Perhaps the ultimate ‘someone understands me!’ moment literature has to offer any reasonably sensitive and intelligent teenager, Salinger’s idiosyncratic and often hilarious tale of a young man struggling with his mental health in the face of a world of ‘phonies’ is, like sport, something you either fall for when you’re a kid or spend you adult years wondering what all the fuss is about. For the former, this book still has few equals.

3. The Line Of Beauty – Alan Hollinghurst

Set in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher’s landslide victory in 1983, Hollinghurst’s Booker-winning novel makes being a young gay man seem sexy and London seem conquerable.

4. Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas – Hunters S. Thompson

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What is being in your twenties all about if not going on a road trip with your best friend, buying a huge bag of hallucinogenic drugs and losing your mind in Vegas? OK, so few of us ever came remotely near matching Thompson’s hedonism even during our wild years, but Fear & Loathing remains the definitive way to experience drugs abuse vicariously.

5. High Windows – Philip Larkin

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Grump old sod that he was, Larkin produced some of modern Britain’s most accessible and compelling poetry. Even the most verse-phobic men will shudder with recognition at the devastating ‘This Be The Verse’…

6. The Watchmen – Alan Moore

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The ‘graphic novel’ that made reading comic books OK (as if it ever wasn’t…), The Watchmen is of course much more than that – one of the most gripping fictional narratives of the past 40 years.

7. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

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One of the great dystopian novels, Huxley’s idea of a world in which we distract ourselves from reality to the point we accept a totalitarian regime seems more plausible than ever in the X- Factor age.

8. White Teeth – Zadie Smith

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Written by the prodigious Smith aged just 24 (a fact either painful or inspiring – you decide), this is the best exploration of modern multicultural Britain we have. And you’re going to laugh out loud. A lot.

9. On The Road – Jack Kerouac

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The book that launched a million gap years, On The Road is beat poet pioneer Jack Kerouac’s free form account of hedonistic road trip across America in the 50s that excites you when you’re still young enough to grab a backpack and follow him, and frustrates the hell out of you with its pretentiousness thereafter.

10. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

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Any young man who loved The Catcher In The Rye ought to read Plath’s novel, a similar story told from a female perspective. The beautifully written semi-autobiographical tale follows a young woman in the cusp of adulthood who struggles with her mental health.

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