T hese recommendations are of short classic books under 60,000 words, or less than six hours’ listening in the audio version. Most are short classic novels or novellas, but we’ve also included nonfiction and a memoir.
“I picked Animal Farm because it is an allegory about power and its seductive and corruptive influence on people regardless of their initial good intentions. As one moves up the ladder and accrues power, the tendency is to forget principles – instead the ends come to justify the means. Once principles are cast aside, however, it is a short way towards becoming exactly the thing one fought against.” Read more...
The best books on Holding Power to Account
Heather Brooke ,
Journalist
“This is the most celebrated story by a writer who is not quite so well known in English. It was written in 1864…it’s set deep in the heartland of provincial Russia, which Leskov knew very well. He grew up in Oryol, south of Moscow, and Mtsensk is a town in the Oryol region. Leskov had a lingering memory from his childhood of the funeral of an old man who was murdered by his voluptuous young daughter-in-law while he kipped under a blackcurrant bush on a summer’s day. This is what gave Leskov the idea for his story.” Read more...
The Best Russian Short Stories
Rosamund Bartlett ,
Translator
“Voltaire is a global writer because of Candide ; it has been translated into every possible language, both western and eastern. It has a huge resonance and was a bestseller right from the minute it was published.” Read more...
The Best Voltaire Books
Nicholas Cronk ,
Literary Scholar
“Another thing people forget about Muriel Spark is how politically savvy she was. She was an avid reader of newspapers, as many novelists are, and a great follower of international news. She always kept up with current affairs. She was fascinated by the unfolding story of the break-in at the Watergate building, and the downfall of Richard Nixon…I love the setting, a convent where things have gone completely awry. The only nun who can sort out the mess is touring the world: that nun is modelled on Henry Kissinger.” Read more...
The Best Books by Muriel Spark
Alan Taylor ,
“This is a fascinating book…‘Pereira maintains’ is an odd phrase. We quite quickly pick up that this is a police report. Pereira maintains ‘he met him one summer’s day…’ So we’re being told second-hand something that Pereira has said… This is the wonderful thing about this book. It’s got great themes, loyalty, trust, aspiration towards truth, the verity of things in a very short book, just 194 pages long. You can read it in a day. I think it’s the most wonderful novel of the last 20 years. I can’t think of anything I admire more.” Read more...
Favourite Books
Philip Pullman ,
Children's Author
“Lermontov wrote this novella directly after the unsuccessful Decembrist revolt against Tsar Nikolai I in 1825 which led to savage repression and resentment amongst young members of the intelligentsia who lost the ability to express themselves in any way… In A Hero of Our Time , I think Lermontov is expressing the rage and boredom of young people of his generation with the stultifying atmosphere of bureaucracy and control in Russia at the time” Read more...
The best books on The Caucasus
Oliver Bullough ,
Journalist
This is one of the three memoirs written by Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century American who escaped slavery and became a leading abolitionist. The book was a bestseller in his lifetime and remains an incredibly moving read. It's a short book, and if you have a free weekend afternoon, learning firsthand what it was like to be enslaved is a rewarding way to spend it.
Read expert recommendations
“It was a critical book – an entirely objective account of a victim in a labour camp. Just one day in an ordinary labour camp. Not exaggerated, not even a particularly nasty day. The most extraordinary part is how is got printed. It ran contrary to everyone in the Communist Party in Russia, but the Novy Mir editor Tvardovsky snuck a copy in to Khrushchev and said, ‘This is awfully good, you ought to publish it’. And he did. It was an extraordinary stroke of luck. And once it was printed, as Galina put it, ‘The Soviet government had let the genie out of the bottle, and however hard they tried later, they couldn’t put it back in’… After One Day in the Life, Solzhenitsyn didn’t publish anything for a long time, but meanwhile he was hoarding the real killer book – The Gulag Archipelago. When he published that, he was arrested and sent to the West in handcuffs. That’s where I met him, in Zurich in 1976.” Read more...
