Novels

This masterpiece will never cease to impress and to awe. Published in 1605, long before anything of similar stature was produced elsewhere in Europe [1], this rollicking tale of a man driven to the edge of folly by his passion for books (readers, beware!) and his immersion in the dream-world they project (video gamers, beware!) to go out into the wild world out there to combat its injustices (social reformers, beware!) and win the heart of his idealised Dulcina (lovers, beware!) is a (…)

At the beginning of this quite extraordinary saga the narrator recounts how, when he was 10 years old and could neither read nor write nor count beyond 5, he was captured by marauding soldiers while tending sheep and witnessed the devastation of his family home, managing to escape to the nearby forest with the screams of his mother and sister in his ears. Where he was taken in hand by an erudite hermit who baptized him Simplex/Simplicius/Simplicissimus [1] and taught him to read, write and (…)

The great story – one of the very first English novels – about how an adventurous man in the 17th century accomplishes his destiny when marooned on a desert island, where he manages not only to survive but to prosper, to find spiritual peace and comfort in his condition, to open his heart to a native whose life he has saved, and finally to triumph in a series of extraordinary challenges that have to be read to be believed.
This stirring, powerful and moving story that almost instantly (…)

One of the very first English novels, published in 1721, only two years after his classic Robinson Crusoe, this racy and most entertaining account of a young woman’s adventures, sexual and otherwise – she gets married five times, goes twice to Virginia in America and narrowly escapes being hung –, while very different from its famous predecessor does tell us an awful lot about the conditions of living, loving and dying at the time (the account ends in 1680) on the lower end of the social (…)

Jonathan Swift’s scathing satire of the society of his time in the form of a seafarer’s account of all the amazing peoples he had encountered in strange far-off places – the tiny Lilliputs, the enormous Brobdingnags, the math-and-music-loving peoples of the floating island of Laputa and the interesting mores of their womenfolk, the foolish professors, scientists and artists of Balnibarbi, the famous spectres from all epochs in Glubbdubdrib, the immortals of Luggnagg and, especially, the (…)

Tom Jones comes into this history as a new-born baby found one morning in the bed of Mr. Allworthy, a wealthy country squire, who adopts him. The story rapidly skips ahead to when he’s a dashing fellow of eighteen full of life who has a tendency of getting into trouble, in particular with the feminine portion of humanity. He’s expelled from Mr. Allworthy’s home because of a false accusation brought against him by his scheming cousin Blifil, the only son of Mr. Allworthy’s deceased sister – (…)

This effervescent brimming-over-with-the-joy-of-life novel in the form of a fictional autobiography goes shooting off in every which way as one thought leads to another, so that it takes the verbose but quite spell-bindingly fascinating and funny author a whole 80 pages to bring his life story (that starts naturally enough but nevertheless very originally with the hilarious account of the moment of his conception) up to the moment of his birth. This great book was written in the early days (…)

Goethe’s famous first novel about the plight of the intense and dreamy Werther, the artisically-minded lover of nature and Homer and Ossian who’s passionately in love with Charlotte, the sparkling bride-to-be and then wife of another.
Werther’s drama and sufferings form the framework for this book whose sensitive, soulful hero was a founding figure for the Romantic movement throughout Europe.
A selection of characteristic citations from this seminal work can be seen below. 42,600 words. (…)

An extravagant series of adventures purportedly recounted by the authentic Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen to the scholar and sometime author Rudolf Eric Raspe on returning to Germany after ten years of serving in the Russian army.
This lively and hard-to-believe but hard-to-leave account first published in English by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1736-1794) in London in 1785 almost instantly became famous all over Europe of the time.
It was translated (and somewhat (…)

The first of the four novels published during Jane Austin’s lifetime, this classic explores in depth the central theme of all her oeuvre: the anxieties of genteel, well-educated, well-mannered — and totally dependant — young women (and their mothers) embarked upon the search for a suitable mate who will enable them to maintain their desirable social status with as few moral compromises as possible. And it is hard if not quite impossible not to feel empathy for Marianne Dashwood, the clever, (…)