With April Fool's Day fast approaching here are ten books, some funny, some not so, featuring fools wise and otherwise...

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole

Ignatius J. Reilly is a monument to sloth, a thirty-year-old anachronism ranting against all things modern. New Orleans is his stomping ground. He wears a green hunting hat with great green flaps and carries a plastic pirate sword. Ignatius, said Walker Percy, is "slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one". In short, unforgettable.

Private Angelo

Eric Linklater

A pawn in Mussolini's "ever-glorious" Italian army, Angelo is conspicuously lacking in one quality essential in a warrior: courage. Drawing on his own experience with the Black Watch in world war two, Linklater is at his satirical best.

The Adventures of Augie March

Saul Bellow

His fate determined by "luck and pluck", the eponymous Augie is an American Everyman who never quite manages to achieve what he sets out to. Seemingly surrounded by "dumbheads" and simpletons, he is forever on the move but more often than not going backwards rather than forwards.

The Good Soldier Svejk

Jaroslav Hasek

Satire from Czechsolavakia in the absurdist mode of Joseph Heller, this comic novel lampooned the military during world war one. The hero - if he can be called that - causes trouble from the start, so eager to sign up that he is wheeled to the army recruitment office by his cleaner, despite his rheumatism, but being instead declared first a malingerer and then insane. Eventually he is given a post at the front as a batman. The most translated Czech novel ever.

The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The young hero Prince Lev Nikokayevich Myshkin is no fool, but being an almost entirely good and innocent man, he is as good as. In venal 19th century Russia, he finds himself all at sea among a society so material and grasping, his virtues are considered almost lunatic.

The Tin Drum

Gunter Grass

Oskar Matzerath is in a lunatic asylum, convicted of a murder he did not convict. If that wouldn't drive you bonkers what would? His drum is his means of remembering a life of percussive turbulence, tragedy and comedy.

Don Quixote

Cervantes

Who, having read the Spanish classic, can look at a windmill without wanting to tilt at it? The deluded Don and his faithful servant, Sancho Panza, are perhaps literature's greatest double act.

Gimpel the Fool

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Published in 1957 in a collection of the same name, this short story tells of Gimpel, a simple breadmaker who is the butt of his town's jokes. Arcane piece of info: it was first translated from the Yiddish by Saul Bellow.

Right Ho, Jeeves

PG Wodehouse

Is Bertie Wooster thick? Very possibly. In this caper he is again blamed by his Aunt Dahlia for all the world's woes and must be rescued by the ever reliable Jeeves. Best of all is another guest appearance by Gussie Fink-Nottle, second only to Ken Livingstone as a lover of newts.

The Dalkey Archive

Flann O'Brien

In which everyone is either mad or a fool, including someone who doesn't know whether he's a man or a bicycle. Only in Ireland...