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

Carrie / Stephen King (1974)

Concerning a high school girl who uses her recently discovered telekinetic powers to punish class bullies, this is King's first of more than 50 novels and, written in an unusual style including through letters and newspaper articles, it still packs an immediate and terrifying punch.

Marathon Man / William Goldman (1974)

This has got everything: New York Jews, diamonds, brotherly betrayal, a beautiful girl, properly evil Nazis and sadistic dentists. Goldman was better known for his screenplays, but this novel - taut and laconic - shows how thrillers should be written.

The Bourne Identity / Robert Ludlum (1980)

When a bullet wounded man is washed ashore, barely alive and with no memory, so begins an artful reconstruction of the past, and though it has since spawned numerous overlymuscular films, the original novel is full of satisfying intrigue.

Jaws / Peter Benchley (1974)

When a huge shark starts eating people from off a Long Island beach resort, the police chief takes it personally, but the mayor wants it hushed up. An epic contest ensues.

The World at Night / Alan Furst (1996)

Alan Furst's novels are all similar - Paris, 1940, a man, a woman, the German army - and the one you read first is the one you like the most. He is a wonderful scene setter, able to conjure a time and place and an atmosphere with a few adroitly chosen words.

The Da Vinci Code / Dan Brown (2003)

Panned by the critics, The Da Vinci Code is nevertheless the most brilliant page turner, with a hook and a cliff-hanger on every other page so you plough on through, desperate for the end.

The Thirty-Nine Steps / John Buchan (1915)

Both plot and hero may be archetypal but there is plenty of "period" excitement and the atmosphere crackles with restrained menace.

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Count of Monte Cristo / Alexandre Dumas (1844)

The Riddle of the Sands / Erskine Childers (1903)

The Scarlet Pimpernel / Baroness Orczy (1905)

The Third Man and other stories / Graham Greene (1949)

The Day of the Jackal / Frederick Forsyth (1971)

Not After Midnight - Five Long Stories / Daphne Du Maurier (1971)

Gorky Park / Martin Cruz Smith (1981)

A Time to Kill / John Grisham (1989)

Los Alamos / Joseph Kanon (1997)

Gone Girl / Gillian Flynn (2012)
FOOD AND DRINK
Fast Food Nation / Eric Schlosser (2001)

Although it may taste that way, not all food is good, and fast food - burgers and fries - is particularly bad, not just for you, but for the planet. Schlosser's book shows how the industry destroys the environment and workers' lives, and aims its products at children.

French Country Cooking / Elizabeth David (1951)

Anyone alive in England in the 1950s will tell you they had to buy olive oil from the chemist, but this was the book that began to change all that, introducing us to food as pleasure and forever turning us from brown Windsor soup.

How to Eat / Nigella Lawson (1998)

It seems ages ago now that Nigella was new on the scene, fresh-faced and full of sensible advice about "the pleasures and principles of good food" instead of wearing unsuitable negligees while raiding the fridge for ice cream at midnight, but this is her at her best.

The Physiology of Taste / Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1825)

For someone said to have founded the lo-carb diet 150 years before its time (again), the father of the gastronomic essay took a hard line on cheese: "A dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye." Full of strong views, it is a deserved classic.

The Man Who Ate Everything / Jeffrey Steingarten (1997)

Part cook book, part travelogue, part scientific inquiry, Steingarten's book is collected from his Vogue columns and answers some of those idle questions such as why the French do not drop like flies from all the butter they eat.

The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break / Steven Sherrill (2000)

The Minotaur works as a short order chef in a rib restaurant somewhere in the American South, keeping himself to himself, watching life go by and taking the occasional fag break. A beautiful, heartbreaking, startling novel about food and love as well as mythological monsters.

The Omnivore's Dilemma / Michael Pollan (2006)

Before refrigeration we had to eat what was there, but now we can eat more or less what we like when we like, and centuries of cultural conditioning have come undone. What does this mean? Pollan is a fascinating writer with a rigorous enquiring mind.

