If you still choose your books after reading the description on the cover, we have prepared below a list of books recognized by critics as the best of their time. Here are ten most memorable readings distinguished with the most prestigious awards for literature.
1. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
The debut novel of writer Arundhati Roy received the Booker Prize in 1997. The novel tells a charming story and full of suspense of two twin sisters who live in India. Rahel and Estha live a happy childhood with their family. But their quiet life changes when their cousin from England comes to visit for Christmas.
2. Sophie’s Choice – William Styron
A passionate love and painfully sad story, this novel is about the drama of a woman – Sofia – who must sacrifice a child to save the other. Meanwhile, Sofia, who is with Nathan meets Stingo, with whom she lives a devouring passion.
Sophie’s Choice was awarded in 1980 with the National Book Award.
3. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Recognized as one of his best works, this novel tells the captivating story that describes, combining the real with the fantastic, the mysterious history of Macondo Colombian village. The inhabitants of Macondo wake up one day in the middle of disasters, being afflicted with insomnia, war and bad weather and mysteries arise out of nowhere.
In 1982, this masterpiece of the narrative receives the Nobel Prize.
4. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
This invented love story that happens on the planet Zycron, brought the writer the Booker Prize in 2000.
The novel describes the risky adventure of a rich woman and a fugitive. During their secret meetings in hotel rooms rented, the two lovers create a fantastic story that is consumed on the planet Zycron.
5. Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk brought to this Egyptian writer the Nobel Prize in 1988. The novel tells the story of a traditional family, captured during the British occupation. Ahmad Gawad is a prosperous merchant and a severe patriarch, his wife and children being required to live under his despotic regime.
Slowly, his children realize that their father is not exactly a model of morality to follow, and his daughters lend the new mentality from the families they blend with.
6. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
Steinbeck’s characters live their lives on the outskirts of the town Monterey, during the Great Depression, on a street lined with sardine canneries that is known as Cannery Row.
Doc, who is a marine biologist, is also an eccentric character for those around him: a man of short stature, with a beard and tantrums.
The novel received the Nobel Prize in 1962.
7. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Considered the best novel of the first 25 years of the first award, which won the Booker Prize, the novel is the story of the 1001 children born at midnight between 14 and 15 August 1947, endowed with supernatural powers.
The story closely follows the destinies of two of them – Saleem, the illegitimate son of a poor Hindu woman, and Shiva, the sole heir of a wealthy Muslim family.
The book received in 1993 the Booker of Booker’s distinction.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
One of the most famous masterpieces, both in literature and in cinema, Harper Lee’s immortal novel, though published half a century ago, remains as relevant as ever.
A brutally realistic novel about racism and failure of innocent childhood, all filtered through the eyes of a little girl, Scout Finch, witnessing dramatic events triggered in a small town in South America where a black man is accused of raping a white woman.
The book sold millions of copies and it received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960.
9. Blindness – Jose Saramago
Blindness is a terrible novel, a testament of the author’s distrust in contemporary society, unable to manage and resolve crisis. In an unnamed city inhabited by characters without names, erupts a horrible disease that causes blindness. Without apparent cause, people lose, one by one, their eye sight and madness sets. The only reaction of politicians is repression, soon followed by the appearance of s0-called concentration camps. For unknown reasons, one person escapes: the wife of a doctor, who will lead people to the light.
The book received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
10. Mama – Pearl S. Buck
Mama is the story of a woman seemingly insignificant, from a world removed and buried in history. The novel depicts a portrait of a woman living in a poor rural area of China. The anonymous mother, like other female characters in the book, is a representation of the millions of faceless women in rural areas.
As ancient traditions, which she herself follows religiously, ideals begin to strike with the communist era, and the heroine is obliged to find the balance in front of the new role that Chinese peasants have to play it.
In 1938, the novel received the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Leave a Reply