Stephen Barbara’s office is nothing to be afraid of. It’s a small, cosy space in Midtown Manhattan with a bookshelf in the corner and inspirational messages on the walls (“There is nothing new in art except talent” and “A mind needs books as a sword needs a whetstone if it is to keep its edge”). Barbara himself is a welcoming person. Though he does claim to be “very argumentative”, that side of his personality doesn’t manifest itself during our hour-long chat. He’s polite, voluble, and answers questions with the patience and precision of someone who loves the topic at hand. Yet most strangers who attempt to contact Barbara will agonise over their emails for weeks. They will ask their friends to proof-read their messages. They will hold their breath as they hit send. They will spend the next hours, days or weeks anxiously refreshing their email inbox. In other words, they will manage their communications with a level of anguish that seems irreconcilable with the perfectly pleasant person sitting in front of me. Stephen Barbara, you see, is a New York literary agent.
It’s easy to understand why people might tiptoe around someone like Barbara. Literary agents are, more often than not, the first point of contact for a writer looking to send their manuscript out into the world. Practices vary from one country to the next, but in the US and in the UK, most novels sitting on your bookshelves and on your nightstand likely began during a dialogue between their author and a literary agent. In other words, people like Barbara can jump-start careers in one of today’s most crowded professional fields – so a little tiptoeing might be in order.
Having been in his line of work for 12 years, Barbara, who now works at the InkWell Management literary agency, has built up an impressive roster of clients, including New York Times bestselling author Lauren Oliver (whose young adult novel Panic is being turned into a series for Amazon) and children’s author and National Book Award nominee Lisa Graff. And he has represented books by actor Krysten Ritter as well as Dylan Farrow (the daughter of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow, whose debut novel, Hush, is scheduled for release in 2020). Barbara, born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, was originally destined to get a “very respectable job”, as a lawyer, perhaps – until his love of literature pulled him in another direction.
“I remember a lot of the books that I saw in my parents’ house, like The Firm and The Godfather or The Da Vinci Code and, um, Jurassic Park,” Barbara says. “I still dream of those books, you know, that sort of big, popular commercial book. And it’s something that I hope we could bring back a little bit.”
It’s not often that someone will comfortably cite The Da Vinci Code in a conversation about literature, but Barbara’s confidence reflects an important truth about literary agents: they literally cannot afford to be snobs. As a profession, they’re on the business side of things. Their job is to find books they can sell. And no, this isn’t nearly as cynical as it sounds: virtually all agents will only take on manuscripts they absolutely love, because loving a novel is a prerequisite for being able to sell it. It is entirely possible, however, for an agent to love a manuscript while thinking it will be a tough sell.
“Sometimes I might have a manuscript I like, but for some reason – there’s a big book that covers the same ground, or maybe the author’s last book didn’t perform as everyone had hoped – the timing isn’t great,” says Barbara. “Then it might be a conversation about waiting for just the right moment to submit it, or finding a slightly new angle to distinguish it.”
1/40 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
2/40 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
3/40 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
4/40 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
5/40 Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe
A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
6/40 1984, George Orwell
The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
7/40 To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
8/40 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
9/40 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
10/40 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
11/40 The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
12/40 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
13/40 Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
14/40 Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
15/40 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
16/40 Middlemarch, George Eliot
This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
17/40 Secret History, Donna Tartt
Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology – and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
18/40 Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
19/40 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
20/40 Beloved, Toni Morrison
Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
21/40 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
22/40 Dune, Frank Herbert
You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
23/40 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
24/40 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
25/40 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
26/40 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
27/40 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
28/40 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
29/40 Dracula, Bram Stoker
Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
30/40 The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
31/40 The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
32/40 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
33/40 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
34/40 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
35/40 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
36/40 Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
37/40 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
38/40 The Trial, Frank Kafka
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
39/40 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40/40 The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
1/40 Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
It is a fact universally acknowledged that every list of great books must include Pride and Prejudice. Don’t be fooled by the bonnets and balls: beneath the sugary surface is a tart exposé of the marriage market in Georgian England. For every lucky Elizabeth, who tames the haughty, handsome Mr. Darcy and learns to know herself in the process, there’s a Charlotte, resigned to life with a driveling buffoon for want of a pretty face.
