For those who like a challenge: Ulysses

Joyce, J. (2008). Ulysses. Oxford University Press. 

For those who are looking for a challenge, James Joyce's stream of conscious loose retelling of the Ancient Greek epic Odyssey might be a good place to start.

Ulysses follows two characters, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, through various events as they unfold on a single day in Dublin in 1904.

Hailed as one of the twentieth century's literary masterpieces and condemned as obscenity each chapter takes on a new style of writing, weaving technique and style together into a book that is both loved and hated around the world.

Loungbourn

 

Baker J. (2014). Longbourn. Random House. 

This revisit to Jane Austen's classic Pride and Prejudice pushes the upper class characters to the back and instead shows us the lives and concerns of the people who keep the Bennet house running: the servants. 

Told from the point of view of Sarah, a housemaid, this novel lets us see the other side of the the stairs to give us an understanding of what life for those not lucky enough to be born into the nobility.

Jane Steele

Faye, L. (2017). Jane Steele. Headline Review. 

Jane Steele is inspired to write about her own life by a book she has read and loved, Jane Eyre. The lives of both Eyre and Steele at times mirror each other; both are orphaned and left in the hands of uncaring aunts and vicious headmasters only to come under the spell mysterious men who have secrets to keep. However in one way they differ greatly is that Jane Steele is a murderer many times over, sometimes for love, sometimes out of necessity, and now she looks to recover her birth-right.

While touching on dark themes such as murder, child abuse and domestic violence this book is also praised as being "wickedly entertaining" by Booklist and was nominated for an Edgar Award for best novel in 2017.