(MENAFN- The Conversation) Your 20s can be an intense decade. In the words of Taylor Swift, those years are“happy, free, confused and lonely at the same time”. Many of us turn to literature to guide us through the highs and the lows of this formative time. We asked 20 of our academic experts to recommend the book that steered them through those ten years. This is the second half of that list, so make sure you've read our first instalment too. And we'd love to know the book of your own 20s – let us know in the comments below.

Read more: Twenty experts on the book that got them through their 20s – part one

11. A Manor House Tale by Selma Lagerlöf (1899)
Norvik Press

To be young is to feel alone with your suffering. Whatever has happened to you – a broken heart, bullying, your parents' divorce, a death – you feel you are alone with your fate. No one else understands how much it hurts, no one tells you how it really is.

In my own 20s, I felt less alone by reading the older classics. In particular, the Swedish Nobel prize laureate Selma Lagerlöf's gothic novel A Manor House Tale moved me deeply. The portrayal of two young people who fall in love, yet are separated by mental illness and financial hardship, taught me something about love beyond superficial dating and convention.

It helped me understand that love is the strength to endure the deepest darkness for the sake of the other, and how difficult that is. Both protagonists are struck by mental illness, and each must struggle with their own affliction to be able to receive love.

Katarina Båth is a senior lecturer in comparative literature

12. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1927)
Vintage Classics

When I first encountered Woolf's work, her prose struck me as impossibly, infuriatingly vague. Luckily for me, her novels were required reading on the course I was taking, so I had no choice but to persevere. It took a while for my inner ear to attune to the poetry of her rhythmical cadences; but once I learnt to attend to them properly, they utterly transformed my sense of what writing could be.

It took time, too, for my life to catch up with the existential and elegiac tenor of Woolf's writing. Loss and grief came to me in my 20s, and amid the utter devastation of those times it was to Woolf that I turned. To the Lighthouse, in particular – in which she reconjures her childhood and the parents she had lost decades before – afforded me a powerful sense of recognition.

Amid the sorrow it evokes, I marvelled at Woolf's depiction of many moments of“ecstasy” and“rapture” arising from the most mundane situations – moments which, in their radiance, seemed to point to the importance of living on.

Scarlett Baron is an associate professor of 20th- and 21st-century literature

13. The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe (1958)
Penguin Classics

I surprised myself with this choice. Standing before my bookshelf, full of colourful spines, broken and creased, evidence of stories told and read, my fingers reached for an unsuspecting novel: The Best of Everything.

It was given to me by a friend who sometimes knows me better than I know myself. I first heard about it from the actor Sarah Jessica Parker, who said that without it, Sex and the City would not exist. The book reaches for a certain universality. I am sceptical of that word, but I do wonder: What touches us all?

As a Black woman, it might seem unlikely I would find fragments of myself in four white women in 1950s New York, yet I do. In the quiet recognitions, the man who does not love you back, the first day you realise what you are good at, the sudden throb of ambition, the book crystallises something electric. It bottles the shock of adulthood that strikes every 20-something-year-old. Who am I? And what do I want?

Olumayokun Ogunde is a doctoral researcher in English

No one's 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you're not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• Why Charli XCX might be gen Z's answer to the Romantic poets

• Let 'performative males' be – gender has always been a performance and our need for authenticity is bad for us

• Is today's political climate making dating harder for young people?

14. Candide by Voltaire (1759)
Alma Classics

When I turned 23, I landed a graduate IT role for an international bank. It was a long commute to a pretty, northern city so daily, for an hour each way, I read.

Reading made late trains, weather and crowded buses tolerable. It wasn't what I'd imagined after my English degree and master's but I appreciated it, and had been awarded a place on a competitive employee environmental project in the Kalahari desert (I still lament leaving before taking up this opportunity).

One week, I reread Voltaire's Candide. Candide is about journeys, changes and seeking“the best of all possible worlds”. Violent, impossible, ridiculous and laconic, it turned me into an annoyingly vocal reader. Suddenly, I knew I must return to university – I started my PhD soon after.

Candide's desperate situations and peaks and troughs of optimism and despair shook me out of my routine during my 20s, a rare period in life when I could change direction. I recommend it for anyone seeking encouragement to take a calculated risk.

Jenni Ramone is an associate professor of postcolonial and global literature and director of the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group

15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell (1996)
Black Swan

What does it mean to have a calling? And what do you do when that calling betrays you and leads the people you love to unbearable suffering? Mary Doria Russell's novel The Sparrow ostensibly tells the story of Emilio Sandoz, a Jesuit priest and linguist who joins a mission to the planet Rakhat to translate the language of its inhabitants, but these questions burn at its heart.

