10 books to mark

Ten books...whose titles come from Shakespeare

With the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe in full swing and thespians strutting every available board, here are ten timeless novels whose names were pinched from the great bard.

Under the Greenwood Tree, by Thomas Hardy

(As You Like It)

Hardy's first novel in the Wessex series, first published in 1872 under a pseudonym. The least melancholic of his works, it's the story of a group of church musicians whose choir is not unlike that in which Hardy himself used to sing.

The Dogs of War, by Frederick Forsyth

(Julius Caesar)

Drawing on Forsyth's time reporting from the Biafran war, the title refers to a group of mercenaries sent by a British industrialist to the fictional African Republic of Zangaro. A dark and jaundiced work.

The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

(Macbeth)

Faulkner's stream of consciousness saga about the declining fortunes of an aristocratic family in American's deep south was not immediately recognised as brilliant. The title reflects one of its four narrators, Benjy Compson: "Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."

The Darling Buds of May, by H E Bates

(The Sonnets)

There couldn't be a better way to encapsulate the carefree, chaotic, bucolic merriment of Bates's rural comedy about the ramshackle Larkin family. The TV adaptation launched Catherine Zeta Jones.

Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley

(The Tempest)

A horrifying vision of the future, half a millennium hence, in which foetuses are created in jars, and chemically altered to fit the caste system they will be assigned to. Although these modified humans live contented lives, Huxley shows the implications of savage state manipulation and the loss of individual identity.

Cakes and Ale, by Somerset Maugham

(Twelfth Night)

A witty depiction of social snobbery in the London literary set, narrated by a bestselling author, it was Maugham's favourite of his novels.

Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov

(Timon of Athens)

Praised to the sky by some critics, and dismissed as unreadable by others, this is metafiction at its most clever, told in the form of a poem by a fictional author, annotated by editorial comments.

A Heart So White, Javier Marias

(Macbeth)

One of Spain's finest writers, Marias's digressive novel explores marriage, and its secrets and lies. An increasingly tense portrait of a newly married couple, it shows the wife's growing bond with her husband's father - a man whose first wife mysteriously died, and whose second committed suicide shortly after their honeymoon.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

(Hamlet)

A sizzling futuristic satire by an author who hanged himself at the age of 46. It is set in a unified North of America, where every year has a sponsor, for tax purposes, as in The Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, or The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, in which most of the narrative takes place. Ranging over topics as diverse as tennis and Quebec separatism, it made Wallace's name.

Remembrance of Things Past, by Marcel Proust

(The Sonnets)

The original French title - A la recherche du temps perdu - was not from Shakespeare, but although he has since been criticised for it, Scott Moncrieff's use of this elegaic phrase is now indelibly attached to Proust's masterpiece, being the first time it reached an English-speaking audience and for some of us capturing the essence if not the literal truth of Proust's own title.