Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable

Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating trilogy represents the high-water mark of Modernism. Written in the late 1940s at the same time as Waiting for Godot - the Absurdist drama which brought the Irish writer international fame - these three desolate monologues on the human condition turn conventional first-person narrative upside down to disturbingly surreal effect and are illuminated by flashes of black humour.

In his distinctive prose, spare, neutral and elegant (he first wrote in French to better achieve this effect), Beckett shows, as no other author has ever done, human consciousness moving towards disintegration, defiantly pitting language, with all its deficiencies, against the ultimate silence.