Top ten 20th-century political novels

Tim Pears is the author of seven novels: In the Place of Fallen Leaves (which won the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award), Blenheim Orchard, In a Land of Plenty, A Revolution of the Sun, Wake Up, Landed (shortlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2012 and the 2011 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, winner of the MJA Open Book Awards 2011) and Disputed Land.

In 2003 he named his top ten 20th-century political novels for the Guardian.  One title on the list:

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek (1923)

Shaggy-dog stories of beautiful incompetence, of effortless anarchy spread through the Austrian army in 1914 by our eponymous idiot hero. A comic handbook on how to undermine authority in the most enjoyable way possible, written by a notorious hoaxer, drinker and vagrant Bohemian.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue