20th Century European

A man is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime never revealed. Kafka's nightmarish parable of bureaucracy, guilt, and powerlessness remains hauntingly modern.

A detached Algerian man kills an Arab on a sun-drenched beach and shows no conventional remorse. His subsequent trial becomes less about the crime than his refusal to perform the emotions society expects.

A deadly epidemic seals off the city of Oran, trapping its citizens in a battle against disease and despair. Camus uses the outbreak as an allegory for resistance, solidarity, and the persistence of human decency.

Over the course of a single June day in London, a society hostess prepares for her party while a shell-shocked veteran spirals toward tragedy. Woolf weaves their inner lives into a luminous meditation on time, memory, and the fragility of sanity.

In a totalitarian superstate where thought itself is policed, one man dares to keep a secret diary. Orwell's chilling vision of surveillance, propaganda, and the destruction of truth has never lost its power.

Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War moves from idealistic camaraderie at the front to disillusionment as political factions betray the cause. It is both a war memoir and a warning about the corruption of revolutionary ideals.

A middle-class officer looks back on his enchantment with an aristocratic Catholic family between the wars. Waugh charts the seductive pull of beauty, faith, and a vanishing England with elegiac precision.