#STYRON_William

[whattoreadnext]

War and Peace

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy, War and Peace

(tapestry of Russian life during the Napoleonic Wars)

All Human Life is Here (unpicking the detail of society)

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (small-town life on Mississippi before American Civil War)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Apprenticeship of Wilhelm Meister  (young man travels 18th-century Europe, learning about life and love)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote  (fantasy knight-errantry in Renaissance Spain)

William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair  (middle- and upper-class life in Napoleonic England)

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield  (English city society in the 1830s)

Stendhal, Scarlet and Black  (middle- and upper-class life in Napoleonic France)

Napoleon and the Napoleonic Wars

Anthony Burgess, The Napoleon Symphony

Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe"s Regiment

Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

C.S. Forester, The Gun

Tsarist Russia

Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Dead Souls  (conman tours rural estates, buying up dead serfs" "souls")

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Fathers and Sons  (landed class resist fashionable revolutionary ideas, 1860s)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot  (psychological disintegration of count dismissed by family as simpleton)

Maxim Gorky, Foma Gordeev  (brutal upbringing in barge-owning family on 19th-century Volga)

War and its Aftermath

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms  (love-affair overshadowed by World War I)

Olivia Manning, Fortunes of War  (World War II: effects on civilians in Balkans and Egypt)

William Styron, Sophie"s Choice  (US woman haunted by memoty of nazi concentration camps)

Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills  (Japanese woman coping with memories of Hiroshima)

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago  (tragic love in chaos of Russian revolution)