The afterlife of books and writers is an enthralling subject full of strange vicissitudes and unintended consequences, as even the most cursory reflection on the life and reputation of Shakespeare suggests. It's also a story of forgotten bestsellers, fashionable names swept into oblivion and overlooked figures growing in posthumous stature. The underexplored fact of literary life is that most books fail, in at least two ways. First, they do not live up to their authors' high expectations. Writers who are honest concede that most typescripts represent the wreck of a grander, just partially fulfilled idea. Second, the majority of books fall stillborn from the press, never living up to their authors' hopes for recognition or dreams of a large, admiring audience. So those bestseller lists and crowded festival appearances create a misleading impression of the true circumstances of literary life. For every book that tickles public taste, captures the zeitgeist and hits the jackpot, there are thousands that do not appeal to contemporary readers, fail to find a sufficient audience and almost disappear.

Almost, but not quite. In this literary twilight zone, you'll find passionate readers who keep candles burning for much-loved and half-forgotten favourites. These underrated novels are the books they might have read as children, teenagers or in rare and unforgettable circumstances. All of which underlines the fact that reading is a solitary pleasure and a private passion: books that seem to speak only to you are, in some ways, the most treasured. In this context, underrated might be another way of identifying 'the best book you've never read'. In any event, at the opening of the autumn season, when so much attention is paid to the presentation and promotion of new books, it's sobering to be reminded that, in the longer run, it's the work that counts as much as the life.

There's no accounting for taste. Almost every reader has a novelist or poet whose work they believe to be shamefully undervalued. When, in an exercise conducted from time to time in the literary press, The Observer decided to approach 50 contemporary novelists to ask for their nominations in this department we could, by definition, have no idea what the outcome would be. Still, the results of this poll have been fascinating and instructive. We hope our readers will be inspired to go off -piste in pursuit of the rare and the beautiful.

Moreover, I suspect that the triple choice of Elizabeth Taylor, a postwar author of some of the finest and subtlest English novels of her time, reflects a really widespread love of her work. Among her distinguished contemporaries such as Barbara Pym, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Bowen, she stands out as a model of sense and sensibility. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont is a masterpiece. The case for Taylor's recognition has often been made in the past but it has not been supported by availability. Has the time not come for her publisher to reissue her work in a collected edition?

Will Self

Lanark (1981)



Alasdair Gray

Alasdair Gray's Lanark isn't exactly a neglected novel, but I believe it to be in the handful of the finest postwar English-language novels. Perhaps because Gray is a non-naturalist writer, an unrepentant socialist and a Scot to boot, his book isn't nearly as widely known as it should be. Set in three parallel worlds, the novel tells the story of the eponymous Lanark and his drive towards self-knowledge in a decaying city in which the benighted inhabitants are assaulted by the metapsoriasis of 'dragon hide'. Exuberantly imaginative, beautifully written, Lanark is at once a devastating critique of the impact of Thatcherite economics on the Scotland of the early 1980s and a fantasia upon the themes of love, creation and metaphysical despair.

MJ Hyland

A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955)



Flannery O'Connor

I'm often surprised to meet serious readers (and writers) who have not yet read the short stories of Flannery O'Connor. She's a master. Without exception the short stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find are gripping, funny and beautifully strange. As a teacher of the craft, she is peerless and it's no wonder the likes of Carver, Cheever, Updike and Marianne Moore have named O'Connor as a first-rate model.

Charlotte Mendelson

Angel (1957)



Elizabeth Taylor

All writers, particularly famous ones, should read Angel. Elizabeth Taylor had a brilliant eye for social and domestic nuance, but it's her description of the development of a monster and her unfaltering portrayal of writerly self-delusion that make this novel such an exhilarating pleasure. A copy could be sent with every new publishing contract - only by then it would be too late.

Toby Litt

The Wind From Nowhere (1961)



JG Ballard

Thousands of books are undervalued by the general public. Far rarer are those undervalued by their own authors. And rarer still are those the authors dislike so much that they suppress them. Graham Greene wouldn't allow his first four novels to be reprinted. And Jeanette Winterson has done her best to turn her second novel, Boating for Beginners, into an unbook. Harder to understand is JG Ballard, who always refers to The Drowned World as his first novel, whereas it was, in fact, The Wind From Nowhere. His reluctance to admit authorship is almost certainly due to having knocked it out in a mere two weeks. But it's not a bad book - recognisably Ballardian in subject and form. Also, it stands as the first part of Ballard's Disaster Quartet. Each of these books - The Drowned World, The Drought (aka The Burning World) and The Crystal World are the others - is based on one of the four classical elements: air, water, fire and earth. By refusing to admit The Wind From Nowhere into his corpus, Ballard leaves this quartet maimed. But maybe that's the whole point.