The Kitchen Diaries, volume I + II / Nigel Slater (2006, 2012)

In two chunky beautifully produced volumes Nigel Slater charts his food highlights of the year. Seasonal, fresh ingredients - often picked from his own garden - with lots of butter and salt, his recipes will have anyone salivating.

Kitchen Confidential / Anthony Bourdain (2000)

In wonderfully salty prose Bourdain describes how he came to find himself working in the netherworld of the restaurant kitchen, a space populated by deviants and borderline lunatics with no time for niceties. Required reading for anyone who eats out.

Thai Food / David Thompson (2002)

The quintessential cookery book that covers not just one great cuisine, but in doing so the cultural and social history of a country. From simple street food to more complex dishes, this has everything you need to know.

BEST OF THE REST

Hangover Square / Patrick Hamilton (1941)

Delia Smith's Cookery Course / Delia Smith (1995)

A Long Finish / Michael Dibdin (1998)

Sichuan Cookery / Fuchsia Dunlop (2001)

Judgement of Paris / George Taber (2006)

CRIME

The Woman in White / Wilkie Collins (1859)

"Women can resist a man's love, a man's fame, a man's personal appearance, and a man's money, but they cannot resist a man's tongue when he knows how to talk to them," wrote Collins in the first great Victorian thriller.

Strangers on a Train / Patricia Highsmith (1950)

The perfect murder is surely the one a sane person has no motive to commit. That's the premise of this tense and morally disturbing noir masterpiece in which two men become "what the other had not chosen to be, the cast-off self".

The Daughter of Time / Josephine Tey (1951)

Unusually topical with the rediscovery of Richard III's bones, Josephine Tey's novel starts with a police inspector bored in hospital re-imagining the last Yorkist king, trying to work out whether he killed the princes in the Tower or not. The conclusion remains controversial, in some parts.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes / Arthur Conan Doyle (1892-1927)

The drug-addicted, violin-playing ex-prize fighter is the only mystery that never gets solved in these original, deliciously engineered and atmospheric detective stories set in "that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained".

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd / Agatha Christie (1926)

Slippery red herrings meet smug little grey cells in this ingenious, rule-breaking country house murder mystery, Christie's masterpiece was inspired by her brother-in-law who suggested that the ideal fictional criminal would be a Dr Watson character.

The Madman of Bergerac / Georges Simenon (1932)

Literature's most dogged detective, Commissaire Maigret, is en route to a restful rural weekend when the peculiar behaviour of a fellow train passenger arouses his curiosity and leads him to a quaint French country village terrorised by a homicidal maniac.

The Nine Tailors / Dorothy L Sayers (1934)

With a flawless English and dry humour that helps make her the most literary of the Golden Age mystery writers, Sayers' ninth novel featuring the crime-solving toff Lord Peter Wimsey is her most ingenious. Church bells chime spookily across remote Fen country.

Rebecca / Daphne du Maurier (1938)

A childlike young woman with lank hair marries a mysterious and dominating older man and becomes dangerously obsessed with his charismatic - but deceased - first wife. Psychologically acute, the novel was described by Germaine Greer as "a superior example of deeply encoded female pornography".

Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow / Peter Hoeg (1992)

At the vanguard of what has since become a Scandinavian crime tsunami, Hoeg's unusual and gripping novel follows Miss Smilla's investigation into whether a boy was pushed or fell from a roof in Copenhagen. The clues take her to Greenland via what must be one of the most peculiar sex scenes in detective history.

In Cold Blood / Truman Capote (1966)

Seven years after publishing Breakfast at Tiffany's, Capote published this sensational "non-fiction novel" about the senseless and brutal murder of a Kansas farmer, his wife and two of their children. Based on interviews with the appalled community and the killers, the book reinvented reportage.

The Name of the Rose / Umberto Eco (1980)

"Books always speak of other books, and every story tells a story that has already been told," writes the Italian philosopher in his postmodernist debut novel about murder in a 14th-century monastery. It is the scholarly reader's answer to The Da Vinci Code.