The best books on Communism
Robert Conquest ,
Historian
“Seamus Heaney’s poetry is so magnificent it’s difficult to do it justice. He engaged with politics and with the violence of the Irish struggle in a complex way. He says the poet is ‘stretched between politics and transcendence.’ In Station Island he goes back to his roots to look at his communal ties, his early beliefs and the dead of his past. In the center of the Station Island sequence, the speaker is visited by ghosts, some literary, some with a personal connection to him, some of the dead who died in the violence. It’s Heaney accounting for who he is in the midst of this violent political struggle, in the midst of complex cultural currents.” Read more...
The best books on Veterans
Phil Klay ,
Military Historians & Veteran
“I taught this book to my students during the economic sanctions. And I feel like it gave me some kind of strength to continue. When I read about the struggle of the old man and the blood running from his hands because of the heat of the rope, I would always think, one day we will make it. At that time I had to work three jobs just to make ends meet. I thought I will struggle on and in the end things will come out fine, but they didn’t. We were invaded and our lives were shattered and people changed.” Read more...
The best books on Life in Iraq During the Invasion
May Witwit ,
Literary Scholar
“Jean Rhys is a white writer who was born in the colonies, and later moved to Britain. Wide Sargasso Sea is a reimagining of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Bertha, Rochester’s first wife. She’s described as a white Creole heiress, with Creole in this context meaning that she is too connected to Caribbean culture to be seen as culturally ‘white’ by the British Rochester. What Jean Rhys does is a post-colonial retelling. She draws out the themes that enable Antoinette to be cast as mad. And this madness is based – a little in Jane Eyre and quite explicitly in Wide Sargasso Sea – in a sense of the Empire as a corrupting space where white people make increasingly bad choices.” Read more...
The best books on British Colonialism
Charlotte Lydia Riley ,
Historian
“Lots and lots of people know the phrase, that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ means a split personality: good on one side, evil on the other. They might even have seen one or two film adaptations of the book. But I think one of the things that would surprise folk who haven’t read the original book, first of all, is that it’s very short. It’s a novella, only about 150 pages long, yet it’s dealing with such amazingly deep themes.” Read more...
Landmarks of Scottish Literature
James Robertson ,
Novelist
“This is my absolute favourite novel by Camus. It’s very short… One of the things that makes this one so interesting, particularly once you get a sense of who Camus was as a person, is how autobiographical it is and how much of this is him putting himself in the seat of judgment, trying to make sense of his own place in the world, his own decisions, and the impact that he’s had on other people… The narrator is telling the story of how, as he’s on the way home from work one night, a woman jumps from the bridge into the river and there’s this moment where he’s able to make a decision. He can turn back and save the woman, or he can continue on his path.” Read more...
The Best Books by Albert Camus
Jamie Lombardi ,
Philosopher
“This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. Wells picked up the up-to-date (in the 1890s) scientific speculation about time being a fourth dimension, and ran with it, imagining a machine that could take a man backwards and forwards through time… It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written, and it manages to open a chink in the reader’s mind that gives a dizzying, thrilling glimpse down the vertiginous perspectives of long time.” Read more...
Science Fiction Classics
Adam Roberts ,
Novelist
“Keun became one of the most significant female authors of the late Weimar period, a very prominent representative of the Neue Sachlichkeit —the new sobriety—style in literature. Her books were commercially successful as well. This particular novel was published in 1932. The protagonist is Doris, an eighteen-year old woman from a small town who wants to be famous and make it in the movie industry, in the big smoke… This is, ultimately, a tragic novel that deals with crushed hopes and expectations, but also a really good corrective to the slightly cliché-ed image that emerges from reading about the Roaring Twenties in Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin .” Read more...
The best books on The Weimar Republic
Robert Gerwarth ,
Historian
Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]
Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you've enjoyed this interview, please support us by donating a small amount .
