#7 A Passage To India by E.M.Forster

What happened to Adela Quested in the Marabar Caves?

That is the question at the heart of E.M. Forster's novel about the fragility of Anglo-Indian relationships and racial tension in colonial India. After a mysterious event during a visit to the Marabar Caves, the charming Dr Aziz is accused of assaulting Miss Quested, a naive young woman recently arrived from England. As the trial begins, the darker side of colonialism is exposed. This is not the India of white linen suits, gin and tonics and polo but an India of simmering resentment, countless cultural misunderstandings and, of course, breath-taking racism.

It's hard to say whether I liked this book or not. Like a lot of 19th and early 20th century fiction, it's a bit heavy going (lots of description, lots of talking about feelings etc) so not really a book for the breakfast table. However when I did settle down to it, I did get absorbed in it. I wanted to find out how it all would end. I was a bit disappointed though. You never do find out what happened in the Caves of Marabar but I suppose that isn't the tale that Forster had to tell. It wasn't even all about colonialism. At the book's very core is Forster's dissection of the human character itself. His characters are not heroic. They are bigoted, naive, repressed, selfish and as the trail continues, both Indians and the English become bitter and resentful.

In Forster's own words A Passage to India is "about something wider than politics... about the universe as embodied in the Indian earth and in the Indian sky". And that is exactly what you get; a sprawling novel that explores not only the fragile and dangerous realities of colonialism but tries to pin down the very nature of India and the people within it.

#6 Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene

Written in 1958, Our Man in Havana is a secret service comedy based on Greene's own stint with MI6 in West Africa. Set against the absurdities of the Cold War, it tells the blackly comic tale of Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman recruited into the Secret Service. Needing money but having no real information to offer, Wormold lets his imagination run wild, claiming expenses for fictional agents and sending false drawings of non-existent secret installations (based on parts of a dismantled vacuum cleaner!). However Wormold's scheme unravels with darkly humorous consequences when MI6 and other agencies start taking his activities seriously. Our Man in Havana was originally intended as a screenplay but permission was denied from the censors, who stuffily informed him that any play poking fun at the work of the Secret Service was damn unpatriotic.

Like his other, earlier comedies and thrillers, Our Man in Havana always took second place in Green's own mind to his later 'catholic' novels. That's probably true. While Our Man in Havana was good, blackly comic in places and an enjoyable read, it wasn't especially memorable. Our Man in Havana is the only Greene novel I'd read so far but my Dad, who went through a Graham Greene phase when he was in sixth form, reliably informs me that his other novels have a much greater impact.

Read On Other novels by Greene include The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Human Factor

#5 Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Probably one of the most famous political thrillers ever written, The Day of the Jackal was published in 1971 and focuses around a plot to assassinate Charles de Gualle.

The book is split into three chapters: Anatomy of a Plot, Anatomy of a Manhunt and Anatomy of a Kill. Anatomy is the right word as in each chapter Forsyth dissects every step of the dangerous waltz between the assassin and the authorities in astonishing detail. As the plot progresses the stakes become ever higher with both luck and misfortune befalling each and sending the waltz spinning into a new direction.

From the very first page you are hit first by the sheer scale of the book as it encompasses not only the movements of the assassin but the manoeuvrings of police departments in two countries, the French Government and a terrorist organisation in hiding. Secondly you are hit by Forsyth's meticulous plotting. Every single detail is in there, including (and this caused a stir at the time) exact instructions on how to obtain a false British passport. Yet all this detail doesn't really get in the way of the story. Oddly it adds to it, making it read like a news article.

Forsyth used to be a journalist and in many ways The Day of the Jackal reads like a news story. So many political thrillers are centred around a single character who, more often than not, has a troubled past which either hinders him (and it is always a him) or drives him on. Unusually The Day of the Jackal is impersonal. Forsyth rarely strays from the here and now and never explores the assassin's background or motivations. You don't even find out his name.

The inclusion of The Day of the Jackal on the list of the 1,000 best books may raise some literary eyebrows but that's missing the point. Yes, it's not literature but a book doesn't have to be worthy to be a bloody good read. And that's what The Day of the Jackal is; a cracking political thriller that won't delve deep into the soul but is a very enjoyable way to spend a few hours.

Read On The Odessa File

Other similar works include The Walking Dead by Gerald Seymour; The Eagle Has Landed by Jack Higgins; Soldier No More by Anthony Price; The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum; The Flight of the Storks by Jean-Christophe Grange.

#4 Enigma by Robert Harris

Robert Harris' most famous novel may be Fatherland, an alternative history in which the Nazis won the war, but Enigma comes a close second. Written in 1992 and adapted into a film in 2001 Enigma depicts the efforts of mathematicians trying to break the German Enigma code against the backdrop of the Battle of the Atlantic.

Harris is a political journalist and it shows in his writing. His prose is relaxed yet he has an eye for exact descriptions, a few telling details which bring a character or scene to life. Enigma is told through the eyes of Tom Jericho, a brilliant young crypto-analyst worked to exhaustion in the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. He returns to find the woman he loved is missing in suspicious circumstances and that the enigma code is still unbreakable. These two obsessions come together and escalate in dramatic circumstances.