The New York Trilogy / Paul Auster (1985-86)

Sly postmodernist sleuthing in this profound, literary quest which sends its author on a search for the meaning of self and the origins of language. "Every life is inexplicable," writes the author, "No matter how many facts are told."

Misery / Stephen King (1987)

Inspired by King's resentment of readers who wanted him shackled to the horror genre, this bloodcurdling thriller sees novelist Paul Sheldon imprisoned and tortured by his "Number One Fan". The real fear though is that of every novelist: the blank, bloodless page.

The Big Sleep / Raymond Chandler (1939)

The cool master of hardboiled crime fiction sends PI Philip Marlowe into a murky web of murder, blackmail and pornography, while "under the thinning fog the surf curled and creamed, almost without sound, like a thought trying to form itself on the edge of consciousness".

LA Confidential / James Ellroy (1990)

The sprawling and violent third novel in the self-proclaimed "Mad Dog" of American crime fiction's thrilling, voyeuristic LA quartet sees three cops - with varying degrees of attachment to justice and the law - sucked down a drain of "astounding audacious perversion''.

Fatherland / Robert Harris (1992)

In this outstanding example of speculative fiction, Harris imagines that Hitler won the Second World War and, by the 1960s, Britain is a client state ruled by King Edward VIII and Queen Wallis. Meanwhile, a detective in Berlin examines a corpse which stinks of conspiracy, but that is only the beginning of the truths waiting to be unearthed.

True History of the Kelly Gang / Peter Carey (2000)

The bushranger turned bank robber gets a voice "like a steel nibbed kookaburra on the fences in the morning sun" in Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel. Never flinching from the extreme violence, Carey gives a rich emotional life to a national legend.

Fingersmith / Sarah Waters (2002)

Updating the decadent thrills of the Victorian melodrama for the 21st century, Waters' daringly plotted, erotically charged and exquisitely detailed novel is as sly as its heroine.

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher / Kate Summerscale (2009)

In 1860, the body of three-year-old Saville Kent was thrust into the servants' lavatory of his father's country house. His throat had been slashed. In this insightful reconstruction, Summerscale turns the spotlight on the moral hypocrisy surrounding the case.

Get Shorty / Elmore Leonard (1990)

A loan shark attempts to make it big in Hollywood in this witty thriller loaded with Leonard's trademark whip-smart dialogue. Martin Amis once said his prose "makes Raymond Chandler look clumsy".

THE BEST OF THE REST

Tales of Mystery and Imagination / Edgar Allan Poe (1852)

The Innocence of Father Brown / G K Chesterton (1911)

The Thin Man / Dashiell Hammett (1934)

True Grit / Charles Portis (1968)

The Hollow Man / John Dickson Carr (1935)

Nineteen Seventy-Four / David Peace (1999)

The Godfather / Mario Puzo (1969)

The Watchmen / Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (1987)

A Dark-Adapted Eye / Barbara Vine (1986)

Devices and Desires / P D James (1989)

The Fifth Woman / Henning Mankell (1996)

My Name is Red / Orhan Pamuk (1998)

The Remorseful Day / Colin Dexter (1999)

The Girl Who Played with Fire / Stieg Larsson (2006)

The Journalist and the Murderer / Janet Malcolm (1990)

COMEDY

Gargantua and Pantagruel / Francois Rabelais (c 1532)

A series of rambunctious novels blending mad vulgarity with slingshot satire, Gargantua and Pantagruel is a family saga involving giants and their adventures - swallowing pilgrims after they've fallen onto their salad plates, battles with flying pigs that excrete mustard, and broad rudeness about the Church.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman / Laurence Sterne (1759-1767)

In many ways, one of the most influential novels - as far as it can be described as a novel - of all time. An infinity of digressions is turned into a fine comic art form, and Sterne seems to invent postmodernism 200 years before anyone else gets there.

