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

On Bullfighting / A L Kennedy (1999)

We are all familiar with the idea of bullfighting, but A L Kennedy upends the tired old cliches with a gimlet-eyed study of the corrida, and the men who risk their lives for the gratification of the public. Spine-tingling.

The Damned Utd / David Peace (2006)

A shocking, biting novel that gets inside Brian Clough's head during his brief unhappy stint as manager of Leeds United in 1974. It is not always a comfortable place to be, but the human drama is riveting.

It's Not About the Bike / Lance Armstrong (2000)

No, it isn't about the bike, and nor is it about the drugs. Instead it is about Lance Armstrong's surviving cancer, a story that has been somewhat dimmed by subsequent events, and that he is pretty unpleasant, but remains inspirational nonetheless.

My Father and Other Working Class Football Heroes / Gary Imlach (2005)

Winner of the William Hill Sports Books Prize in 2005, this is part social history, of the Fifties and Sixties, and part family memoir of a life lived on the fringes of professional football, in those days a very different affair.

Addicted / Tony Adams (1998)

Remember the Arsenal offside trap of the 1990s with the Big Man putting his hand up every five minutes? It turns out he was also doing this at the bar after the match, and this is the story of his dive into alcoholism and subsequent recovery, showing the dark side of a glittering career. Raw and very moving.

All Played Out / Pete Davies (1991)

Davies's study of England's 1990 World Cup campaign came as something of a corrective after the mild euphoria of watching the team reach the semi-finals. Davies points out the structural flaws in the country's system, hidden below the surface by that one good performance and by Gazza's tears.

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner / Alan Sillitoe (1959)

How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup / J L Carr (1975)

King of the World / David Remnick (1998)

Seabiscuit / Laura Hillenbrand (2001)

The Austerity Olympics / Janie Hamilton (2012)

PLAYS

The Bacchae / Euripides (405 BC)

In his last play, written in exile and performed posthumously, Euripides nailed the whole genre of tragedy, at once celebrating its context (a Bacchic festival and spelling out the consequences of being ruthlessly sane when a god bids otherwise.

Oedipus the King / Sophocles (after 430 BC)

The audience knows what's going to happen; but Oedipus's struggle with the terrible truths that await him remind us that careful language, rich in irony and exposively timed, can make us scream as much as on-stage violence can.

Doctor Faustus / Christopher Marlowe (c1592)

This play changed drama forever, by fusing the simplicity of morality plays with fashionably sumptuous language. As a result, the message can seem murky: should you avoid selling your soul, or can it look a little glamorous by the end?

Ghosts / Henrik Ibsen (1882)

A lot can happen in a night: revelations about syphilis; the symbolic burning of an orphanage and, above all, blasts from the past. This last is ineluctable, the play suggests, and its messages about guilt and fate remain unsettling.

Uncle Vanya / Anton Chekhov (1899)

Russian critics assure us that we make Chekhov sound more melancholy than he would be in the original. It's true that Vanya's poignant glimpses of deluded failures and wince-inducing love triangles can be played for the occasional laugh.

A Midsummer Night's Dream / William Shakespeare (c1595)

Here, some of Shakespeare's most wonderfully constructed verse is put to the service of some David-Brent-like caricature, befuddling visions and a plot that only just manages to stay under Shakespeare's control, let alone anybody else's.

Hamlet / William Shakespeare (c1602)

Shakespeare's longest play is one of the tightest dramatically: characters' fates are mirrored and intertwined with an astonishing range of language: from beauty to bawdy in a beat, and the tormented adolescent lead is among Shakespeare's most compelling creations.

Life is a Dream / Pedro Calderon de la Barca (1635)

Is theatre an illusion? Or does it make magic things actually happen? This theme dominated Calderon's work, but in Life is a Dream matters of state are at stake. Did King Segismundo of Poland sleep through them?

The Middle-Class Gentleman / Jean-Baptiste Moliere (1670)

However much of a chump the socialclimbing M Jourdain looks, he's not the only object of ridicule in this revealing social satire: the intellectuals can seem ghastlier, for using their learning to taunt him and do some climbing of their own.

Largo Desolato / Vaclav Havel (1984)

In his years of protest, Havel was able to use the language of absurdist theatre to devastating political effect. Even the rhythms were part of the point: can an intellectual say new things, or is he trapped in a loop of cliche and scary visitors?

The Birthday Party / Harold Pinter (1957)

Pinter's second play nearly ended his career; but the clipped, earthy dialogue, along with a thinly veiled plea that we should respect artists and individuals (represented by a myopic pianist) guaranteed its place in the repertoire.

