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

Lord of the Flies / William Golding (1954)

A boat-load of English boys are washed up on a desert island and have to create a self-governing society, which starts off with the best of intentions but, as ever, human nature will out, and pretty soon they have turned heaven into hell. A human version of Animal Farm.

Dune / Frank Herbert (1965)

A saga of off-world dynasties, harsh alien deserts, giant sandworms and an intricately worked-out ecosystem, this sprawling work of imagination made sci-fi mainstream and inspired much environmental thought.

High Rise / J G Ballard (1975)

In arguably his most resonant work, Ballard postulated a tower block that contained everything its residents needed, from shops to pools to offices. They need never leave. And they don't. The internal society begins to fragment, form classes, and savage civil war breaks out. It is a brilliantly unheimlich urban parable.

The Colour of Magic / Terry Pratchett (1983)

The first Discworld novel introduces us to a universe populated by wizards, witches and Death himself. To have these comic stories and gentle pastiches of Tolkien, and every myth and fairy tale, lapped up by 70 million readers is a spectacular achievement.

Nights at The Circus / Angela Carter (1984)

An extraordinarily vivid and sensual journey following the circus through 19th-century London and Russia which brilliantly - and movingly - blurs the lines between acute psychological drama, fairy tale and ancient myth.

The Handmaid's Tale / Margaret Atwood (1985)

Offred is a concubine in a future America where "handmaids" are used to provide children for sterile upper-class women. A tale of institutionalised misogyny and biological tyranny that Atwood explained was not exactly science fiction.

Mother London / Michael Moorcock (1988)

The heroes of this novel have emerged from mental institutions; but do they have special powers? In a narrative that sweeps from the Blitz to modern day, we encounter mindreading, preternatural empathy, and fascinating theories about the people who live under the streets.

American Gods / Neil Gaiman (2001)

America is now teeming with gods that have been brought over with each successive wave of immigrants - from Odin to Thor. But can these old gods do battle with the new gods spawned by technology?

Cloud Atlas / David Mitchell (2004)

Six narrators, six interlocking stories - ranging from a future dystopia to Seventies nuclear thriller, to 19th-century medical drama - Mitchell forces the reader to make the connections across time and space; how can interrupted stories still live on?

Darkmans / Nicola Barker (2007)

An M C Escher tapestry of history, time, language, legend - and all against the backdrop of Ashford in Kent. Here, history is as much absurd linguistic comedy as it is nightmare.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Utopia / Thomas More (1516)

Gulliver's Travels / Jonathan Swift (1726)

The Fall of the House of Usher / Edgar Allan Poe (1840)

Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There / Lewis Carroll (1871)

The Glass Bead Game / Hermann Hesse (1943)

Animal Farm / George Orwell (1945)

Childhood's End / Arthur C Clarke (1953)

The Man in the High Castle / Philip K Dick (1962)

Contact / Carl Sagan (1985)

Snow Crash / Neal Stephenson (1992)

The Scar / China Mieville (2002)

The Road / Cormac McCarthy (2006)

The Lord of the Rings / J R R Tolkien (1954-55)

The Time Machine / H G Wells (1895)

The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde (1890)

CHILDREN'S CLASSICS

Watership Down / Richard Adams (1972)

The full-scale novel about rabbits finding their promised land has the magic of prophecy, idyllic Hampshire locations and the structure of the Aeneid. Adams enjoys parading his scholarship, and this is a lively introduction to brainy books.

The Hobbit / J R R Tolkien (1937)

Here we meet the characters who will make The Lord of the Rings happen, and on a pre-Peter Jackson scale. If anything, Gollum is even more chilling here, because we see him through the eyes of a hobbit - seldom the calmest of travellers.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe / C S Lewis (1950)

Welcome to the magical land of Narnia, where the White Witch reigns over a snow-girt land peopled by fawns, talking beavers and people eager to put their trust in four kids from Finchley. The Christian allusions can come later, but for now this is pure narrative magic.

Charlotte's Web / E B White (1952)

The New Yorker writer cherished for his elegance of style gives us an altruistic spider with exquisite manners, and a pig to make her proud. There are intimations of mortality, but a plot of fame and legacy thumbs its nose at the inevitable.

The Little Prince / Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1943)

The Little Prince falls to Earth to meet the author, who has crashed his plane. His quizzical, wise stories of other planets (most of which are inhabited by solitary monomaniacs) lead to the daftest of all - our own.

