Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Recently ranked Britain's second most loved book (after The Lord of The Rings) Pride and Prejudice was published in 1813, two years after Sense and Sensibility. Its original title was First Impressions.

Ulysses - James Joyce

Joyce's debut, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, though brilliantly executed, was an archetypal first novel - a barely disguised autobiographal coming-of-age yarn. Ulysses was something else entirely.

Midnight's Children- Salman Rushdie

The recent winner of the Booker of Booker's, Midnight's Children is often cited as a first novel. The reason is that Grimus, published in 1975, was so poorly received that barely anyone remembered it. The original Times review

Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh

Less studied and autobiographical - and much funnier - than Decline and Fall, Waugh's first, with which Vile Bodies shares some characters. A sure step upwards towards the heights of Scoop and Brideshead Revisited.

Oliver Twist -Charles Dickens

Published in serial form after The Pickwick Papers but, composed simultaneously to it, and then - once Pickwick was complete - at the same time as Nicholas Nickleby. Read an extract published in the Times in 1837

Girl With a Pearl Earring -Tracy Chevalier

Not unlike Rushdie, in that Chevalier's first novel, The Virgin Blue made little impact; 12,000 copies were pulped. Chevalier later said in an interview: “Now that edition is a collector's item. Heh.”

The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing

Texts layered within text Anna Wulf's notebooks touched on everything from the fear of nuclear annihilation to institutional sexism of the 1960s. A regular on post-modern literature reading lists - a wonderful read nonetheless. Read the original Times review

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

After two collections of short stories and a novel, Self, Martel's Life of Pi won the Booker and survived a controversy about its similarity to a book by Brazilian author Moacyr Scliar. Read an extract from Life of Pi

The Beautiful and Damned - F.Scott Fitzgerald

He confirmed the reputation won with This Side of Paradise two years earlier. The Beautiful and Damned was the Jazz Age chronicler's first great novel, published by Scribner (who will publish Audrey Niffenegger's second) in 1922. His third was The Great Gatsby.

The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot

Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) published Adam Bede in 1859, and although her rural tragedy was praised by critics and fellow authors, including Charles Dickens, it is her second novel that became a set text, and the standard-bearer for Victorian social realism.

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