Nicola Barker

The Obscene Bird of Night (1970)

Jose Donoso

I'm no expert on the topic of South American literature (in fact I'm a dunce), but I have reason to believe (after diligently scouring the internet) that Chile's Jose Donoso, while a very highly regarded author on home turf, is little known on this side of the Atlantic. His masterpiece is the fabulously entitled The Obscene Bird of Night. It would be a crass understatement to say that this book is a challenging read; it's totally and unapologetically psychotic. It's also insanely gothic, brilliantly engaging, exquisitely written, filthy, sick, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow connives to make the brave reader feel like a tiny, sleeping gnat being sucked down a fabulously kaleidoscopic dream plughole.

John Mortimer

Midnight (1936)



Julien Green

Julien Green was an American who wrote in French. He also wrote plays and, I think, lived in Paris. Midnight, written in French and translated by Oscar Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, is an extraordinary book dealing with the happenings in a house in the country one night. It has Kafka-like twists on reality, but it's Kafka as it might have been if rewritten by Proust. When I first read it, I was entranced and the feeling remains today.

Colm Toibin

New Perspective (1980)



K Arnold Price

This is a short Irish novel which deals entirely with private life; it is a middle-aged woman's most subtle and sensuous and intelligent study of her relationship with her husband. I found it haunting at the time and I am still haunted by its stillness and rich cadences and powerful distinctions between levels of feeling, but I have only ever met two other people who have read it and they are both writers. It does not read like a first novel and has some of the hallmarks of a Bergman movie. The author, I later learnt, was 84 when it was published. She published only one other novel.

Russell Hoban

The Reef (1912)



Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton's penetrating observation of the betrayals of self and others in this book may be too uncomfortable for many readers, and perhaps accounts for its relative obscurity. George Darrow, hoping to marry the young widow Anna Leath, plans to visit her at her country house in France. When she puts him on hold, he decides to make the trip anyhow, with a detour in Paris. At embarkation, he encounters a pretty girl, Sophy Viner, who has lost her trunk. He retrieves it, takes her under his wing, goes to Paris with her, has a brief affair, then continues on his way to Anna Leath. Can you imagine what might arise from this situation? Don't try - get the book.

Lynne Truss

Strange Fits of Passion (1991)



Anita Shreve

Anita Shreve isn't overlooked by any means. In fact, books like Fortune's Rocks and The Weight of Water have sold zillions. But this novel from 1991 doesn't fit into the more romantic model that has subsequently made her name, so people tend not to know about it. It concerns domestic abuse, but, more importantly, it concerns the impact of judgmental, subjective and partial journalism on complex situations. Twenty years after writing about a 'collusive' battered wife (who murdered her husband), a journalist realises how wrong she was. It's like Atonement without the war or the broken vase. I remember being really impressed by it. The only thing wrong with it is the title, which, quoting from Wordsworth, refers to the way grief creeps up on you when you're thinking about something else.

Anita Brookner

Belchamber (1904)



Howard O Sturgis

Howard Sturgis was a friend of both Henry James and Edith Wharton. This, his third novel, is an accomplished but unassuming story about moral choices. The protagonist is barely in touch with the ways of the world and for this, he is nicknamed 'Sainty' by his family and friends, most of whom betray him in one way or another. Fortunately or unfortunately, he is also wealthy and titled, which makes him ripe for exploitation. With an intriguing cast of unreliable characters, Belchamber poses questions about good and bad behaviour and demonstrates effectively that virtue is rarely its own reward.

Philip Hensher

Pendennis (1850)



William Makepeace

Thackeray One day, I realised that the man who wrote Vanity Fair just wasn't, couldn't possibly have been, a one-masterpiece sort of writer. And he isn't. Pendennis is the most wonderfully human novel; most of its characters you can walk right round, have imaginary conversations with and go on living after you've finished the book. They surprise you as real people do and as characters in novels hardly ever do. My favourite page in literature is the one on which old Costigan painfully gives up his marital ambitions on behalf of his beautiful daughter and she shrugs honourably and remarks, with real pleasure, that 'them filberts is beautiful'. I've read it three times and just thinking about it now makes me want to read it again.

