To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf (1927)

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse reinvented the novel through stream-of-consciousness narration, interior monologue, and the abolition of plot as conventional readers understood it. Centred on two visits to the Ramsay family's Scottish holiday home separated by the trauma of the First World War, it is simultaneously a technical revolution in fiction and an extraordinarily tender portrait of family love, time, and the impossibility of knowing another person.