Death of a Salesman / Arthur Miller (1949)

When Miller's Uncle Manny found he was in trouble, he'd change the facts. The salesman Willy Loman is constantly in trouble. Often he deludes himself, until he notices he's just one step ahead of the junkyard. The staging puts us into his crazed head.

The Government Inspector / Nikolai Gogol (1836)

Although Gogol wrote stories that were all too able to mimic the madness of their content, his play is ruthlessly plotted. The characters are uniformly unsympathetic - the nebbish who passes himself off as an inspector, no less than the sycophants he dupes.

Top Girls / Caryl Churchill (1982)

This play explores the images of women in history and literature (Joan of Arc, the Wife of Bath) while accentuating the debates about "Top Girls" as mothers and professionals.

The Lieutenant of Inishmore / Martin McDonagh (2001)

McDonagh has refined a language that can tackle trauma with a kind of insouciance. His film In Bruges made this technique famous and The Lieutenant of Inishmore puts terrorism and an underfed cat on an equal footing.

THE BEST OF THE REST

Lysistrata / Aristophanes (411 BC)

The Rover / Aphra Behn (1677)

Miss Julie / August Strindberg (1888)

The Vortex / Noel Coward (1924)

Waiting for Godot / Samuel Beckett (1953)

The Bald Prima Donna / Eugene Ionesco (1950)

I Will Marry When I Want / Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1977)

Insignificance / Terry Johnson (1982)

Blasted / Sarah Kane (1995)

Enron / Lucy Prebble (2009)

AMERICAN CLASSICS

The Scarlet Letter / Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)

Uniquely among male novelists of his era, Hawthorne's compelling story of the callous judgment meted out to an unmarried mother by the puritans of Boston, Massachusetts, is a moving and thoughtful study of society's ambivalent and contradictory treatment of women.

Moby Dick / Herman Melville (1851)

"In landlessness alone resides highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God," says wandering sailor Ishmael, as he sets sail with vengeful Quaker Captain Ahab on the hunt for the monstrous white whale that maimed him. Fathoms deep in allusion and nautical nomenclature.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn / Mark Twain (1884)

Set in the geographic centre of the antebellum US, the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is the colourful tale of an abused and motherless boy's coming of age along the Mississippi River which wittily challenged America's perception of itself as the "sivilized" land of the free.

The House of Mirth / Edith Wharton (1905)

Caught between her entitled taste for luxury and her yearning for true love, Lily Bart, the beautiful and intelligent heroine of this acutely observed novel slowly slithers down the rungs of superficial New York society to a tragic end.

The Call of the Wild / Jack London (1903)

When men "groping in the Arctic darkness" strike gold, a proud St Bernard-Scotch Collie called Buck is sold into sledgehauling slavery. It's survival of the fittest in what E L Doctorow described as this most "fervently American" club and fang adventure.

The Grapes of Wrath / John Steinbeck (1939)

"I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags," Steinbeck said of his novel about a poor family of "Okies" driven from their land in the Great Depression. It was the main reason he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature.

Independence Day / Richard Ford (1995)

The second book in Ford's trilogy about Frank Bascombe - sportswriter turned realtor. Coiner of such quirky phrases as "happy as goats" and "solitary as Siberia" Bascombe's been described as "America's most convincing everyman". Ford says he's "asleep at the switch".

The Colossus of Maroussi / Henry Miller (1941)

This impressionistic travelogue, whose rolling, incantatory style predicted the Beat Generation, was inspired by the time Miller spent in Greece with Lawrence Durrell before the Second World War. He felt "like a cockroach" but "came home to the world" at Mycenae.

The Catcher in the Rye / J D Salinger (1951)

Salinger's "sort of" autobiographical account of the misfit Holden Caulfield's flight from his "phony" prep school is a controversial classic of adolescent angst that has inspired readers as diverse as President George H W Bush and John Lennon's assassin Mark Chapman.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas / Hunter S Thompson (1971)

Described by Tom Wolfe as a "scorching epochal sensation", this reckless, drugfuelled "gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country" is a funny, furious and disorienting attack on the American Dream by the original gonzo journalist.

Beloved / Toni Morrison (1987)

With an epigraph of "60 Million and more" dedicated to victims of the Atlantic slave trade, this psychologically complex, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about a former slave who kills her infant daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.

