James Joyce's Ulysses: The hardest novel to read or a completely illiterate book?

Published in 1922, the book was a marker of early Modern and a turning point for prose - stories didn't have to make sense or indeed be a story at all. Woolf, D.H Lawrence and Ezra Pound were all exploring themes outside of traditional linear story-telling, such as: time, the conscience, sex and death.

Joyce's Modern giant harks a style back to Chaucerian English which he peppers with slang. However, his far-out thinking was not exactly praised by his contemporaries, fellow writer Woolf condemned it ''an illiterate, underbred book.''

So what exactly is the plot of this much-debated and much-loved/hated novel? The tale takes place over one day, with the reader able to roughly ear mark each hour following the goings on of a group of academics living in Dublin, Joyce's birthplace.

The end of the novel - if the reader ever reaches it - delves into Molly Bloom's stream of consciousness. As her husband Leopold falls asleep beside her after requesting his wife makes him breakfast in bed the next morning, the thirty-something-year-old Molly allows her mind to wonder back to her youth. She recalls sexual encounters with such a vibrancy of language.

Master of the last lines, Joyce finishes the Modern epic with Molly's thoughts: "I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another… then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

The poetry within Molly's prose wonderfully captures the inner psyche of a woman.

In 2009, a first edition copy of Joyce's novel sold for £275 000 at Manhattan bookshop Sunwise Turn. This was the highest price recorded for a 20th-century first edition novel.