Pippi Longstocking / Astrid Lindgren (1945)

It's quite something to live as an orphan with just a horse and a monkey for companions. The heroine has a chutzpah that makes her sound at her most adult when she's flouting adult conventions, especially at tea time.

Emil and the Detectives / Erich Kastner (1929)

When Emil is robbed of his mother's hardearned savings (that were never likely to stretch far), he has help from a scratch squad of child detectives from Berlin. However much this sounds like the best child's game ever, the real world is seldom far away.

James and the Giant Peach / Roald Dahl (1961)

One of Dahl's earliest, best, and fully developed tales. There is no attempt to make the giant insects or articulate clouds seem natural: this is a world of wonder, more marvellous than Wonka's even.

Winnie the Pooh / A A Milne (1926)

Characters begin days by visiting one another, and end up shifting houses, learning to fly or surviving floods.

A Little Princess / Frances Hodgson Burnett (1905)

Sara has a privileged background but is now living as a Cinderella figure; and she plays at being a princess. But her response shows that being a princess is less a rank than a state of mind.

The Just So Stories / Rudyard Kipling (1902)

How did the leopard get his spots? How was the alphabet made? Why are elephant's trunks so long? Kipling is the model of the patient parent in the face of constant questions. And who cares about evolution? This is much more fun.

A Journey to the Centre of the Earth / Jules Verne (1864)

Verne uses all the tricks that make Anthony Horowitz so successful - the action-packed chapters that end at just the right time and the sense of deepening mystery - but also a knack for convincing us that there really might be creatures down there.

The Wind in the Willows / Kenneth Grahame (1908)

The idyllic, stylised account of life on the river, with anxious glimpses beyond it, is a masterclass in character-driven comedy - alongside the arriviste Toad is the petitbourgeois Mole, and Rat, the gentleman of leisure.

The Doll People / Ann M Martin and Laura Godwin (2000)

The dolls in your dolls' house might look inanimate to you, but you clearly have no idea of what they get up to at night. They're casing the joint, tracking lost relatives and dodging that cruel fate - PDS (Permanent Doll State).

The Child that Books Built / Francis Spufford (2002)

Although this book isn't written for children, the more reflective might enjoy it as a guide on how to grow into reading; and it's a wonderfully eloquent take on how growing up happens unexpectedly.

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Sword in the Stone / T H White (1938)

The Secret Garden / Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

Stig of the Dump / Clive King (1963)

Heidi / Johanna Spyri (1880)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone / J K Rowling (1997)

How the Whale Became / Ted Hughes (1963)

The Velveteen Rabbit / Margery Williams (1922)

The Phantom Tollbooth / Norton Juster (1961)

A Boy and a Bear in a Boat Rhymes / Dave Shelton (2012)

The Little White Horse / Elizabeth Goudge (1946)

AFRICAN CLASSICS

Things Fall Apart / Chinua Achebe (1958)

Set in Nigeria at the turn of the 19th century, this is a heartbreaking modern Greek tragedy in which a flawed hero finds himself at odds with the rapidly changing world. It is the classic modern African novel.

Children of Gebelawi / Naguib Mahfouz (1959)

Originally serialised in a Cairo newspaper, Children of Gebelawi is an allegory for the religious history of the Jews, the Muslims and the Christians set in an alleyway in Cairo. It earned Mahfouz the Nobel Prize and an assassination attempt.

Season of Migration to the North / Tayeb Salih (1966)

Beautifully rendered in lush poetic language, Salih's story of a man returning to his Sudanese village from England is a bleak meditation on cross-cultural misunderstandings, as well as the confusions and contradictions within the human heart.

A Bend in the River / VS Naipaul (1979)

An East African Indian, Salim leaves the east coast of Africa to set up shop in a little town on the bend of a river in an unnamed country deep in the interior, but he is plagued by disappointment and failure as the country falls to ruin. It is hardly a cheery book, but compelling and resonant.

My Traitor's Heart / Rian Malan (1990)

Rian Malan, from a family that included the architect of apartheid, left a divided South Africa only to return to confront his "tribe" of white Africans and - just as much - himself. There is something unsettling about his findings, but this is never less than totally absorbing.

The Poisonwood Bible / Barbara Kingsolver (1998)

Set in the 1960s, The Poisonwood Bible concerns a family of missionaries from the American South who are moving to the Congo. It is at once a family drama and a study of the impact of one culture on another.

