Election fall-out will be chewed over all weekend.
Here are ten great political novels that make the UK's current issues seem trivial. Ten more by women are to follow.
Love and Garbage
Ivan Klima
The great Czech playwright had suffered personally, along with his family, under totalitarian rule, first the Nazis and then the Communists. This, his most popular novel, is set in Prague, before the Velvet Revolution, and tells of a street sweeper - as was the author once - who is having an adulterous affair.
Dog Years
Gunter Grass
The third in the Danzig trilogy that began with The Tin Drum, it shows the close friendship of two young boys. One is half-Jewish, and an artist in the making. As Nazi ideology creeps into everyday life, his friend rejects him because of his background, echoing the wider and darkening world.
Burr
Gore Vidal
Aaron Burr was America's third vice president, a lawyer who fought in the Revolutionary War and was accused - and acquitted - of treason. Subversively, Vidal portrays the nation's political class through this far from perfect man's eyes. It was the first in his mammoth seven-part Narratives of Empire series.
The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst
Winner of the Man Booker Prize, this is a sensuous evocation of Thatcher's Britain in the 1980s. A young gay man from the middle-classes becomes a long-term guest in an upper-class house, where at a party he dances with the Iron Lady herself. Over the years, he learns that the political establishment is riddled with hypocrisy, both political and sexual.
Milan Kundera's The Joke
Kundera's debut novel was based on jokes, of the blackest sort. When a student sends a friend a postcard on which he has written "Optimism is the opium of the people!" he is expelled from the Communist Party and sent to work in the mines. He later takes his revenge but, like Communism itself, it goes awry.
James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain
A condemnation of racism in America, Baldwin's semi-autobiographical account of Harlem is an indictment of the role of the Christian church in African-Americans' lives, although he shows it could also be a positive force.
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
An indelible portrait of what it was to be black in early 20th century America, Ellison's novel was recognised immediately as a masterpiece. It was enormously influential on the shape of American fiction, but Ellison never completed a second.
The Possessed
Foedor Dostoevsky
One of the finest political novels ever written. Set in Imperial Russia, on a magnificent estate, it shows a band of would-be revolutionaries and the brutal acts they are prepared to commit. Though chilling, its message is to defy the nihilism the author feared was gaining ground.
Animal Farm
George Orwell
Studied by most of us at school, its cleverness in using a farmyard and its creatures to mock Communism's crude beliefs and cruelties remains timeless.
Life and Fate
Vassily Grossman
Grossman's novel was a searing indictment of Stalin's era. When he tried to have it published the censor told him it would not be possible for several hundred years. Admirers of his work smuggled it out and it was published in the west in 1980, but by then Grossman was long dead.
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