2/40 The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
Read this one when you’re decrepit enough, and chances are you’ll die laughing. No-one has lampooned the self-absorption, delusions of grandeur and sexual frustration of adolescence as brilliantly as Susan Townsend, and no one ever will. Beyond the majestically majestic poetry and the pimples, there’s also a sharp satire of Thatcherist Britain.
3/40 Catch 22, Joseph Heller
It’s not often an idiom coined in a novel becomes a catch-phrase, but Joseph Heller managed it with his madcap, savage and hilarious tour de force. War is the ultimate dead-end for logic, and this novel explores all its absurdities as we follow US bombardier pilot Captain John Yossarian. While Heller drew on his own experience as a WWII pilot, it was the McCarthyism of the fifties that fueled the book’s glorious rage.
4/40 Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
A good 125 years before #metoo, Thomas Hardy skewered the sexual hypocrisy of the Victorian age in this melodramatic but immensely moving novel. Tess is a naïve girl from a poor family who is raped by a wealthy land-owner. After the death of her baby, she tries to build a new life, but the “shame” of her past casts a long shadow. Read this if you want to understand the rotten culture at the root of victim-blaming.
5/40 Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe
A classic exposé of colonialism, Achebe’s novel explores what happens to a Nigerian village when European missionaries arrive. The main character, warrior-like Okonkwo, embodies the traditional values that are ultimately doomed. By the time Achebe was born in 1930, missionaries had been settled in his village for decades. He wrote in English and took the title of his novel from a Yeats poem, but wove Igbo proverbs throughout this lyrical work.
6/40 1984, George Orwell
The ultimate piece of dystopian fiction, 1984 was so prescient that it’s become a cliché. But forget TV’s Big Brother or the trite travesty of Room 101: the original has lost none of its furious force. Orwell was interested in the mechanics of totalitarianism, imagining a society that took the paranoid surveillance of the Soviets to chilling conclusions. Our hero, Winston, tries to resist a grey world where a screen watches your every move, but bravery is ultimately futile when the state worms its way inside your mind.
7/40 To kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A timeless plea for justice in the setting of America’s racist South during the depression years, Lee’s novel caused a sensation. Her device was simple but incendiary: look at the world through the eyes of a six-year-old, in this case, Jean Louise Finch, whose father is a lawyer defending a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman. Lee hoped for nothing but “a quick and merciful death at the hands of the reviewers”: she won the Pulitzer and a place on the curriculum.
8/40 Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Dickens was the social conscience of the Victorian age, but don’t let that put you off. Great Expectations is the roiling tale of the orphaned Pip, the lovely Estella, and the thwarted Miss Havisham. First written in serial form, you barely have time to recover from one cliffhanger before the next one beckons, all told in Dickens’ luxuriant, humorous, heartfelt prose.
9/40 The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Roy won the 1997 Booker Prize with her debut novel, a powerful intergenerational tale of love that crosses caste lines in southern India, and the appalling consequences for those who break the taboos dictating “who should be loved, and how. And how much”. Sex, death, religion, the ambivalent pull of motherhood: it’s all there in this beautiful and haunting book.
10/40 Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
In an astonishing act of literary ventriloquism, Mantel inhabits a fictionalised version of Thomas Cromwell, a working-class boy who rose through his own fierce intelligence to be a key player in the treacherous world of Tudor politics. Historical fiction so immersive you can smell the fear and ambition.
11/40 The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
If you haven’t read PG Wodehouse in a hot bath with a snifter of whisky and ideally a rubber duck for company, you haven’t lived. Wallow in this sublimely silly tale of the ultimate comic double act: bumbling aristocrat Bertie Wooster and his omniscient butler, Jeeves. A sheer joy to read that also manages to satirise British fascist leader Oswald Mosley as a querulous grump in black shorts.
12/40 Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Shelley was just 18 when she wrote Frankenstein as part of a challenge with her future husband, Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron, to concoct the best horror story. Put down the green face paint: Frankenstein’s monster is a complex creation who yearns for sympathy and companionship. Some 200 years after it was first published, the gothic tale feels more relevant than ever as genetic science pushes the boundaries of what it means to create life.
