows the river from Dartmoor to Dartmouth, and is steeped in the voices of people whose lives are vitally linked to it. The result gives the river life, too, as it finds and loses its own identity.

Family Values / Wendy Cope (2011)

In perhaps her best collection to date, Cope balances her observations of present quirks (such as eccentrics who go to concerts) with memories of her childhood and family. Readers will welcome the warmth and simplicity of her love poems, too.

The Divine Comedy / Dante (1308 -1321)

Dante's journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise is sometimes startling, sometimes even grotesque but it teaches us about divine love, and human love, and gives us a lesson in the use of striking imagery and symbolism.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Songs and Sonnets / John Donne (1633)

Faust I and II / Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1808, 1832)

Les Fleurs du Mal / Charles Baudelaire (1857; 1861)

Selected Poems / John Clare (published posthumously)

Montage of a Dream Deferred / Langston Hughes (1951)

Station Island / Seamus Heaney (1984)

Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair / Pablo Neruda (1924)

The Golden Gate / Vikram Seth (1986)

Selected Poems / Yehuda Amichai (2000)

White Egrets / Derek Walcott (2010)
THRILLERS
The Secret Agent / Joseph Conrad (1907)

Although written more than 100 years ago there is something timely about what is arguably Conrad's most enduring novel, which sees his secret agent embroiled in a plot to blow up Greenwich Observatory on behalf of - perhaps - a group of anarchists. It absolutely predicts the rise of terrorism.

The Manchurian Candidate / Richard Condon (1959)

Set during the Cold War, The Manchurian Candidate concerns the brainwashing of a whole company of soldiers by Korean Communists, to allow their officer to become a "sleeper" in the American Government. Complex and steeped in the paranoia of the time.

The Hunt for Red October / Tom Clancy (1984)

At the height of the ColdWar the captain of a Russian nuclear submarine that cannot be detected defects to the west, bringing his craft - Red October - with him. The Russians try to stop him. The Americans and the hero Jack Ryan try to stop them. Incredibly tense and superbly claustrophobic.

Killing Floor / Lee Child (1997)

When ex-army loner Jack Reacher gets off a bus in a one-horse town in the American South he is instantly arrested and charged with murdering his own brother. But boy have they picked the wrong man to pick on...

On Her Majesty's Secret Service / Ian Fleming (1963)

It might almost have been any of them, but Fleming's tenth Bond book reveals the spy in a softer, more humane light, even falling in love and getting married - though not for long - while battling with Ernst Blofield in his high alpine fastness.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold / John le Carre (1963)

"What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs?" No! They are, among other things, vain fools and le Carre's third novel, a marvellously bleak take on the Cold War, shows them at their morally repugnant worst.

Where Eagles Dare / Alistair MacLean (1967)

MacLean wrote the novel at the same time as the screenplay (which was to be made into the greatest war film of all time) and it is the best of his many; full of ferocious action, double-crossing spies and fist fights on cable cars. Top stuff.

The Andromeda Strain / Michael Crichton (1969)

Crichton's first novel under his own name was a huge success and became a blueprint for the many technothrillers that followed. His technique was to find something people were frightened about, then make it worse, in this case organisms from out of space that would wipe out mankind.