Beryl Bainbridge

The Drinker (1950)



Hans Fallada

The Drinker was begun in 1944 when Hans Fallada was imprisoned in a criminal asylum for the attempted murder of his wife. Author of two previous novels, his third, The Drinker, is autobiographical and tells the story, in diary form, of a man driven by the demons of morphine and alcohol. Some writers attempt to convey the truth but fail to provide the right words. Not so Fallada. Profound in its psychological insight and in language sparse yet explosive, this is a novel both shocking and original.

William Boyd

Incandescence (1979)



Craig Nova

Incandescence was Nova's third novel after The Geek and Turkey Hash (remarkable novels in their own right). These three novels established Nova's unique voice and in Incandescence, it reached a perfect, cool pitch (never wholly replicated in Nova's subsequent work). Incandescence reads like a cross between Albert Camus and Don DeLillo: it haunts and disturbs, resonating eerily in your mind, at once bleakly realistic a nd full of strange sardonic philosophical riffs. There has been nothing quite like it in contemporary American fiction.

Hari Kunzru

The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948)



Victor Serge

If Serge is remembered at all these days, it's for his extraordinary life as a wandering revolutionary who returned to Russia to take part in the revolution, then fell foul of Stalin and ended his life in Mexico. His fiction has usually been considered as secondary to his politics, but work like The Case of Comrade Tulayev (which is in print, at least in the US) shows that he was an important novelist. His portrait of the terror of the Stalinist purges is superior, in my opinion, to Koestler's Darkness at Noon, and should find a wider readership.

Helen Fielding

Any Human Heart (2002)



William Boyd

I thought it was a great read and a great piece of literature, with some great observations about modernish life, such as: 'One cannot spend one's entire time keeping in touch.' I think the reason it didn't win any prizes, as far as I'm aware, is that there are fashions in these things and sometimes novels which are heavy-going to read, by authors who are heavy-going to spell, get the most acclaim.

Ben Okri

Labyrinths (1971)



Christopher Okigbo

Labyrinths is an interlinked volume of poems. Christopher Okigbo was an extraordinarily gifted poet who died in 1967 during the civil war in Nigeria. It is his only volume of poems, a meditation on everything from our origins to our obscure destinies; it's autobiographical; and it's a piercing lament on war. I think of him as our Lorca. He belongs to that class of poet who brings out one work and that work is a world. It says everything he needed to say in his lifetime. It should be read by everyone in every country. I can't think of him without the shadow of tears in my heart.

Jilly Cooper

The Tortoise and the Hare (1954)



Elizabeth Jenkins

Elizabeth Jenkins, a friend of Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West and Rosamund Lehmann, was a hugely admired novelist and biographer. Her greatest novel, The Tortoise and the Hare, tells the story of Imogen: beautiful, sweet, submissive, loving - the perfect wife for Evelyn, her brilliant, irascible, much older husband. Or so it seems... Set against a Home Counties background of cucumber sandwiches and twinsets and pearls, the darkness of the story is redeemed by exquisite writing and marvellously subtle characterisation. The novel is now out of print and when I tried to interest literary editors in Miss Jenkins's 100th birthday last year, sadly there were no takers. Virago Classics, however, is reprinting in 2008.

Philip Pullman

The Balloonist (1977)

MacDonald Harris

My candidate for revival is a book by the American writer MacDonald Harris, who died in 1993, and none of whose 16 novels remain in print. Why he isn't better known I simply don't understand, because he's outstandingly good.

If I have to restrict myself to one novel (and it is difficult) I'll nominate The Balloonist - an adventure story, told in the first person, about an expedition by balloon to the North Pole in 1897. It's leisurely, it's subtle and reflective, it's funny, it's accurate and fascinating about the technical business of flying balloons and meteorology and the mysteries of early radio; there's a love story that is tender, sexy and ridiculous all at once, there are characters who are firmly conceived and rounded and surprising, there's an immaculate and jazz-like sense of rhythm and timing; but best of all there's that sensation that comes so rarely, but is as welcome as a cool breeze on a hot day when it does - the sensation that here is a subtle, witty and intelligent mind that really knows how to tell a story.

Actually, it's almost impossible to read any of Harris's first pages without helplessly turning to the next, and the next. I'm astonished that he's not far better known.