The Diary of a Nobody / George Grossmith and Weeden Grossmith (1888-1889)

Charles Pooter - with his absurdly earnest chronicle of the vagaries of everyday life in Upper Holloway - long ago earned the accolade of the suffix 'esque'; and this late Victorian masterpiece has never been out of print. It was originally written for Punch. It's also pretty wonderful social history.

Three Men in a Boat / Jerome K Jerome (1889)

Both a work of comic delight, following the titular three friends as they sail down the Thames, as well as an evocation of willow-trailed waters and grassgreen river banks. It still touches those essential nerves: comedy concerning food, hypochondria and dogs, plus messing about in boats.

Queen Lucia / E F Benson (1920)

More acidic than PG Wodehouse's sunny creations, this is the first of the Mapp and Lucia novels in which the two women engage in devious and brilliantly funny battles for social supremacy in the idyllic seaside town of Tilling (based on Rye, in Sussex). But Benson was fondly forgiving of his comic monsters and their friends.

Cold Comfort Farm / Stella Gibbons (1932)

That rare thing: a satire that seems to have lasted better than its targets, among them DH Lawrence, and the serious source material of the now all but forgotten novelist Mary Webb. This earthy saga of Sussex rural life with Ada Doom, and the Starkadders including the lustful Seth, and the Church of the Quivering Brethren as experienced by the 19-year-old outsider Flora Poste continues to appeal to fresh generations.

The Code of the Woosters / PG Wodehouse (1938)

The finest of all Wodehouse's work: an exquisitely structured farce involving an antique silver cow creamer, a policeman's helmet, drippy Madeleine, hellhound Sir Watkyn Bassett, Mosley wannabe Roderick Spode, Wooster's indefatigable Aunt Dahlia, and an aggressive dog called Bartholomew.

The Loved One / Evelyn Waugh (1948)

Notable not least because Waugh was horrified by its success in America, this is a satirical, sick tale of English poets and the American death industry, as represented by the Happy Glades cemetery and the mortician Mr Joyboy. It was inspired following Waugh's sojourn in Hollywood, failing to adapt his novel Brideshead Revisited.

Molesworth / Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle (1953)

English literature is not short of memorable schools, but the chronicles of life at St Custard's, as observed by the laconic Nigel Molesworth in a series of assertive and terribly spelled essays, are easily the funniest. As well as giving us the phrase "as any fule kno", the stories also brought forth the exquisite Basil Fotherington Thomas.

Lucky Jim / Kingsley Amis (1954)

Amis was lumped in with the playwrights and novelists of the "Angry Young Men" movement of the Fifties; but unlike humourless John Osborne, this acutely observed comedy of sex and second-class university life is a bellow of hilarious bile. Still beloved for its set-pieces: Jim Dixon forced to endure an afternoon of madrigal singing, an occasion when drink is seemingly the only answer.

Puckoon / Spike Milligan (1963)

Although some of Milligan's other works are not universally loved, Puckoon - set in a fictional Irish village in 1924 - endures. As the country is divided between north and south, the village is absurdly cut in half, leading to chaos, satirical points and a feast of Joycean jokes.

The Bottle Factory Outing / Beryl Bainbridge (1974)

Bainbridge's distinctive comic voice has so much discomforting truth that many found it too dark; here, lonely Freda and Brenda work in an Italian wine-bottling concern, and dreams of romantic fulfilment are pitched against the grotty reality of lecherous men and bedsit life.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy / Douglas Adams (1979)

Adams was hitchhiking through Europe when he came up with the idea for this book, and the result is a beautifully inventive blend of Monty Python and Isaac Asimov - a teeming universe of absurdity, singularity and satirical philosophy, where planets are demolished to make way for galactic motorways.

The Commitments / Roddy Doyle (1987)

A rich comic fusion of band life, teenage yearnings for pop stardom and a snapshot of the decaying heart of Dublin, this is the book that made Doyle's name. The wannabe band manager is Jimmy Rabbitte, determined to bring soul music to Ireland, and the band gets its name because in the 1960s, all bands had to have a 'The'.

