5. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe, 1958)

The classic One Thousand and One Nights, is another top pick. “A timeless work,” says Ainehi Edoro-Glines, Assistant Professor of Literature, Marquette University. “It gets at the primordial human desire for the story that never ends – which can very easily stand for life that never comes to an end.” Ahdaf Soueif, novelist, writer and commentator, points out: “Many characters, motifs and quotations (‘Open Sesame!’) from this set of stories within stories have become common parlance across the world. In the west, the ‘Nights’ has definitely coloured the view of the ‘Orient.’” Or as BBC journalist Sophia Smith Galer puts it: “The symbols and characters in the stories – from Aladdin’s cave to devilish adventurers, djinn and harems – still show in 2018 how cultural appropriation, appreciation and racism continue to manifest within the parameters of Arabian Nights imagery.” “It’s the deepest of wells,” says novelist and columnist Nilanjana S Roy. “In medieval and modern times, from writers to singers and film-makers, we never stopped drawing from it.” Critic Muneeza Shamsie, meanwhile, admires “Sheherazade’s courage, intelligence and confidence and the fact that she succeeds, asserts the power of storytelling and imagination over that of tyranny and terror – a concept which has strongly influenced the ideals and ideas of our world.” And Lena Merhej, a comic artist from Lebanon, picked the book “because it gives a subversive voice to a woman that uses it as a weapon for her survival.” (Credit: Howard Timberlake)