1 Atomised

Michel Houellebecq (1998)

All of Houellebecq’s novels are vital, but perhaps his most towering, frightening, and original work is Atomised. This extremely upsetting, unflinching book forced us to gaze into a nightmarish vision of society that simply had not been presented before. Through the story of two brothers, Bruno and Michel, Houellebecq charts the deteriorations in Western society since the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

More than that, this philosophical novel stands as a traumatic vision of humankind at the end of the 20th century - and suggests what might replace us. The sex is explicit, plentiful, and often humiliating; the violence is terrifying; the politics are provocative. Yet Houellebecq’s vision is far, far deeper than that of any mere shock-tactician. A modern giant of the novel form.

2 2666

Roberto Bolaño (2004)

The Chilean genius’s final, unfinished, monstrous novel is about two things: the unexplained killing of hundreds of women in the cartel-run Mexican borderlands – and everything else. Intoxicatingly original, mesmeric and unsettling. There are worlds within worlds in this inexhaustible masterpiece.

3 Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer (1998)

Extremely erotic and almost unbearably wistful, Dyer’s expat slacker novel has no great plot to speak of – basically, young people in Paris fall in love, take drugs, watch films and go clubbing – but the novel shimmers with longing and beauty. I’ve read this one a silly number of times.

4 London Fields

Martin Amis (1989)

Perhaps the only novel that has made me laugh so much while reading it in public that I had to put it away. Funny, yes, but also intensely sinister: in this novel, Amis’s feverish vision of urban modernity is matched unforgettably to his incendiary prose style. The darts-playing lout Keith Talent is one of the great comic creations of the 20th century.

5 The Rings of Saturn

WG Sebald (1995)

Like many of my favourite novels, The Ring Of Saturn may not even be a novel at all. A bleak, haunting, erudite psychogeographical roam along the Sussex coast, which opens out onto a sublime vision of an entire planet spinning into disarray. A pessimist classic.

6 Limonov

Emmanuel Carrére (2011)

Everything in it is true – if jaw-dropping – but like all of Carrére’s recent work, this masterpiece reads like the most gripping novel. Every page is rich and fascinating in this account of the dissident writer who fled Soviet Russia and became a notorious, Bukowski-like novelist, before returning to the homeland to enter extremist politics.

7 The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Milan Kundera (1984)

Of all the Czech master’s philosophical, erotic, effortlessly genre-expanding novels, his most famous is also arguably his most beautiful. Haunting, profound, and unbearably light – a novel to savour time and again.

8 NW

Zadie Smith (2012)

A novel that evokes London as vividly as the music of Amy Winehouse or The Libertines, NW is both compulsively readable and formally experimental. Restless and vibrant, this one put Smith up there with Martin Amis and the other great chroniclers of modern London.

9 Extinction

Thomas Bernhard (1986)

Bernhard devoted to himself to a brilliantly original and uproarious art-form: basically, the novel as unhinged misanthropic rant. Granted, his novels are all fairly similar, but some are better than others, and his final, unrelenting work is probably his best. Both terrifying and a hoot.

10 Oryx and Crake

Margaret Atwood (2003)

Everything that dystopian speculative fiction should be. This novel felt as plausible as it was disturbing, with its near-future world overrun by genetic-engineering, snuff-movie entertainment, and decimated humanity. A worthy successor to prior future-shockers such as Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World.