The Next 100 Books — Detroit

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis.

American Psycho is a chilling portrait of 1980s Manhattan, where wealth, power, and moral decay intertwine. At the centre is Patrick Bateman, a successful investment banker by day and a psychopathic killer by night. Beneath his polished exterior lies a disturbing, hollow existence, consumed by consumerism, superficiality, and violence. As Bateman spirals deeper into madness, Bret Easton Ellis masterfully blurs the line between reality and delusion, creating a biting satire of yuppie culture. Both a disturbing psychological thriller and a scathing social critique, American Psycho exposes the darker impulses lurking beneath the surface of modern life. (from: Pan Macmillon's "Must Reads: 50 best books of all time")