Born in 1935, David Lodge is the author of 14 novels including Nice Work, Thinks... and Deaf Sentence. He is also Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Birmingham, where he taught between 1960 and 1987. As well as his fiction, he has written numerous books of criticism. His new novel, A Man of Parts, is a fictionalised account of HG Wells's life and career. Reviewing it in the Guardian, Blake Morrison said it "bounds along terrifically and never tires" while showing "what made Wells, in his lifetime, so irresistible".

"HG Wells (1866-1946) was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. He is probably best known today as the author of classic works of science fiction, but he published well over 100 books in his lifetime, of many different kinds: novels and short stories that were realistic, fantastic, comic, tragic, and didactic, utopias and dystopias, social criticism, reportage, travel, autobiography and biography, world history … and also found time to edit collaborative encyclopaedic works on science and economics. I have selected 10 personal favourites from this abundance."

This was the book that made Wells instantly famous when it was first published, and it has never been out of print since. The machine itself quaintly resembles a bicycle, on which the time-traveller ventures further and further towards the death of the Earth as the sun cools. On the way he stops in the year 802,000 to discover a disturbing reversal of the Victorian class-system. Unforgettable.

The mother of all aliens-invade-the-earth novels. Monsters from Mars land in the south of England near Woking and cause devastation, death and mass panic with their sophisticated weaponry, until they are defeated in an unexpected but plausible way that owes more to Nature than humanity.

Arthur Kipps is a down-trodden apprentice in a drapery store (as Wells himself was) who unexpectedly inherits a fortune that enables him to live the life of a gentleman. But without education and the talents possessed by his creator he is exploited and humiliated by his new bourgeois associates. The novel combines rich comedy and biting social criticism with Dickensian verve.

Its rather off-putting title is the name of a worthless patent medicine which, through meretricious advertising and marketing, makes the narrator's pharmacist uncle, Edward Ponderovo, ridiculously rich until his bubble bursts. This, however, is only one thread in a wide-ranging Condition of England novel that contains some of Wells's most powerful writing, especially its descriptions of London.

The story of a young woman rebelling against her stuffy middle-class, suburban upbringing, seeking independence in every aspect of life, including sex. Set against the background of the suffragette movement, from which Ann Veronica eventually parts, the novel was banned from libraries and denounced from pulpits when it was first published. It remains a lively, engaging picture of a society in transition between traditional and progressive values.

Widely considered to be Wells's most perfectly-formed novel, this comic idyll is the story of a henpecked, unsuccessful, desperately frustrated small shopkeeper who bungles but survives a suicide-and-arson attempt, and becomes master of his fate under another identity.

"The War That Will End War", Wells called it when it broke out in August 1914, but as time passed and the casualties mounted he became disillusioned and renounced his early jingoistic fervour. Mr Brittling is a transparently autobiographical and amusingly critical self-portrait. His changing response to the tragic conflict struck a chord with people in many countries, and the novel was a bestseller.

Wells first visited Russia in January 1914. This is a vivid account of his return to post-revolutionary St Petersburg, now called Petrograd, a ruined city with a near-starving population. Wells was a first-class reporter, and he had the advantage of staying with his friend, Maxim Gorky, rather than the carefully-monitored hotel usually reserved for foreign visitors. He also had enough prestige to get an interview with Lenin in Moscow.

Although it drew on the same research as Wells's Outline of History, this book was a separate, original work. It is an amazing feat of lucid, economical exposition that tells the story of our planet from its very beginnings up to the first world war. It has been reissued by Penguin with an admiring introduction by the historian Norman Stone, who says: "Wells is the English writer of this century whom I should most like to raise from the dead."

10. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (1934)

The subtitle is of course to be taken with a pinch of salt, but this work is remarkable for its honesty and absence of vanity. Organised thematically rather than chronologically, it contains revealing memories of Wells's underprivileged family background and early struggles, and reflects the multiplicity of his later interests and achievements.