13/40 Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Anyone who has ever suspected that children are primitive little beasties will nod sagely as they read Golding’s classic. His theory is this: maroon a bunch of schoolboys on an island, and watch how quickly the trappings of decent behaviour fall away. Never has a broken pair of spectacles seemed so sinister, or civilisation so fragile.
14/40 Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
The protagonist of Rushdie’s most celebrated novel is born at the exact moment India gains independence. He’s also born with superpowers, and he’s not the only one. In an audacious and poetic piece of magical realism, Rushdie tells the story of India’s blood-soaked resurgence via a swathe of children born at midnight with uncanny abilities.
15/40 Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
You will need a cold, dead heart not to be moved by one of literature’s steeliest heroines. From the institutional cruelty of her boarding school, the “small, plain” Jane Eyre becomes a governess who demands a right to think and feel. Not many love stories take in a mad woman in the attic and a spot of therapeutic disfigurement, but this one somehow carries it off with mythic aplomb
16/40 Middlemarch, George Eliot
This is a richly satisfying slow burn of a novel that follows the lives and loves of the inhabitants of a small town in England through the years 1829–32. The acerbic wit and timeless truth of its observations mark this out as a work of genius; but at the time the author, Mary Anne Evans, had to turn to a male pen name to be taken seriously.
17/40 Secret History, Donna Tartt
Stick another log on the fire and curl up with this dark, peculiar and quite brilliant literary murder tale. A group of classics students become entranced by Greek mythology – and then take it up a level. Remember, kids: never try your own delirious Dionysian ritual at home.
18/40 Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A subtle and engrossing look at racial identity, through the story of a charismatic young Nigerian woman who leaves her comfortable Lagos home for a world of struggles in the United States. Capturing both the hard-scrabble life of US immigrants and the brash divisions of a rising Nigeria, Adichie crosses continents with all her usual depth of feeling and lightness of touch.
19/40 Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
An absolute unadulterated comic joy of a novel. Stella Gibbons neatly pokes fun at sentimental navel-gazing with her zesty heroine Flora, who is more interested in basic hygiene than histrionics. In other words, if you’ve “seen something nasty in the woodshed,” just shut the door.
20/40 Beloved, Toni Morrison
Dedicated to the “Sixty Million and more” Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, this is a cultural milestone and a Pulitzer-winning tour de force. Morrison was inspired by the real-life story of an enslaved woman who killed her own daughter rather than see her return to slavery. In her plot, the murdered child returns to haunt a black community, suggesting the inescapable taint of America’s history.
21/40 Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh bottles the intoxicating vapour of a vanished era in this novel about middle-class Charles Ryder, who meets upper-class Sebastian Flyte at Oxford University in the 1920s. Scrap the wartime prologue, and Charles’s entire relationship with Sebastian’s sister Julia (Dear Evelyn, thank you for your latest manuscript, a few suggested cuts…) and you’re looking at one of the most affecting love affairs in the English language.
22/40 Dune, Frank Herbert
You can almost feel your mouth dry with thirst as you enter the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune and encounter the desert planet of Arrakis, with its giant sandworms and mind-altering spice. It’s the setting for an epic saga of warring feudal houses, but it’s as much eco-parable as thrilling adventure story. Rarely has a fictional world been so completely realised.
23/40 Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
Will there ever be a novel that burns with more passionate intensity than Wuthering Heights? The forces that bring together its fierce heroine Catherine Earnshaw and cruel hero Heathcliff are violent and untameable, yet rooted in a childhood devotion to one another, when Heathcliff obeyed Cathy’s every command. It’s impossible to imagine this novel ever provoking quiet slumbers; Emily Bronte’s vision of nature blazes with poetry.
24/40 The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
The savage reviews that greeted F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel – “no more than a glorified anecdote”; “for the season only” – failed to recognise something truly great; a near-perfect distillation of the hope, ambition, cynicism and desire at the heart of the American Dream. Other novels capture the allure of the invented self, from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black to Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull, but Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby casts a shadow that reaches to Mad Men’s Don Draper and beyond.
