Isn’t it time you read . . . ?

Bret Easton Ellis' violent black comedy about a wealthy New Yorker leading a double life as a serial killer turns thirty in 2021.

One of the most controversial and talked-about novels of all time, this cult classic about the darkest side of human nature feels no less shocking and relevant three decades later.

2016 is the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the controversial and compelling book that made Truman Capote's name.

Capote's investigation into a bloody murder in rural Kansas and the effect it had on those involved is often described as the first non-fiction novel.

It's fifteen years since the publication of Ray Robinson's inventive and unusual story of a young woman with epilepsy, which has since been made into a film starring Agyness Deyn.

Lily's epilepsy means she's used to seeing the world in terms of angles – you look at every surface, you weigh up every corner, and you think of your head slamming into it. Prickly, spiky, up-front honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily is thirty, and life's not easy but she gets by.

But then her mother – who Lily's not seen for years – dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she'd long since left behind.

Jean Rhys' postcolonial classic Wide Sargasso Sea, which transports Jane Eyre to a Caribbean island, is fifty-five this year. In this haunting novel, Rhys delves deeper into the story of the first Mrs Rochester, the mad woman in the attic.

Never quite managed to get through Joyce's modernist masterpiece Ulysses? James Joyce's first novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is much more manageable. This autobiographical Dublin-set coming-of-age tale is a story of sexual awakening, religious rebellion and artistic development.

If you've yet to get through all of William Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets, this could be the year. Alternatively, if you're short on time, you could read Jonathan Bate's classic biography of the life – and afterlife – of the greatest English poet, The Genius of Shakespeare and watch the BBC's series of history plays starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

If your reading list is looking a bit heavy after all of those, you'll be delighted to know that 2021 is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of Helen Fielding's hilarious tale of a pissed, chain-smoking London thirty-something.