1. This novel, according to a 1991 American Library of Congress survey, was the book which, after the Bible, had most influenced American lives.

2. Critic Martin Walser said of this author: ‘Reading [him] one can feel like an atrophied example of humanity. One has the sense that until now one has hardly made any use at all of the full range of one’s own consciousness.’

3. In this novel the secret selves of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are laid bare in a stream-of-consciousness technique…

4. This famous novel about K (we never find out his name) is a parable about man and grace, a pilgrim’s progress where the pilgrim doesn’t make any progress.

5. Who wrote ‘The Man Without Qualities’ – about bureaucracy – in this case the Austrian Empire on the eve of its collapse in 1913-14.

6. His finest novel offers accounts of married love unmatched in fiction. (Bernard Shaw said of him, ‘He developed a whole philosophy of fascism before the politicians had thought of it’).

7. A story about Little Oskar and his drum.

8. A prose lyric; the setting: a Hebridean island, in 1919.

9. This one catches the post-World War 1 Lost Generation perfectly – Jake Barnes, the war-wounded American reporter, Lady Brett Ashley, and their entourage – at ease in France, in Spain, but with no true home.

10. It’s the story of an ageing Russian emigre’s pursuit of a nymphet across low-life America.

11. The remote South American town of Macondo is seen through the eyes of seven generations of the incessently marrying and inter-marrying Buendia family.

12. This is a book about books, particularly those written by Dead White European Males. Its 578 pages is, in part, a dire prophecy of the end of civilization as Americans know it: ‘I realize that the Balkanization of literary studies is irreversible.’

Answers:

1. Ayn Rand’s ‘Atlas Shrugged’. 2. Marcel Proust. 3. James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. 4. Franz Kafka’s ‘The Castle’. 5. Robert Musil. 6. ‘The Rainbow’, D.H.Lawrence. 7. Gunter Grass, ‘The Tin Drum’. 8. Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’. 9. Ernest Hemingway, ‘The Sun Also Rises’. 10. ‘Lolita’ by Vladimir Nabokov. 11. ‘A Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Marquez. 12. Harold Bloom, ‘The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages’.