25/40 A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
From the moment we meet Alex and his three droogs in the Korova milkbar, drinking moloko with vellocet or synthemesc and wondering whether to chat up the devotchkas at the counter or tolchock some old veck in an alley, it’s clear that normal novelistic conventions do not apply. Anthony Burgess’s slim volume about a violent near-future where aversion therapy is used on feral youth who speak Nadsat and commit rape and murder, is a dystopian masterpiece.
26/40 Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
Banned from entering the UK in its year of publication, 1955, Vladimir Nabokov’s astonishingly skilful and enduringly controversial work of fiction introduces us to literary professor and self-confessed hebephile Humbert Humbert, the perhaps unreliable narrator of the novel. He marries widow Charlotte Haze only to get access to her daughter, 12-year-old Dolores, nicknamed Lo by her mother, or as Humbert calls her “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.” Cloaking his abuse in the allusive language of idealised love does not lessen Humbert’s crimes, but allows Nabokov to skewer him where he hides.
27/40 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
Here be Roy Baty, Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen – the novel that inspired Blade Runner is stranger even than the film it became. Back in an age before artificial intelligence could teach itself to play chess in a few hours better than any grandmaster that ever lived, Philip K Dick was using the concept of android life to explore what it meant to be human, and what it is to be left behind on a compromised planet. That he could do it in 250 pages that set the mind spinning and engage the emotions with every page-turn make this a rare science-fiction indeed.
28/40 Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Inspired by Conrad’s own experiences of captaining a trading steamer up the Congo River, Heart of Darkness is part adventure, part psychological voyage into the unknown, as the narrator Marlow relays the story of his journey into the jungle to meet the mysterious ivory trader Mr Kurtz. Although debate continues to rage about whether the novel and its attitude to Africa and colonialism is racist, it’s deeply involving and demands to be read.
29/40 Dracula, Bram Stoker
Whatever passed between Irish theatre manager Bram Stoker and the Hungarian traveller and writer Ármin Vámbéry when they met in London and talked of the Carpathian Mountains, it incubated in the Gothic imagination of Stoker into a work that has had an incalculable influence on Western culture. It’s not hard to read the Count as a shadowy sexual figure surprising straitlaced Victorian England in their beds, but in Stoker’s hands he’s also bloody creepy.
30/40 The Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger
It only takes one sentence, written in the first person, for Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to announce himself in all his teenage nihilism, sneering at you for wanting to know his biographical details “and all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. The Catcher in the Rye is the quintessential novel of the adolescent experience, captured in deathless prose.
31/40 The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Dashiel Hammett may have been harder boiled, his plots more intricate but, wow, does Raymond Chandler have style. The push and pull at the start of The Big Sleep between private detective Philip Marlowe, in his powder-blue suit and dark blue shirt, and Miss Carmen Sternwood, with her “little sharp predatory teeth” and lashes that she lowers and raises like a theatre curtain, sets the tone for a story of bad girls and bad men.
32/40 Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
All the teeming life of 19th century London is here in Thackeray’s masterpiece, right down to the curry houses frequented by Jos Sedley, who has gained a taste for the hot stuff as an officer in the East India Trading Company. But it is Becky Sharp, one of literature’s great characters, who gives this novel its enduring fascination. As a woman on the make, Becky is the perfect blend of wit, cunning and cold-hearted ruthlessness. Try as film and TV might to humanise and make excuses for her, Becky needs victims to thrive! And she’s all the more compelling for that.
33/40 The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
The only novel written by the poet Sylvia Plath is a semi-autobiographical account of a descent into depression that the book’s narrator Esther Greenwood describes as like being trapped under a bell jar – used to create a vacuum in scientific experiments – struggling to breathe. Almost every word is arresting, and the way that Plath captures the vivid life happening around Esther, news events, magazine parties, accentuates the deadening illness that drives her towards suicidal feelings. Plath herself would commit suicide one month after the novel’s publication in 1963.
34/40 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
Harry Potter may be more popular, but Willy Wonka is altogether weirder. From the overwhelming poverty experienced by Charlie Bucket and his family, to the spoilt, greedy, brattish children who join Charlie on his trip to Willy Wonka’s phantasmagorical sweet factory there is nothing artificially sweetened in Roald Dahl’s startling work of fantasy.