The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency / Alexander McCall Smith (1998)

Not even the author would claim this was a "great" book, but it earns its place by being overtly cheerful and for bringing a rare "good news" story out of an Africa that is too often characterised as a grim, barbaric, hopeless and miserable place.

Disgrace / J M Coetzee (1999)

Winner of the Booker Prize and later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, Coetzee's novel follows a disgraced university lecturer, David Lurie, who is forced out of his post after an affair and is beginning to come to terms with his powerlessness. Bleak and powerful, with just a hint of the possibility of redemption.

Half of a Yellow Sun / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)

Another Nigerian modern classic, set before and during the Biafran War in the late 1960s, Adichie's novel won the Orange Prize for fiction in 2007. It describes the impact of a civil war on ordinary people and in its moral seriousness - it acts almost as a book end to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart.

In the Country of Men / Hisham Matar (2006)

A beautiful description of growing up in Gaddaffi's Libya finds nine-year-old Sulaiman trying to make sense of a life where his father is a dissident and his mother on drugs. Meanwhile, the police are closing in...

THE BEST OF THE REST

Cry, the Beloved Country / Alan Paton (1948)

The Grass is Singing / Doris Lessing (1950)

The Bride Price / Buchi Emecheta (1976)

A Dry White Season / Andre P Brink (1979)

July's People / Nadine Gordimer (1981)

LIVES

Lives of the Caesars / Suetonius (c121AD)

Suetonius was private secretary to the emperor Hadrian and although this group biography of the lives of the 12 Caesars might need an occasional pinch of strict historical salt, it is full of racy decadence and colourful detail - such as Julius Caesar's semi-baldness, and his use of a comb-over to disguise it.

Experience / Martin Amis (2000)

Easily Martin Amis's best book, in which he leaves behind the struggle for effect, stops trying to say anything serious, and in doing so creates something effective and serious about his early life, his relations with his father, the death of his cousin, his various artistic rivalries, and, of course, those teeth.

A Moveable Feast / Ernest Hemingway (posthumously 1964)

Published three years after his death, this is part road trip, part love letter to Paris, part study of his friendship with characters such as F Scott Fitzgerald, and wholly wonderful. It is a mystery how he remembered a moment of it, though, since he drinks so much alcohol, all the time. Try keeping up with him and you'll be dead drunk by page four.

The Life of Samuel Johnson / James Boswell (1791)

Less a biography and more an act of homage, this volume not only provides a close-up of the great lexicographer, in all his terrific wit and travels, it also brings to life an entire era. Often hugely funny - and Boswell omits no details.

Eminent Victorians / Lytton Strachey (1918)

Written throughout the Great War - and some think thematically influenced by this cataclysm - this pioneering and witty group biography of major Victorians was the first to dissolve the popular image of that era's morality and thought.

Goodbye to All That / Robert Graves (1929)

Although Graves recounts the days of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, it is his chronicle of the First World War and his unflinching depiction of life in the trenches - the deadening banality of that horror - that gives this book its enduring force. His comrade Siegfried Sassoon was not happy about some of the descriptions.

The Moon's a Balloon / David Niven (1972)

These only semi-credible memoirs come from a seemingly happier, simpler time, and deal with the first half of the actor's life as he made his way from Sandhurst to Hollywood. Packed with great stories, they are irresistibly charming.

The Rings of Saturn / W G Sebald (1995)

Ostensibly a memoir of Sebald's walking tour around Suffolk, this extraordinary and profoundly haunting work is also about the echoes in landscape, the long shadows of history and the inescapability of the past - from sea-submerged villages to air force bases from which bombers flew in the war.

The Diaries of Samuel Pepys (1660-69)

Probably as close as we can get to a time machine, Pepys famously witnesses the Great Fire of London; but more gripping throughout these hypnotically copious journals is the texture of life and love in 17th-century London.

De Profundis / Oscar Wilde (1897)

The Latin title translates as "from the depths", and this 50,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas was written while Wilde was in jail. It examines their time together and details Wilde's spiritual development during his incarceration.

Alan Clark: Diaries (Vol I) (1993)

Far exceeding anything he might ever have achieved in office, the late Tory MP's diaries remain a classic of outspoken invective, political plotting, extramarital sex, vividly unpleasant character portraits and a relish-filled panorama of the snakepit that is Parliament.

