
Animal Farm
The animals drive out the farmer and run the place themselves, until the rules painted on the barn wall start changing. Orwell reduced the Russian Revolution to a fable no adult forgets.

The animals drive out the farmer and run the place themselves, until the rules painted on the barn wall start changing. Orwell reduced the Russian Revolution to a fable no adult forgets.

Four centuries of Bosnian life pass over one stone bridge, built by an Ottoman vizier taken from these hills as a boy. Andric ends in 1914 and you feel it coming.

Charles Ryder, an officer billeted at a requisitioned country house, remembers the Catholic family who owned it: the ruined son he loved at Oxford, the sister he wanted later, and grace closing in.

Mack and his friends, unemployed and unhurried, decide to repay Doc the marine biologist with a party. Steinbeck writes a Monterey street of bums and grocers and whores as a functioning society.

Hunger runs through Wright's Southern boyhood: for food, for books, which he gets by forging notes on a white man's library card. He sets down Jim Crow's cruelty without a word of self-pity.

Banished by Mussolini to a village in the Italian south, a Turin doctor found peasants convinced Christ had stopped short of them. The book made postwar Italy confront a region it had abandoned.

Sally Bowles, the English cabaret singer who became the heart of Cabaret, sings badly in a Berlin nightclub while Isherwood's narrator calls himself a camera, shutter open, recording the city's slide into Nazism.

Uncle Matthew hunts his children across the Oxfordshire fields with bloodhounds. Linda Radlett escapes that house into two bad marriages and a French duke, in the funniest English novel of the interwar aristocracy.

Pippi is nine, lives alone with a monkey and a horse she can lift with one arm, and answers to no adult. Lindgren handed children a heroine no grown-up can manage.