Through Jericho's eyes the reader is also quietly shown the realities of wartime Britain - the food rationing, the ill-fitting clothes, the lack of toiletries and cosmetics, the dim and overcrowded trains and the grimness of a winter with little fuel. Although the main theme of the novel is the breaking of enigma, and the toll it took on the men who worked on it, it is the evocations of grim, austere wartime Britain that lingers afterwards.

Read On: Fatherland, Archangel and The Ghost - a political thriller now made into a film starring Ewan MacGregor - all by Robert Harris.

#3 The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett writes madcap, farcical fantasy with his tongue firmly in cheek. The Discworld, a disc carried on the back of four elephants carried along on the back of a giant space turtle called Great A'Tuin is held up as a mirror to our own world and Pratchett spoofs everything from the genres of fantasy and science fiction to Australia, football, academia and Hollywood.

In The Truth, Pratchett turns his attention to journalism. William de Worde is a young man who, along with a eclectic cast of dwarfs, tramps and an obsessive-compulsive vampire, forms the Discworld's first newspaper. He simply finds things out and writes things down but this quickly leads to a whole pile of problems from humorous vegetables that aren't funny to people wanting to kill him.

The Truth is the twenty fifth in the Discworld series but, like all of Pratchett's novels, it is self-contained although established characters including Vetinari, Gaspode and the Watch make frequent cameos.Like all of Pratchett's fare it is bit of an acquired taste but for those who appreciate a good spoof novel then Pratchett is hard to beat.

Read on: There are over thirty Discworld books to choose from now but my particular favourites are Mort, Guards, Guards and The Colour of Magic.

Other farcical fantasies include; Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin; Odds and Gods by Tom Holt; The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde and The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse by Robert Rankin.

#2 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This is one of those books that I suspect a lot of people mean to read but never quite get round to. Much like A Suitable Boy or 1984, a modern classic in other words. I started it on the train up to Aberdeen and the woman next to me confided, somewhat shamefully, that she had started it three times but had never managed to finish it. This did not fill me with optimism.

As Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad, the history of his family is told in a series of wandering flashbacks where the Buendia dynasty proliferates like Japanese knotweed. The Buendias do not have a family tree as an unpruned shrubbery and the family relationships are more complicated even than those of the Dingle clan. I suspect I'm not the only one forced to scribble a family tree on a scrap of paper and even then my pen ran out. This is not helped by what I can only describe as Marquez's complete lack of imagination when it came to naming his characters. Three characters are named Arcadio (or some variation thereof) and, ridiculously, Aureliano himself has seventeen sons - all named Aureliano.

Despite these small, if irritating, niggles there is something enchanting about the way Marquez weaves his tale. Magic and realism coexist in a sort of rough-and-tumble Eden and fantastic tales of talking to ghosts and dabbling in alchemy are interwoven with more mundane life as the Buendias marry, cook, gossip and feud. Even though I couldn't always work out who a character was or how he related to the rest of the family I was carried away in Marquez's bewitching tale and deposited unwillingly, if slightly bemused, at the end.

Read On: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Similar tales of magical realism include: Shame by Salman Rushdie; Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes; The Storyteller by Mario Vargas Llosa; and Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis.

#1 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

In the 1860s a new literary genre emerged. Shocking and too much to take for some (one critic described the genre as 'unspeakably disgusting') the sensation novel peered beneath the genteel and eminently respectable veneer of Victorian life to to reveal a world full of bigamy, madness, murder and violence.

Wilkie Collins was the best known author of this shocking new literary genre. The Moonstone is an elaborate tale of mystery and intrigue centred around a fabulous diamond, looted from a Hindu shrine, and the curse it brings on those in possession of it. The Moonstone contains all the essential ingredients of Victorian sensationalist fiction. Collins was addicted to laudanum and opium weaves its way through the narrative alongside the Victorian obsessions with India, crime and the dark arts.

Arguably in The Moonstone Collins created the first whodunit, a genre in which authors such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers would make their names. It is in this book that Collins establishes many of the conventions of the English detective novel; a country house setting, a large number of loosely related suspects (all with secrets of their own), a renowned detective and, of course, liberal amounts of red herrings.

I had originally started to read a battered paperback copy that my dad bought secondhand in 1970 but as it was only held together with forty year old sellotape I abandoned it amid fears it would disintegrate completely before I could finish it. Instead I opted for a more robust hardback I found in the library which probably owes its good condition to lack of reading than good care.

Shame really as I really enjoyed this book. It may have been scandalous for the Victorians but for the C.S.I. generation it's pretty tame fare. The appeal of the book, to me anyway, is the tight plotting and the evocative picture it creates, completely unintentionally, of Victorian England.

Read On: No Name by Wilkie Collins

Other works of Victorian sensationalist fiction include; Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon; Bleak House by Charles Dickens; and Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu.