With so many novels and works of fiction to choose from these days, where do you start? Here, we've put together reading lists compiled by some of the most eminent authors, poets, critics and academics writing today to help you find the best novels and works of fiction. Whether you're looking for some light holiday reading or writing an essay about Charles Dickens books, you should be able to find what you're looking for.
Our fiction section is broadly organized as follows. First, we have interviews with leading academics on some of the great authors of the past (e.g Jane Austen, George Eliot, Vladimir Nabokov). Generally the recommendations will be a combination of the most important works by those authors, as well as one or two books of literary criticism.
For prominent authors still alive and writing today, our interviews tend to focus on the books that inspired them. Our collection of interviews and book recommendations entitled 'Novelists' Inspiration' can be found here.
We also have a lot of novels and fiction broken down geographically, so our site is a good place to find (say) the best Egyptian or South African novels or the best of Israeli fiction. The best Italian novels are a perennial favourite.
Finally, we have a lot of genre fiction – from thrillers and horror to historical fiction and romance.
The most recommended books in our interviews include Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Our book recommendations are all made by experts, who explain their choices in an interview. You can browse our database either by book or by interview:
The Mirror and the Light
by Hilary Mantel
The reviews are pouring in for the long-awaited conclusion to Hilary Mantel's highly acclaimed Thomas Cromwell trilogy (released March 2020), and it's a masterpiece. Writing for the Guardian, Alexandra Harris calls The Mirror and the Light "a novel of epic proportions, every bit as thrilling, propulsive, darkly comic and stupendously intelligent as its predecessors." Opening in the aftermath of Anne Boleyn's death, the book traces Cromwell's final years in the court of Henry VIII—his inevitable fall from grace and subsequent execution.
The Mirror and the Light is one of the most hotly anticipated new books of the decade: Mantel's legions of fans have waited eight years for this final instalment. Both previous titles—Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies—won the Booker Prize and, combined, have sold more than 1.5m copies. The books have also been adapted into an award-winning television series starring Mark Rylance and Damian Lewis.
“Zero Sum Game has an action hero whose superpower is math. The hero is an expert in mathematics, and has the ability to see the math behind everyday things, and she uses that to perform superhuman feats. It’s fresh, it’s exciting, it’s fun, and it’s so moving.” Read more...
“It’s an alternate history in which the Axis powers won World War II, and Japan has conquered parts of the United States. And it’s a book in which there are giant mechas, and there are references to gaming culture, a lot of nerdy, geeky references that we love to see in science fiction.” Read more...
“Such a powerful, powerful book. It is amazing. It is, in some ways, a superhero story that literalizes power, and powerlessness, and anger, and allows us to understand and view racial injustice in America in a way that I think few works have been able to do for me, at an emotional level.” Read more...
The Paper Menagerie
by Ken Liu
A highly acclaimed collection of short stories by Ken Liu. Stories in this collection include: 'The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary' (Finalist for Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards), 'Mono No Aware' (Hugo Award winner), 'The Waves' (Nebula Award finalist), 'The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species' (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), 'All the Flavors' (Nebula Award finalist), 'The Litigation Master and the Monkey King' (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre's history: 'The Paper Menagerie' (the only story ever to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
“We tend to think of sci-fi as being very escapist and fantastical, and not interested in the problems of everyday life or how to live. But what I love about this book is the way that Yu is combining the fantastical elements of sci-fi with the more practical, reflective orientation of self-help.” Read more...
Fire from Heaven: A Novel of Alexander the Great
by Mary Renault
The first novel in Mary Renault's Alexander trilogy, Fire from Heaven focuses particularly on Alexander's youth and his close relationships with Hephaestion and other young men at the Macedonian court.
The Stranger Diaries
by Elly Griffiths
***Shortlisted for the 2020 Edgar Allan Poe Awards***
The Stranger Diaries is a Gothic take on a modern mystery, with a fictional Victorian author, RM Holland, as a central part of the plot. The book has won a number of accolades, as well as being a Richard & Judy Bookclub pick, suggesting it's also a relatively easy read. That said, it is educational: the book pulls you along, but you also feel the need to look up the ghost stories of MR James (on whom, one can't help but presume, RM Holland is based), and reread Wilkie Collins.
“This novel comes from her most renowned period, from the late 1960s to the late 1970s, when she was producing almost a novel a year. All of them were very well received and very well reviewed. A Word Child is not unlike The Black Prince in the sense that it’s based around this one rather odd man called Hilary Burde, a repressed creature who we find out has had a difficult childhood, but has a brilliant mind.” Read more...