The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas / Gertrude Stein (1933)

About as modernist as one can get, this is actually art collector Gertrude Stein's biography, written in the voice of her lover, Alice B Toklas. Stein was close friends with Picasso - he painted her in the manner of a stone idol - and was right at the centre of the Parisian art and literary vortex.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom / T E Lawrence (1922)

An account of Lawrence's experiences during the Arab Revolt of 1917 when he fought the Ottomans with Emir Faisal, capturing Aqaba and winning the Battle of Tafileh. The romanticism of the imagery captured in photographs - Lawrence in full Bedouin dress out in the desert - made him a sensation back in Britain.

Testament of Youth / Vera Brittain (1933)

In the Great War, Brittain was a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse. She lost her fiance on the Western Front, then her brother and then her two closest male friends. She vowed to write their stories, and about her war experiences, as a form of a memorial.

My Family and Other Animals / Gerald Durrell (1956)

This account of naturalist Durrell's childhood years in Corfu is an unforgettable blend of wonderful human comedy - the foibles of older relatives and family associates as seen through a child's eyes - plus those same eyes looking in wonder at the abundance and variety of wildlife in the world around.

Homage to Catalonia / George Orwell (1938)

A memoir of a searingly intense time: Orwell's months in Spain during the Civil War, when he fought the fascists alongside mountain peasants. Among many unforgettable images - the terror in Barcelona, the moment he was shot in the neck - was the pervasiveness of the lice, and their fondness for trousers.

The Diary of a Young Girl / Anne Frank (1947)

The story is so well rehearsed and yet the details still astound; not merely the fear and the claustrophobia, but the different shades of human behaviour and endurance. The nightmarish circumstances of her deportation and death in Bergen-Belsen mean that no matter how familiar her story may feel, no one should ever overlook it.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings / Maya Angelou (1969)

The poet's hugely influential biography (this was the first volume, dwelling on her early years) was on the US bestseller lists for two years. The story of her childhood is harrowing - the racism of the deep south and the trauma of rape. But it is also to do with the freedom that literacy and poetry brings.

Wild Swans / Jung Chang (1991)

Following the lives of three generations of the Chang family through the turmoil of 20th-century China, this biography is a personal account that casts incandescent light on the lives and experiences of ordinary Chinese people in extraordinary and often evil times.

Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects / Giorgio Vasari (1550)

The biographical work that laid the foundations for Renaissance art history, Vasari made the reputations of many of the "Old Masters" but he also peppers his "lives" with vivid detail - including allegations that Andrea del Castagno murdered Domenico Veneziano, a claim that is still controversial today.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Walden / Henry David Thoreau (1854)

The Life of Charlotte Bronte / Elizabeth Gaskell (1857)

Out of Africa / Karen Blixen (1937)

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men / James Agee and Walker Evans (1941)

Churchill: A Life / Martin Gilbert (1969)

The Double Helix / James Watson (1968)

The Year of Magical Thinking / Joan Didion (2005)

Peter the Great: His Life and World / Robert K Massie (1981)

Maus /Art Spiegelman (1991)

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius / Dave Eggers (2000)

Steve Jobs / Walter Isaacson (2011)

Persepolis / Marjane Satrapi (2000)

Anthony Blunt: His Lives / Miranda Carter (2001)

Giving up the Ghost / Hilary Mantel (2003)

The Hare with the Amber Eyes / Edmund de Waal (2010)

SPORTS AND PASTIMES

Beyond a Boundary / C L R James (1963)

"One of the finest and most finished books to come out of the West Indies", according to V S Naipaul. C L R James's literary book looks at race, society, politics and culture through the prism of cricket, the game he played at top level in the Forties and Fifties.

The Fight / Norman Mailer (1975)

The Rumble in the Jungle has gone down in history as one of the epic nights of heavyweight boxing, when Ali took on and beat George Foreman on a steamy night in (then) Zaire. Mailer records every blow in startling prose.

Fever Pitch / Nick Hornby (1992)

Credited as being one of the things that made supporting a football team socially acceptable, Nick Hornby's book about his relationship with Arsenal Football Club came as a surprise hit, but it touched a nerve, and has become a classic of its kind.

The Rider / Tim Krabbe (1978)

A semi-fictionalised account of a bike race from the eye of the narrator as he struggles up the hills and clings on during descents. The Rider is a beautiful, quiet piece of work: unusual, plausible, moving and poignant. A must for any budding Sir Bradley.