Top 10 allegories

Adam Biles is an English writer and translator based in Paris. He is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company, from where he hosts their weekly podcast. In 2022, he conceived and presented Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses—an epic, polyphonic celebration of James Joyce’s masterwork. Feeding Time, his first novel, was published by Galley Beggar Press in 2016, and was chosen by The Guardian as a Fiction Pick for 2016 and was a book of the year for The Observer, The Irish Times, The Millions and 3:AM Magazine. It was published by Editions Grasset in France in 2018 to great critical acclaim. His second novel, Beasts of England, was published in September 2023 by Galley Beggar Press, and in 2025 by Editions Grasset. It was selected as a "2023 highlight" by The Guardian.

At the Guardian Biles tagged ten of his favorite "allegories, from classics that defined the form (and our view of the world), to surreal and unsettling parables and contemporary masterpieces." One title on the list:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

This Pulitzer-winning novel manages the near-impossible feat of combining a stark and powerful allegory with realistic characters that the reader takes to heart. Beginning with the premise that the Underground Railroad was literally that, a subterranean network of trains that spirited enslaved people to freedom, the story follows Cora, one such escapee, through “different states of America”, as Whitehead described them when I interviewed him in 2017. That evening he also spoke about the importance of striking the delicate balance between allegorising and historical reality: “Before I started deforming reality, I wanted to get it straight, to testify for my family members who went through it 100 years ago, and for other slaves. I wanted to get it straight before changing things around.”

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Underground Railroad is among Andrew Ridker's seven novels that defined the Obama era, Andrea Wulf's top ten books about unlikely revolutionaries, Chris Mooney's six intelligent, page-turning, genre-bending classics, Rachel Eve Moulton's top ten literary thrillers, Nathan Englander’s ten desert island books, Greg Mitchell's top ten escapes in literature, and President Obama's summer 2016 reading list.

--Marshal Zeringue