I first read The Sparrow in my mid-20s, fighting to balance my newfound vocation to progressive Christian ministry with multiple family members' deaths and the unravelling of a young marriage. For many, our 20s are a time when we struggle to define who we are and what we are called to do in the world. Both inspiring and harrowing, The Sparrow speaks to that struggle – and to the discernment we must use to avoid doing more harm than good as we wage it.

The Reverend Tom Emanuel is PhD candidate in English literature.

16. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011)
Bloomsbury

The Song of Achilles came out right at the beginning of my PhD in classics. It was the start of my 20s, and I'd just become interested in how fiction can challenge the classical canon, especially epics like Homer's.

I'd been reading Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad, and I'd begun writing the early chapters (though I didn't know it then) of what would become my first novel, For the Most Beautiful (itself a retelling of the Iliad, through the women). And then Madeline Miller came to Yale, and I heard her speak about what it means to retell stories as she does. I read (or rather, devoured) her beautiful book, and something clicked.

There is nothing more powerful than to have trailblazers like Miller who lay the path. The Song of Achilles is a masterful, gorgeous, timeless novel that I come back to again and again. I would encourage anyone in their 20s who wants to know that there is more than one way of telling a story – and that that can be its own story and its own gift, in itself – to turn to this book.

Emily Hauser is a senior lecturer in classics

17. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)
Fourth Estate

I first read this stunning, Booker prize-winning novel at the age of 22, as part of my master's degree at the University of Edinburgh.

At the time, I was reading voraciously for classes, sometimes getting through a book a day. But Roy's opening chapter, a challenging piece that contains all the elements of the story she's about to tell, stopped me in my tracks because of its beauty, tragedy and complexity. I was instantly hooked.

Set in Kerela, India, The God of Small Things traces the lives of fraternal twins, Rahel and Estha, and their extended family from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. Roy puts the small stories of the family's life into conversation with the big narratives and structures that shape Indian society over this period. The book's revelations enthralled me in terms of plot, while Roy's stylistic innovations and intricate structuring (her training as an architect perhaps played a role here) made it a mesmerising read.

The God of Small Things examines the specifics of Indian society such as (de)colonisation and caste while also speaking to questions of family, death and ultimately, love. It is a novel to savour at any age but since it's one worth returning to, reading it in your 20s just means more chances to do so!

Ellen Howley is an assistant professor in the School of English

18. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
William Collins

Heart of Darkness is crucial reading in your 20s because it contains multiple opportunities for discovery, including self-discovery. Or at least, that's what my future self can tell my past self.

On the face of it, Conrad's novella is a journey into the heart of Africa. It is also, though, a story about the discovery of historic injustice as it reports on Belgium's colonial regime. To learn about colonial history is a vital education.

Less obviously, it also exposes you to a narrative style which gets you questioning how a work of fiction can play with your confidence in truth. We're warned early on of“old sailor's yarns” while imposters, facades and silences can be found throughout the story. Reading it in my 20s, I discovered that critical thinking and observation skills make for valuable mental equipment.

Conrad's story teaches you how to be a better reader, a crucial skill in our times – and rewards a reader that pays attention.

Lewis Mondal is a lecturer in African American literature

19. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
Vintage Classics

Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925) came to me in my early 20s, as I was beginning to understand how the life we live inwardly rarely mirrors the one other people perceive.

Set across a single day in post-war London, the novel captures the texture of our thoughts: fleeting, associative, irrepressible. Clarissa Dalloway's quiet crisis – was this the right life? did she love the right way? – and Septimus Smith's descent into trauma spoke to the realisation that adulthood isn't a destination but a continual negotiation of memory, grief and the mundane.

For readers in their 20s, Mrs Dalloway is invaluable because it resists the binary of success and failure. Instead, it explores the richness of interiority, how past selves linger in present choices, and how the smallest gestures can shape a life. Woolf teaches us that meaning is stitched not in milestones but in moments, in glances, in a solitary walk to buy flowers.

Nada Saadaoui is a PhD candidate in English literature

20. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Oxford Classics

Since having children in my 30s, I am reduced to a sobbing ball by media in which people get depressed, or toddlers worry about things, or inanimate objects seem like they might be lonely. But in my 20s, when I was better equipped to face the realities of the human condition, I returned frequently to Madame Bovary.

It tells of Emma, a sheltered young woman who marries a kind but prosaic country doctor. Desperate for romance, she embarks on affairs and spends beyond her means, with predictably tragic results. There is some hauntingly beautiful imagery, as in the scene when Emma incinerates her wedding bouquet and watches petals flit like butterflies up the chimney.

Mainly, though, the novel reassured me that there was someone out there (albeit a fictional someone) making a bigger mess of life than me. My ill-advised student purchases included unwearable shoes, fishnet tights for the Scottish winter, and a pool table – but at least I never spent 14 francs in a month on lemons for polishing my nails.

Martha McGill a historian of memory and supernatural beliefs

Did a particular book help you navigate your 20s? Let us know in the comments below.

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