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Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands

In 1903, Erskine Childers did something profound: he wrote the world’s first great seagoing spy thriller. But The Riddle of the Sands opens so quietly that a reader might think that Childers himself didn’t know what he was creating.

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Graham Greene's The Ministry of Fear

Written in 1943 and set in the bomb-pocked London of World War Two, The Ministry of Fear manages to present an engagingly fast, light plot whose initial enticement and final resolution entertain the reader without troubling him too much with the story’s admittedly dire setting.

Sure, Greene slips in a few of his usual bleak sketches of a world that is on the verge of revealing itself as meaningless, but it’s just enough to remind the reader that while he’s reading an entertainment, it’s still one written by a fine, intelligent novelist.

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Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

Sure, the novel offers a handful of murders to solve, but the real interest lies in the enigmatic title figure: what, precisely, is the Maltese Falcon, and who has it?

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Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea

The path that led Jean Rhys to write the masterly Wide Sargasso Sea after decades of literary silence is unlikely, to put it mildly, and it deserves a novel in itself.

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Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree

In the context of acknowledged classics like Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree is a relatively small, quiet achievement.

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