35/40 Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
Andrew Davies’s recent TV adaptation of War and Peace reminded those of us who can’t quite face returning to the novel’s monstrous demands just how brilliantly Tolstoy delineates affairs of the heart, even if the war passages will always be a struggle. In Anna Karenina – enormous, too! –the great Russian novelist captures the erotic charge between the married Anna and the bachelor Vronsky, then drags his heroine through society’s scorn as their affair takes shape, without ever suggesting we move from her side.
36/40 Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The most deliciously wicked experience in literature, this epistolary novel introduces us to the Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont, who play cruel games of sexual conquest on their unwitting victims. The Marquise’s justification for her behaviour – “I, who was born to revenge my sex and master yours” – will strike a chord in the #metoo era, but emotions, even love, intrude, to the point where Laclos’s amorality becomes untenable. Sexy but very, very bad.
37/40 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The energy and enchantment of Garcia Marquez’s story of seven generations of the Buendia family in a small town in Colombia continue to enthrall half a century on. Hauntings and premonitions allied to a journalistic eye for detail and a poetic sensibility make Marquez’s magical realism unique.
38/40 The Trial, Frank Kafka
“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K…” So begins Kafka’s nightmarish tale of a man trapped in an unfathomable bureaucratic process after being arrested by two agents from an unidentified office for a crime they’re not allowed to tell him about. Foreshadowing the antisemitism of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as the methods of the Stasi, KGB, and StB, it’s an unsettling, at times bewildering, tale with chilling resonance.
39/40 Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
The second Mrs de Winter is the narrator of Du Maurier’s marvellously gothic tale about a young woman who replaces the deceased Rebecca as wife to the wealthy Maxim de Winter and mistress of the Manderley estate. There she meets the housekeeper Mrs Danvers, formerly devoted to Rebecca, who proceeds to torment her. As atmospheric, psychological horror it just gets darker and darker.
40/40 The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Published posthumously in 1958, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel is set in 19th century Sicily, where revolution is in the air. The imposing Prince Don Fabrizio presides over a town close to Palermo during the last days of an old world in which class stratifications are stable and understood. Garibaldi’s forces have taken the island and a new world will follow. It’s a deep and poetic meditation on political change and the characters that it produces.
So how do manuscripts find their way into Barbara’s life – and how do they (maybe) become bestsellers? Broadly speaking, new projects land on his desk in one of two ways: either through a referral (for example, by an author he already represents) or through the “slush pile” – a not particularly flattering term used in the industry to refer to unsolicited manuscripts. That is how Barbara found his client Paul Tremblay, the author of the popular horror novel A Head Full of Ghosts.
“I think there’s a tension for agents where sometimes it’s very tempting to ignore the slush pile or roll your eyes at the slush pile,” he says – acknowledging that “strange” things, such as queries written in crayon, sometimes land in his mail. “But I think most people in publishing – we’re all dying to read something great. It would be so exciting to find something amazing. So you might go through hundreds of queries and hopefully something sticks out for you.”
Barbara does usually have an assistant who helps monitor the agency’s submissions folder, though on the day of our interview, her job was vacant, as she had just moved on to another company to be an agent herself. While there is an urban legend that claims agents don’t read their “slush”, Barbara expresses the opposite concern: ignoring unsolicited submissions could mean missing out on a hidden gem. And yes, new authors will sometimes get multiple offers of representation (queries are typically sent out in batches, so several agents will end up reading the same manuscript at the same time) – meaning agents must bear their competition in mind.
Budding authors are usually extremely curious about the slush pile, because it’s where their work is most likely to end up. So let’s stop and think about unsolicited submission and their place in an agent’s life for a bit. For Barbara, his reading system is “a pyramid of sorts”. “The things I have to read first are new manuscripts from my existing clients,” he says. “Then come works that arrive highly recommended from clients. We call those referrals, and they’re a great way to find new business. For “slush” – unsolicited manuscripts – we have interns and assistants who comb through those submissions and they might identify certain projects as having promise.”
Yes, having an established list of clients means it’s “a little harder to find time” for unsolicited queries – but it does happen, Barbara insists. “There are often clues in a query letter that someone is well worth paying attention to, so I do try to keep up with queries,” he says. “Most unsolicited submissions are not for me – it couldn’t be otherwise, statistically, of course – and I can tell in a few paragraphs. Over time you get a feel for it, you just know your own taste better and better.”
