>> Nostromo, by Joseph Conrad.
Thought by many to be his greatest, and he was a great writer in his sour, scornful way. It's about British and US capitalist/imperialist expansion in Central America. His other widely admired work, The Heart of Darkness, seems to me flawed somehow, morally muddy. Far more incisive and correctly angled, on the same theme of Belgian exploitation of the Congo which Conrad had witnessed at close quarters, is the novella or long short story An Outpost of Progress. I would recommend that to anyone.
And pursuing the theme of genocidal imperialism by thuggish white men, the great modern American novelist Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is absolutely superb, if you can stomach it.
Dickens was much admired by Russian and other revolutionaries and is of course awfully good, but not a real favourite of mine. Thackeray's Vanity Fair, a bit earlier, seems to me more subversive really. Thackeray is very good on morally ambiguous or bad characters but gets a bit syrupy, like Dickens at his worst, when dealing with innocent maidens and the like.
Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is pretty rollicking stuff, earlier still of course. It's a bit reactionary but most fiction is when you really analyse it.
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