Bridget Jones's Diary / Helen Fielding (1996)

Originally a newspaper column, Jones's adventures - punctuated with her faithful recording of cigarettes, calories and alcoholic units consumed - was taken to define a generation. But for all the romantic farce and sexual slapstick (if that is how we might term granny pants), the character has genuine humanity and warmth; we can't help caring for her.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Decline and Fall / Evelyn Waugh (1928)

Thank You, Jeeves / P G Wodehouse (1934)

Pnin / Vladimir Nabokov (1957)

A Confederacy of Dunces / John Kennedy Toole (2006)

The Ascent of Rum Doodle / W E Bowman (1956)

The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar / B J P Donleavy (1967)

Portnoy's Complaint / Philip Roth (1969)

Porterhouse Blue / Tom Sharpe (1974)

The History Man / Malcolm Bradbury (1975)

What a Carve Up! / Jonathan Coe (1994)

SCI-FI AND FANTASY

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde / Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

Everybody thinks they know the split personality story, but Stevenson told associates he meant it as an allegory. For what though? The id and the ego? The fall of man? Or quite simply the effects of alcohol?

Frankenstein / Mary Shelley (1818)

It took a while for Shelley's work to be taken seriously as literature, as opposed to imaginative blood and thunder. But it is a brilliant commentary on the Romantic movement, and more frightening than any of the films - especially at the novel's Arctic climax.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland / Lewis Carroll (1865)

It has been suggested that Alice's trippy experiences are Carroll's comment on his contemporary mathematical theory: that all the growing and shrinking is about Euclidean geometry and that episodes such as the caterpillar and the hookah are a send-up of symbolic algebra. Whatever the explanation, it endures.

The War of the Worlds / H G Wells (1898)

Does the county of Surrey make quite enough of the fact that Wells's malevolent Martians first landed in Woking? Or that the hideous creatures in their tripods laid waste to Walton-on-Thames? Like all immortal science fiction, this is rooted in more earthly anxieties - here, belligerent European rival nations.

Dracula / Bram Stoker (1897)

Best enjoyed not as Gothic horror, but as a blazing late Victorian imperial adventure. Jonathan Harker may initially travel to the Count's eerie fastness in Transylvania, but the Count is intent on some reverse colonisation, coming to London and spreading his undead activities into the very heart of bourgeois English society.

Titus Groan / Mervyn Peake (1946)

What must post-war readers have made of the denizens of Gormenghast? Of Lord Sepulchrave, Dr Prunesquallor, Nanny Slagg, and Steerpike? What did all that rich and mad Gothic detailing portend? The imagery remains unforgettable, not least Swelter's infernal kitchens, and Flay hurling a white cat at Steerpike.

Brave New World / Aldous Huxley (1932)

Initially intended as a gentle send-up of H G Wells's utopian "things to come" visions, Huxley instead conjured a nightmare 26th-century society of babies grown in "hatcheries", promiscuous casual sex (marriage and families are obsolete) and hallucinogenic drugs. It is frequently pointed out that all such things have come to pass.

1984 / George Orwell (1948)

Had Orwell written this one year earlier, we would have associated complete totalitarianism with the year 1974. As it is, Double-Think, Room 101 and the utterly harrowing betrayal of love are attached eternally to every oppressive state regime. Orwell's warning is undying.

I, Robot / Isaac Asimov (1950)

A series of spacey stories chronicling the evolution of man's relationship with robots, and famous for establishing the law that they cannot harm us. What they can do, however, is create tense philosophical and ethical debates about the chasm between mind and machine, intention and consequence.

The Day of the Triffids / John Wyndham (1951)

A few years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, this vivid horror story about a monstrous plant species with lethal stingers played on our ecological fears. Wyndham was writing as postwar agriculture was becoming a vast chemical-led industrial concern, and the Triffids were payback.