Don Quijote de la Mancha

The first picaresque novel: a poor boy serves a blind beggar, a stingy priest and a starving squire, and learns to survive by his wits. Short enough to finish in an evening.

Anónimo

Ana Ozores, bored in a provincial cathedral town, is pulled between a scheming priest and a local seducer. Often called the greatest Spanish novel of the 19th century.

Leopoldo Alas Clarín

Two women, one wealthy and one poor, love the same careless young man in 1870s Madrid. Galdós at his fullest, with the whole city alive around them.

Benito Pérez Galdós

A poor, plain girl guides a blind young man through the mining country of northern Spain, until a surgeon offers him his sight. A short, moving way into Galdós.

Benito Pérez Galdós

A young priest arrives at a crumbling Galician manor ruled by a brutal marquis and his steward. The key novel of Spanish naturalism, violent and hard to put down.

Emilia Pardo Bazán