The Beautiful and Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Oxford World's Classics, £5.99 in UK)

Anthony Patch, a debonair young man-about-town who nurses an ambition to write and expects a healthy inheritance from his millionaire grandfather, meets and marries Gloria Gilbert, the stunningly beautiful cousin of one of his best friends. That's the action of this book: the rest is reaction as Fitzgerald chronicles, with devastating malice, Gloria's slide into blowsy middle age and Anthony's long-term affair with alcohol. The Beautiful and Damned has been described as one of the most powerful studies of alcoholism in the literary canon - Fitzgerald, even at twenty-six, had plenty of hands-on experience of the topic - but it is also a vivid snapshot of 1920s New York and a dark-hued portrait of the postwar generation.