All the Pretty Horses / Cormac McCarthy (1992)

The reclusive author best known for bringing a biblical sense of evil into his portrayal of the unforgiving American landscape achieved mainstream success with this tale of a talented 16-year-old horse breaker, evicted from his Texan ranch in 1940. First in the Border Trilogy.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter / Carson McCullers (1940)

The debut of a 23-year-old author, this small-town drama set in the Depression-era South tells of a teenage girl, an African-American doctor, an alcoholic socialist, and a taciturn diner owner who all think the local deaf-mute "gets" them. He doesn't.

Fugitive Pieces / Anne Michaels (1996)

In this haunting narrative of a Jewish boy who hides while the Nazis take his family, the Canadian poet wrote that death first becomes believable when "You recognise the one whose loss, even contemplated, you'll carry forever, like a sleeping child."

We Need to Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver (2003)

Even to his mother, Kevin Katchadourian has been a creature of "opaque predilections" since birth. But she spends this novel trying to work out why her son committed a school massacre. Was her snobbery about her fellow Americans a cause? Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Great Gatsby / F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

For Whom the Bell Tolls / Ernest Hemingway (1940)

Rabbit, Run / John Updike (1960)

The Color Purple / Alice Walker (1982)

The Human Stain / Philip Roth (2000)

White Noise / Don DeLillo (1985)

The Bonfire of the Vanities / Tom Wolfe (1987)

The Shipping News / Annie Proulx (1993)

Infinite Jest / David Foster Wallace (1996)

ASIAN CLASSICS

The Dream of the Red Chamber / Cao Xueqin (printed 1791)

With a cast of more than 400 characters, this episodic novel written in the vernacular rather than classical Chinese tells of two branches of an aristocratic family with a tragic love story at its humane heart. Chairman Mao admired its critique of feudal corruption.

A Fine Balance / Rohinton Mistry (1995)

Set during the Emergency of 1970 (a period marked by political unrest, torture and detentions), Mistry is critical of then-prime minister Indira Gandhi, although she is never named. Four characters from very different backgrounds are brought together by rapid social changes.

Rashomon / Ryunosuke Akutagawa (1915)

The author of more than 150 modernist short stories, but no full-length novels, Ryunosuke published Rashomon in a university magazine when he was just 17. Just 13 pages long, it comprises seven statements regarding the murder of a Samurai and his wife's disappearance.

The Thousand Nights and One Night / Anonymous (First published in English 1706)

Wiley Scheherazade diverts the sultan from her execution with the poetic and riddlesome adventures of Aladdin, Ali Baba, Sinbad and mystical creatures. Packing in crime, horror, fantasy and romance, it influenced authors as diverse as Tolstoy, Dumas, Rushdie, Conan Doyle, Proust and Lovecraft.

Heat and Dust / Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1975)

In this compelling novel by the only person to have won both the Booker Prize and an Oscar, a woman travels to India to learn the truth about her step-grandmother and her life under the British Raj of the 1920s.

All About H Hatterr / G V Desani (1948)

It's the glorious mash-up of English and Indian colloquialism that makes this book, about the son of a European merchant and a Malayan lady, such a wild, whimsical delight. Anthony Burgess admired its "creative chaos that grumbles at the restraining banks".

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle / Haruki Murakami (1994)

This labyrinthine and hallucinogenic novel gets going when Toru Okada's cat disappears in suburban Tokyo. He consults a pair of psychic sisters who appear to him in dreams and reality. But although Murakami's plot meanders, it never loses its pace or its humanity.

Spring Snow / Yukio Mishima (1969-71)

Before committing ritual suicide in November 1970, Mishima posted this tetralogy of novels (named after a dry lunar plain once believed awash with water) to his publisher. It's a saga of 20th-century Japan, in which a law student imagines a school friend constantly reincarnated.

Midnight's Children / Salman Rushdie (1980)

Magic realism meets postcolonial India in the ambitious, colourful and clever novel which was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize. Hero Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947: the second of India's independence and is endowed with an extraordinary talent.

The God of Small Things / Arundhati Roy (1997)

This intense and exquisitely written tale of fraternal twins unfolds against a backdrop of communism, the caste system, and Christianity in Kerala from the Sixties to the Nineties. "Change is one thing," writes Roy in her Booker Prize-winning debut, "Acceptance is another".

THE BEST OF THE REST

The Home and the World / Rabindranath Tagore (1916)

Diary of a Madman / Lu Xun (1918)

An Insular Possession / Timothy Mo (1986)

The Holder of the World / Bharati Mukherjee (1993)

A Suitable Boy / Vikram Seth (1993)