Michael Chabon

The Long Ships (1941-45)



Frans Gunnar Bengtsson

I personally guarantee that, however infinitesimally, the world would be a happier place if this wonderful novel, in its excellent English translation by Michael Meyer, were restored to print. A tale of Viking adventure set in the 10th century, what makes The Long Ships such a delicious book is not its thrilling escapes, battles and rescues, nor its lifelike, morally ambiguous heroes and villains, but the droll, astringent, sly tone taken by the narrator toward the characters, particularly with regard to their relations to God, gold and sex. It's a world classic of the literature of adventure, on a par with The Three Musketeers and The Odyssey, its avowed models.

Lionel Shriver

As Meat Loves Salt (2001)



Maria McCann

I have been astounded since its publication in 2001 that Maria McCann's As Meat Loves Salt did not cause more of a stir and was not nominated for any major literary prize such as the Booker. I am not usually a big reader of historical novels, but this one, set during the English Civil War, is riveting. About a gay relationship in the days when homosexuality was a hanging offence, McCann's first novel follows two soldiers gone Awol from the New Model Army, and their subsequent involvement in the kind of commune that I would have, in my ignorance, associated only with the 1960s. The book is exquisitely written, capturing the flavour of the language of that time, but accessible to a contemporary reader. It's erotic, packed with plot and thrumming with forward narrative thrust. To my disappointment, McCann has still not published a second novel - but for this to be her first is truly impressive.

Romesh Gunesekera

Season of Migration to the North (1966)



Tayeb Salih

This book was given to me some time ago by a librarian who had to replace her fiction shelves with an information centre. I was completely captivated by the story: a Sudanese student returns to his village after many years in London and discovers a predecessor, Mustafa Sa'eed, who is hiding a disturbing English past. A short, powerful book, it explores the violence of misperception in culture, tradition and sexuality with tremendous poetic force. It takes some troubling risks, exploiting even as it exposes the brutality of Mustafa Sa'eed's world, but the writing is extraordinarily hypnotic. First published in Arabic in 1966, and in English in 1969 by Heinemann's African Writers Series, it was much acclaimed but did not gain as wide a readership in English as it deserved. In 2003, it had that chance again having been reprinted as a Penguin Classic (the first Arabic book to be included in the series), although it seems even that accolade does not guarantee shelf space these days.

Peter Ho Davies

The Cottagers (2006)



Marshall N Klimasewiski

In 1992, I was in a creative writing programme with Ha Jin and Jhumpa Lahiri - wonderful writers, both, but the pick of our bunch, in my opinion, was Marshall Klimasewiski, a consummate stylist, who last year published his first novel, The Cottagers. A haunting, psychological study, in the vein of early McEwan or Ruth Rendell, it slipped under the radar in the US, perhaps because of its settings in Canada and India, most likely because it defies easy categorisation (a Chekhovian character study hijacked by Dostoevsky, with some Lewis Carroll thrown in for good measure). The result is by turns gorgeous, mesmerising and deeply unsettling - a true original.

Howard Jacobson

Rasselas (1759)



Samuel Johnson

'Nothing odd will do long,' Dr Johnson wrote, noting that Tristram Shandy had not lasted. In fact, Tristram Shandy has lasted fine, whereas Dr Johnson's short novel, Rasselas, published in the same year, is now just about unknown outside the academy. But Rasselas has had the more profound effect on the English novel, teaching it how to make moralising dramatic. Tristram Shandy introduces messing about into fiction; Rasselas, while also laughing at its own sonorities, introduces tragedy. Blinded by the modern prejudice against whatever sounds like sermonising - though sermonising is one of the glories of English prose - we miss the great story Rasselas has to tell, of 'the hunger of the imagination' and the toll it takes on our sanity.

Tim Lott

Amanda and the Million Mile High Dancer (1985)



Carol De Chellis Hill

This is a rare blend of feminism, adventure and quantum physics. A brilliant, philosophical and athletic physicist, Amanda Jaworski is in training to be the first person to journey to Mars. With her magic cat, Schrodinger, Amanda goes on the ultimate space odyssey. She finds herself in a battle for her life and her planet with the greatest seductress of all, the Eleven Million Mile High Dancer, a being from 40 million light years away. I have never read anything else by CDC Hill, or even heard of her since, but this book is riveting - intellectual, entertaining and unique.