So what will prompt Barbara to go to bat for a specific project? Well, good, confident writing – the kind that makes you feel the author is comfortable running the show – is a start. High-concept, ambitious stories make him tick, as long as the writer can pull them off. A new voice – something that feels like it simply hasn’t been done before – is a good way to grab his attention.
Some clients might find another way into an agent’s path. Barbara came to work with Dylan Farrow and Krysten Ritter through the media and content company Glasstown Entertainment, which is itself a client. It’s not uncommon for people who have become famous through another line of work to turn to the publishing industry – mainly because they have a pre-existing audience, also known as a platform.
From an author’s standpoint, an agent can provide some much-needed guidance and support. “Working with an agent feels like constant affirmation that what you are pursuing is not only worthwhile, but even possible,” says Corinne Sullivan, a client of Barbara’s who published her debut novel, Indecent, in 2018. “Any writer will tell you that doubt is as much a part of the process as the actual writing, so having someone on your team who believes in your ability (and who is not your parent or significant other) can sometimes feel like the only reason to keep creating against all odds.”
With all this in mind, let’s say Barbara comes upon a brilliant manuscript, either through a referral or through an unsolicited query, and decides to take on the author as a client. What happens next? Well, he and the author will take some time to polish the manuscript together. Then, his mission – as he stresses several times – is to get the right person to read it as promptly as possible.
This person will be an editor at a publishing house. Agents are a point of entry for writers, but if they ever want their words to see the light of day, they need editors too – people who will acquire their manuscript for publication. The vast majority of mainstream editors don’t accept queries from authors, only from agents, who have honed their pitching techniques for years.
“From the outside, people may assume that we’re just sort of throwing spaghetti against the wall or something like that. That we’re indiscriminately blasting projects out there,” Barbara says. “But to me the pitch, the time when you call the editor and tell them about a book – that is where, if you put the right words in the right order, you can really set someone’s expectation where even by the end of the call you feel it. Like, ‘I’ve accepted it right away. I’m going to read it.’”
The rapport between agents and editors is perhaps the part of the literary industry that is the most remote from the general public, yet it’s one of its most important driving forces. It’s the kind of relationship built through regular phone calls, through lunches and coffees over the years. The goal for agents is to build a roster of editors whose tastes are familiar to them, so that they know who to call on a specific project. Editors, naturally, benefit from the process, too, since they heavily rely on agents to bring them new, exciting work.
“Part of what we’re trying to do as agents I think is really to get editors – and hopefully the editors trust us or they have a certain idea about our taste and what kind of books we work on – but, when we call and tell them about a book, I feel like I’ve done my job if I know someone is going to start reading,” Barbara adds. “So picking the right editor and the right way to pitch a book, to me, is crucial.”
The quest for the right editor will usually begin with a phone call – yes, an old-school phone call. If the publisher bites, the agent will then send them the manuscript and hope they read it promptly.
How does this all play out on the editor’s side? “We really rely on them to bring us the cream of the crop,” says Sally Kim, vice president and editor-in-chief of Putnam, an imprint of the Penguin Group. Sometimes, according to Amy Einhorn, executive vice president and publisher at Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan, an agent will prepare a proper pitch, clarifying which kind of readers a manuscript is likely to attract, or comparing it to existing titles. Other times, she says, they won’t have a proper pitch other than “I love this novel and think you will too.” In some instances, Kim says, agents will even begin to entice editors before a novel is ready to send out – just to make sure they grab their attention as early as possible. As a result of this back and forth, a single editor working full-time will take on six to 10 novels a year on average, though this estimate depends on each imprint.
It’s well known that agents and editors alike receive an astonishing number of manuscripts. Kim, however, remembers a time when “it used to be an event to have a box land on your desk” following an agent’s call. But the increasing number of literary agents, combined with the fact that sending a manuscript now requires little more than an email and the click of a button, means that the volume has increased drastically over the years. It’s not uncommon for Kim to receive four to eight manuscripts a day – all quality work from agents she holds in high esteem.
