Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck | 
Oliver Twist
by Charles Dickens | 
Room
by Emma Donoghue | 
Sophie's World
by Jostein Gaarder | 
The Sound and the Fury
by William Faulkner | 
Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote | 
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf | 
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulkner | 
Revolutionary Road
by Richard Yates | 
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton | 
Absalom, Absalom!
by William Faulkner | 
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf | 
The Crying of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon | 
Light In August
by William Faulkner | 
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy | 
The Pearl
by John Steinbeck | 
Housekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson | 
Sometimes a Great Notion
by Ken Kesey | 
As I Lay Dying
by William Faulker | 
The Bone People
by Keri Hulme |
Roxana (1724), Defoe's last and darkest novel, is the autobiography of a woman who has traded her virtue, at first for survival, and then for fame and fortune. Its narrator tells the story of her own 'wicked' life as the mistress of rich and powerful men. A resourceful adventuress, she is also an unforgiving analyst of her own susceptibilities, who tells us of the price she pays for her successes. Endowed with many seductive skills, she is herself seduced: by money, by dreams of rank, and by the illusion that she can escape her own past. Unlike Defoe's other penitent anti-heroes, however, she fails to triumph over these weaknesses. Roxana's fame lies not only in the heroine's 'vast variety of fortunes', but in her attempts to understand the sometimes bitter lessons of her life as a 'Fortunate Mistress'. Defoe's achievement was to invent, in 'Roxana', a gripping story-teller as well as a gripping story.