Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (Anchor, $11). One of the great novels of the 20th century, chronicling the cultural disintegration that follows the arrival of white missionaries in a traditional Nigerian village. The book’s themes are profound, and its main character, tribal leader Okonkwo, achieves a tragic grandeur.
And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov (Vintage, $18). Grigori Melekhov, another flawed, complex, and tragic hero, dominates this controversial and epic account of Don Cossacks caught up in the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the subsequent civil war. A novel of massive, harsh power, rich in memorable characters, And Quiet Flows the Dawn is a War and Peace for the 20th century.
I, Claudius by Robert Graves (Vintage, $16). Published in 1934, and still an acknowledged masterpiece and a model for historical fiction, this “autobiography” of the stuttering, limping first-century Roman emperor is sympathetic and intensely involving: a great feat of imagination.
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Q by ‘Luther Blissett’ (Mariner, $15). From 1999, a weird, confusing, but visceral, engaged, and deeply informed novel of the European Reformation, written, or perhaps thrown together, by four Italian writers hiding their identities. A one-off, like no other historical novel.
The Man on a Donkey by H.F.M. Prescott (Loyola Press, two vols., $14 each). The historian-author H.F.M. Prescott brought both empathy and expertise to her classic and much-loved 1952 novel about the victims and losers of the early English Reformation.
A Dead Man in Deptford by Anthony Burgess (Da Capo, $14). A fast, funny, flawless re-creation of the life and violent death of Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. This deeply engaging, ingenious novel is a bravura performance, confident and utterly convincing in tone.
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