They teach you about the history of our world, the possibilities of our future and the fabric of our souls.

Whatever the breathless claims about reading, one thing is certain: losing yourself in a great novel is one of life’s most enduring and dependable joys. Job satisfaction comes and goes, partners enrapture and abscond, but you can always fall back on the timeless ability of literature to transport you to a different world.

From Jane Austen’s mannered drawing rooms to the airless tower blocks of 1984, novels do something unique. They simultaneously speak to the heart and mind.

They teach you about the history of our world, the possibilities of our future and the fabric of our souls.

So where do you start? It’s a fraught question, because the obvious answer – “the literary canon” – means a pantheon of predominantly dead, white dudes.

The power structures at play for centuries have meant that a very narrow band of people have been given the opportunity to say something universal about the human condition.

As it stands, whittling this list down to 40 novels has been a process that makes Brexit negotiations look simple and amicable. We hope you enjoy the selection – or at least enjoy arguing about who should or should not have made the cut.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
3. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
4. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
5. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
6. 1984, George Orwell
7. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
8. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
9. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
10. Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
11. The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
12. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
13. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
14. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
15. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
16. Middlemarch, George Eliot
17. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
18. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
19. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
20. Beloved, Toni Morrison
21. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
22. Dune, Frank Herbert
23. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
24. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
25. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
26. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
27. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
28. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
29. Dracula, Bram Stoker
30. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
31. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
32. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
33. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
35. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
36. Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
37. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. The Trial, Franz Kafka
39. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
40. The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

The Independent