Books: 10 of TIME's Hundred Best Novels

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Brilliant and beer-soaked, this book is ostensibly about a lazy, poor student who's writing a novel. But he loses control of his characters, and they get mixed up with local Dublin types and figures out of Gaelic myth who collide and commingle in glorious, category-defying cacophony. --L.G.

APPOINTMENT IN SAMARRA

JOHN O'HARA

Julian English is a man who squanders what fate gave him. He has a country-club membership and a loving wife. His decline and fall, over the course of three days around Christmas, is a matter of spending, liquor and a couple of reckless gestures. That his calamity is petty only makes it more powerful. --R.L.

See time.com/100books for a complete list of the critics' picks