How does an editor wade through a sea of quality work? It begins with knowing one’s personal tastes. “I usually know pretty quickly on if I want to keep reading or not,” Kim says. “Fiction is so subjective. So if I don’t click with it, it’s not a book that I’m going to be able to champion for the next two years of work with the author for five to six drafts.” In that case, she says, it’s fair to step aside so that the manuscript gets picked up by another editor. Above all, if a manuscript keeps her reading until the wee hours, that’s a sure sign that she should take it on.
Einhorn, too, knows what she’s looking for. “I’m always drawn in by the voice. If it’s a voice I’ve never heard before then I’m all in,” she says. “I tend to be less intrigued by what a novel is ‘about’ per se because to me it’s all about the voice.”
Pacing plays an important part as well – and a winning manuscript will, of course, omit neither style nor substance. “I always want a book that grabs me immediately,” Einhorn adds. “I have no patience for books where you have to read the first 30 pages before the story kicks in. It seems like too often submissions are either beautifully written with no story, or all story but the writing is lacklustre. What’s so great about someone like Liane Moriarty [the best-selling author of novels such as Big Little Lies] is that she does both – she’s a wonderful wordsmith with great stories. I think people underestimate just how hard it is to do both and do both successfully time after time.”
Sometimes, a manuscript will generate so much attention that multiple editors will express interest – at which point an auction will take place. An editor might make a pre-emptive offer to keep that from happening, or they might let the book go to auction. Once an editor acquires a manuscript for good, they begin working with the author, over the course of an editing process that varies with each writer. It can take roughly two years to take a book from acquisition to publication, according to Kim, with a year being the absolute minimum.
The author, meanwhile, will look for an editor who “shares their vision and is just as passionate as they are – if not more so – about the story they want to tell”, says Corinne Sullivan. “Editing is a long and tiring process, and so you need an editor who doesn’t just like your writing, but connects with your story, your characters, and you as a person as well,” she adds. “I knew early on that my ideal editor would be someone whose enthusiasm only bolstered my own. I knew that person also had to be someone who knew how to expand and improve my story in a way that felt true to my intention. It can be painful to be told, ‘Guess what? This isn’t perfect,’ but the right editor will make your manuscript reach its full potential.”
The editing process as described by Kim moves from a macro to a micro level, first addressing the general vision for the book, then eventually moving on to a line edit. “Some authors require lots of back and forth, some only want to talk to you once,” Einhorn says. “In the ideal world,” she adds, “the work an editor does goes completely unnoticed by everyone except the author. Our work should make a book better, but ultimately it’s the author’s work through and through.”
While this might seem like the end of the line, Kim warns this is actually the beginning of a book’s journey. “I think people think an editor sits at their desks all day reading. That makes me laugh,” Einhorn adds. “Editors are editing pretty much all the time except when they are in the office. When they’re at work they’re dealing with all of the other components of a successful book publication – marketing, publicity, cover design, interior design, contracts… And an editor is just one person on the publisher’s team that helps bring a book out into the world – there is an entire village of other departments who work on books.”
Publication day, then, is a long-awaited, joyful, nerve-wracking affair for everyone involved. “I have a book coming out next month, [Reed King’s dystopia] FKA USA, that was so many years in the making – I can’t remember how many now – and it will be a great moment when it’s out in the world,” says Barbara.
“Publication day doesn’t feel like an ending to me, though. I am usually a little bit worried. I wonder about whether all the reviews are in, if the author received his or her author copies, whether Amazon will go out of stock, the social media plans, the launch party, the tour if there is one. Then I just hope the book has a long, happy life, because I know how much the author has put into it and everyone who’s worked on the book is going to want it to succeed.”
The emotional roller coaster is naturally just as vertiginous on the author’s side. “After you sign a book deal, everyone assumes they’ll be able to purchase your book next week, but that is absolutely not the case,” says Sullivan.
“My publication date came a year and a half after I signed my contract, with dozens of rounds of edits and cover approvals and blurb requests along the way. Nothing compares to the feeling of holding a physical copy of your book for the first time. It feels like you’ve released something terribly private and vulnerable into the world that you almost immediately wish you could take it back, but once that fear passes, seeing that book in a store for the first time is the purest joy imaginable.”
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