East of Eden

The old story of Cain and Abel, retold across the fields and small towns of California's Salinas Valley. Steinbeck follows two families over several generations: the Trasks, beginning with Adam, who comes west after a bruising rivalry with his half-brother Charles, and the Hamiltons, led by the inventive, generous Samuel. When Adam marries a woman whose cruelty runs deeper than anyone around her guesses, the pattern of brothers set against each other begins again in the next generation.

It is a long, roomy novel, full of argument and tenderness, with a narrator who wanders in and out of his own family history. At its centre sits a single idea about whether people are bound by what they inherit or free to choose otherwise. For anyone who likes their fiction big-hearted and morally serious, it is the kind of book that stays with you for years.