Ten of the best: explosions

John Mullan on 10 of the best explosions in literature

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Prince Andrei is fighting at the Battle of Borodino when a grenade descends, "like a bird whirring in rapid flight and alighting on the ground". His adjutant shouts to get down, but Andrei is frozen, musing, "Can this be death?". "The same moment came the sound of an explosion, a whistle of splinters as from a breaking window frame, a suffocating smell of powder".

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
There's a big bang at the heart of Greene's tale of adultery in wartime Clapham when a tryst between Bendrix and his lover Sarah is interrupted by a flying bomb. Bendrix disappears under the masonry and Sarah tells God that, if her boyfriend is spared, she will give up sex for religion. Bendrix is fine – so Sarah dumps him in favour of God.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters

Plenty of explosions in this novel, whose central section takes place during the bombing of London in 1944. Julia and Helen get caught in an air raid and a sudden explosion nearby detonates their passion.

The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad

Agent provocateur Verloc is instructed to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. He persuades his wife's beloved idiot brother Stevie to carry the bomb, but he succeeds only in blowing up himself. Conrad describes the effects of the detonation with horrible clarity.

The Good Terrorist by Doris Lessing

You know something bad will happen near the end of Lessing's tale of soi disant revolutionaries. Posh Alice dotingly tends the absurd Jasper, whose Communist Centre Union comes under the spell of the real revolutionaries in the squat next door. Their role model is the IRA. Alice and her fellow radicals, driven by anger at their parents, are going to help cause a very nasty explosion.

The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe

Coe's 70s-set bildungsroman has a real explosion at its heart: the destruction of the Tavern in the Town in the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings. Ben Trotter, the teenage hero of Coe's tale, has his life changed by the bomb: his sister Lois is injured and her gentle boyfriend Malcolm is killed. Lois never recovers from the trauma, a sign to Ben that life is not all about girls and pop music.

"The Explosion" by Philip Larkin

Larkin's poem reimagines an underground explosion, which kills coal miners but hardly registers in the world above. "At noon there came a tremor; cows / Stopped chewing for a second; sun / Scarfed as in a heat-haze dimmed".

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
Fighting with the republicans during the Spanish civil war, demolition expert Robert Jordan is instructed to blow up a bridge behind enemy lines. Against all the odds he rigs up the explosives and, in the novel's final chapter, there is the big boom – though the title should tell you of our hero's fate.

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson

The con-men who gull the money-obsessed citizens of London in Jonson's satire have set up an alchemical laboratory in the house of a wealthy man who has left for the country. When their plots start falling apart, they stage an explosion. "O, sir, we are defeated! all the works / Are flown in fumo, every glass is burst; / Furnace and all rent down, as if a bolt / Of thunder had been driven through the house."

Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

Thousands of years after a nuclear apocalypse, men and women scratch a primitive living, but dream of the magical technology of former years. Finally, Granser, one of the charcoal burners, rediscovers gunpowder. "WHAP! there come like a thunner clap it wer like litening strikes right close it eckowit up and down the river". The clever amateur chemist is decapitated.