4.08 avg rating — 160,219 ratings

"The Pilgrim's Progress blends fact and fiction. As well as being the record of Bunyan's dream, a well-known fictional device, it is also an archetypal tale – a quest, fraught with danger. Christian's pilgrimage takes him through the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair and the Delectable Mountains in a succession of adventures that keep the reader turning the page. With his good companions, Faithful and Hopeful, he vanquishes many enemies before arriving at the Celestial City with the line that still reverberates through the English literary tradition: "So he passed over, and all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side.""

3.68 avg rating — 332,713 ratings

"A complex literary confection. It purports to be a history, written by Crusoe himself, and edited by Daniel Defoe who, in the preface, teasingly writes that he "believes the thing to be a just History of Fact; neither is there any Appearance of Fiction in it".

So what do we find in this "History" ? Robinson Crusoe has three elements that make it irresistible. First, the narrative voice of the castaway is Defoe's stroke of genius. It's exciting, unhurried, conversational and capable of high and low sentiments. It's also often quasi-journalistic, which suits Defoe's style. This harmonious mix of tone puts the reader deep into the mind of the castaway and his predicament. His adventures become our adventures and we experience them inside out, viscerally, for ourselves. Readers often become especially entranced by Crusoe's great journal, the central passage of his enforced sequestration."

3.59 avg rating — 299,934 ratings

"In its afterlife as a classic, Gulliver's Travels works on many levels. First, it's a masterpiece of sustained and savage indignation, "furious, raging, obscene", according to Thackeray. Swift's satirical fury is directed against almost every aspect of early 18th-century life: science, society, commerce and politics. Second, stripped of Swift's dark vision, it becomes a wonderful travel fantasy for children, a perennial favourite that continues to inspire countless versions, in books and films. Finally, as a polemical tour de force, full of wild imagination, it became a source for Voltaire, as well as the inspiration for a Telemann violin suite, Philip K Dick's science-fiction story The Prize Ship, and, perhaps most influential of all, George Orwell's Animal Farm."

3.40 avg rating — 8,579 ratings

"The longest novel in the English canon. It is one of the greatest European novels whose influence casts a long shadow. I first read Clarissa, in France, in a gold-tooled library edition of many volumes. In the house where I was staying there was nothing else to read in English; I picked it up quite ignorant of its reputation and importance. Perhaps that's the best way to approach a classic – unawares. Soon, I was swept up in the headlong drama of Clarissa Harlowe's fate – a novel with the simplicity of myth."

3.75 avg rating — 34,373 ratings

"For Coleridge, this long novel was, with Oedipus Rex and The Alchemist, one of "the three most perfect plots ever planned". It was also highly original and deeply comic. Fielding broke away from Richardson's epistolary technique of "writing to the moment" to compose his narrative in the third person. This engaging picaresque tale about the adventures of Tom, a high-spirited bastard, rollicking through England, was an instant hit, selling some 10,000 copies at a time when the population of London was only around 700,000."

3.73 avg rating — 22,984 ratings

"Tristram Shandy and its author, Laurence Sterne, are so intensely modern in mood and attitude, so profanely alert to the nuances of the human comedy, and so engaged with the narrative potentiality of the genre that it comes as something of a shock to discover that the novel was published during the seven years war. In other words, it appeared during the annus mirabilis of that prototype of international warfare that saw stunning British military victories in India, Canada and the Caribbean, and established the first British empire that would send the English language around the world. Some of the raw ebullience of the national mood is mirrored in the slightly mad pages of this uniquely entertaining novel."

4.05 avg rating — 989,579 ratings

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really liked it 4.00 avg rating — 773,440 ratings

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