Treasure Island review: the adventure story that wrote the template
Robert Louis Stevenson's pirate novel gave us treasure maps, one-legged sea cooks and a boy narrator, and it is still a pleasure.
Jaques Duchamp Betencourt writes A Man of Letters, our weekly column on the great books: new, old and best-selling.
The Time Machine review: Wells at his most compact
H. G. Wells launched time travel as a modern genre in about 32,000 words, with a dinner-table argument and an idea that still feels alive.
The Call of the Wild review: a short novel with a long cold shadow
Jack London's tale of a dog taken north in the Klondike Gold Rush is lean, vivid and surprisingly deep for its 32,000 words.
The Picture of Dorian Gray review: Wilde's glittering warning
Oscar Wilde's only novel mixes epigram and unease: a dazzling book that is also a quiet argument about beauty and consequence.
Wuthering Heights review: a storm with a house around it
Emily Brontë's only novel is a strange, stormy book about love as a force of nature, told through narrators who may not be reliable.
The Great Gatsby review: the short novel that says so much
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel is under 50,000 words and still one of the most carefully built books of its century.
Pride and Prejudice review: wit, money and the art of the first line
Jane Austen's most famous novel opens with a joke about marriage and never stops being funny, or clear-eyed about money.
Frankenstein review: why Mary Shelley's novel still unsettles
Begun when its author was 18, the novel remains the sharpest book we have about what we owe the things we make.