I’ve always loved quest narratives, partly because they have such admirable purity of purpose: Must find grail! Must solve crime! Must defeat evil being! But then I lack such admirable purity of purpose, so my true affinity is with absurdist quests, a tragicomic sub-genre in which everything is awry, and the rules keep changing – if there are any rules at all. The bemused protagonist struggles nonetheless to find grail/solve crime/defeat evil being but they are constantly thwarted by the strangeness of reality.

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Furthermore, the most important mystery can’t be solved: the meaning of life. This leads to a further question about whether we can know if a quest is absurd or not, when – as Jorge Luis Borges wrote – we can’t even tell if the universe belongs to a realist genre or a fantastic one. While writing my latest novel Zed I was very influenced by this tradition. In my fictional world there has been a series of mysterious deaths; meanwhile everyone is grappling with a possibly related and unfathomable quantity called Zed. I wanted my characters to keep striving to find answers, even as everything falls apart. So here are 10 of my favourite absurdist quests …

1. The Golden Ass, or The Metamorphoses of Apuleius by Lucius Apuleius (late second century AD)

The eponymous hero Lucius is meandering through life when he apparently murders three men, is put on trial and awaits his doom. Yet it turns out that he is the victim of a weird practical joke. Things become weirder still when he has a slight accident with some magic and is transformed into an ass. His quest is clear: to stop being an ass. The satire is robust; Apuleius knows that in any era of history there are many – some of them our most powerful leaders – who really should embark on such a quest …

2. The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol (1842)

This absurdist classic has inspired countless authors, film-makers, artists and musicians; Dostoevsky is reported to have said that “we all come out from Gogol’s overcoat”. The hero here, Akaky Akakievich, works hard at his clerical job even as his colleagues mock him for his unkempt appearance. His overcoat is threadbare, so he spends most of the story trying to gather the money for a new one. Having finally earned his prize, he enjoys a moment of pure happiness, and his colleagues even throw a party in honour of his coat. But the overcoat is stolen and when Akaky petitions the authorities they tell him to stop wasting their time. This represents the monumental outrage of Akaky’s life: that no one cares what happens to him, and that his society is cruel and stupid.

3. The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)

Another absurdist classic set in a terrifyingly cruel and stupid society. Josef K is suddenly arrested and told that he must stand trial. No one will tell him the nature of the crime he has allegedly committed, and he is tormented by a venal, relentless bureaucracy. It is the abrupt shifts of reality, and the claims by those in power that insanity is sanity and lies are truth, that make this novel so unsettling and timeless.

4. The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (1940)

Buzzati was working as a journalist for the Corriere della Sera when he perceived that his “routine would never end and so would eat up my whole life”. This revelation caused him to write a beautiful, bleak novel about one man’s quest for meaning. Giovanni Drogo, a soldier, is posted to a remote fortress. His duty is to repel an attack by a mysterious enemy, the Tartars. He waits each day for the attack, scanning the wastes, but the Tartars never come, and the novel reads as a prose precursor to Waiting for Godot.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ceaselessly inventive … Ithell Colquhoun’s watercolour Their Link Was Without Passion 1955, painted to illustrate Goose of Hermogenes. Photograph: Peter Owen Publishing

5. Goose of Hermogenes by Ithell Colquhoun (1961)

In this dreamlike and non-sequential novel, a narrator (“I”) finds herself on a quest to escape from her alchemist uncle, who is questing himself for the secret of eternal life. Throughout, there are ironic allusions to the fixated hero of the classical quest, who thinks of nothing but the golden fleece, the glittering grail or further prize. In Colquhoun’s novel this fixed purpose becomes a sort of demonic magic, which warps reality in all sorts of fabulous ways. An extraordinary book from a ceaselessly inventive writer and artist.

6. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966)

Our heroine, Oedipa Maas, is drawn into a baroque mystery after the death of her ex-boyfriend, Pierce Inverarity. The impenetrable events are bound up with an organisation called Trystero, or Tristero, which might be a secret underground delivery service, with a slogan W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire). Yet there is a possibility that this organisation isn’t real, and Oedipa is mad or the victim of a practical joke. This novel has much in common with the equally brilliant Ubik by Philip K Dick, published in 1969.

7. The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien (1967)

A wonderfully ingenious novel that is often interpreted as an afterlife quest in which the unnamed protagonist is dead for much of the action. Either way, he finds himself in an insane universe in which characters are dead one moment and alive the next, and policemen talk incessantly about bicycles and the third policeman is omniscient. Brian O’Nolan (his real name) finished the novel in 1940 but it was rejected as “too fantastic”. It was published shortly after O’Nolan’s death.

8. The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington (1976)

The British-born Mexican artist and author makes her questing heroine a nonagenarian, and lingers on the ruched contours of her ageing skin. People keep trying to confine Marian Leatherby, while she steadfastly ignores their prohibitions. It is absurd to be old and to be informed that you are – consequently – nothing. But blissfully, importantly, she refuses such doleful edicts and embarks on a wild adventure.

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9. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (1998)

Two poets, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, are searching for another, Cesárea Tinajero. This mock-detective quest is relayed by a dizzying cast of narrators, who disagree about almost everything. The prose is stunning, and full of lovely aphorisms such as: “In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats.” This concisely describes the relationship between the absurdist quest and the lion-like heroic quest …

10. The Fat Years by Chan Koonchung (2009)

In a slightly sci-fi version of China, a month has disappeared from the official records and from collective memory. Old Chen, the central character (an idle, self-obsessed author who just wants to lounge around drinking Lychee Black Dragon Lattes) is persuaded by an ex, Little Xi, to find out what really happened in this month, and why the authorities want to erase it from history. A bold, exhilarating satire of the tech-totalitarianism of contemporary China.

• Zed by Joanna Kavenna is published by Faber.