“The Philosopher’s Pupil is my favorite of the late novels. There’s an enormous web of characters and an interconnected society. This is one of the few novels that creates a completely realized setting outside of London.” Read more...
“The Bell is recognized as Murdoch’s first major landmark.” Read more...
“It’s the most complex and complicated of Murdoch’s novels. It plays around with form; it’s a quasi-postmodern novel. It’s got a range of voices. It’s the story of an eccentric failed artist/ author called Bradley Pearson, who’s trying to write a great work of artistry. His great friend and rival is Arnold Baffin, a popular author who writes works that sell. And Bradley is intensely jealous of this. The relationship between Bradley and Arnold fuels the novel.” Read more...
“Ferrante is an enchanting describer of myth. To me, the most incredible parts of Frantumaglia are when she’s telling the story of Ariadne or the story of Dido. She has a fixation with weaving women, and that to me is the most interesting through-line of the book. She claims that her mother was a dressmaker, and there are these unbelievably luminous passages describing what it was like to accompany her mother to the fabric store to buy fabric and watch her fit clothes to other women. There emerges a parallel between making dresses—weaving fabrics together—and making stories—weaving language together.” Read more...
“The Beach At Night is a children’s book—or it’s supposed to be a children’s book. It’s really horrifying. The book is about a doll that gets left on the beach at night by her owner, a little girl who’s gotten a new little kitten and is much more interested in playing with the little kitten now than she is in playing with the doll. Many vicious things happen to the doll on the beach at night. She’s almost burned; part of her body melts off. There’s a man with a thick mustache who puts a golden wire down the doll’s mouth and forces her to speak her name.” Read more...
“The Lost Daughter tells the story of a 50-year-old literature professor named Leda who takes herself on a melancholy beach vacation, where she sees a mother and daughter playing together on the beach. Leda’s own daughters are grown, and she’s struck, instantaneously and illogically, with a kind of jealous attraction to the connection between this mother and daughter. The little girl leaves her doll on the beach, and Leda takes the doll, and watches the child suffer its loss, watches the whole family frantically search for the doll on the beach.” Read more...
“It’s the most suffocating book I can think of—an incredibly claustrophobic novel in that it’s literally about a woman who’s trapped in her apartment with her children and her dying German shepherd … It’s the fictional exercise of being trapped in your home, the self you’ve constituted. It’s the opposite of home invasion; it’s the opposite of how most fiction works. There’s something so interesting about being with this one character in this one space. That image of disintegration—as you get scattered around the house, what happens? She moves around restlessly; there’s something wrong with the locks and she can’t get out.” Read more...
“I think one of the things that’s so interesting about these books is that we’re supposed to interrogate what friendship is. Because friendship is not nice—a lot of the time.” Read more...
Good Girl, Bad Girl: A Novel
by Michael Robotham
***Shortlisted for the 2020 Edgar Allen Poe Awards***
The title of this book is not ideal, seemingly jumping on the bandwagon of books with 'girl' in the title. But once you've set aside that prejudice, it's a great read, mainly seeing the world through the eyes of forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven. The audiobook is not immediately engaging, but quickly becomes quite addictive. (Perhaps best to first test a sample to see if you like it)
“You look at it and think, this is a book that primarily deals in black vernacular. But does it? It’s so deeply fixed in a visual tradition that it really troubles the connection between orality and visuality. It asks those questions directly: what’s the connection between hearing and seeing? When you hear a black person speak, does it also mean you can see them?” Read more...
“Gaitskill delights in peeling back the skins of her suffering, often nasty characters and showing you the vulnerable, frail human beings desperate for love underneath. There’s nothing quite like it.” Read more...
Death in Her Hands: A Novel
by Ottessa Moshfegh
The highly-anticipated new novel from the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation and the Booker-shortlisted Eileen is to be published on 21 April 2020. Ottessa Moshfegh, selected as one of Granta's best young American novelists in 2017, is one of the most outstanding literary talents working today, and produces darkly provocative fiction.
“A work of subtle imagination, recreating the feel of Rembrandt’s time, and reconstructing a harrowing and moving episode from his day.” Read more...
“Mary Gaitskill’s novella This is Pleasure was an extraordinary exploration of issues thrown up by the Harvey Weinstein case and wider MeToo movement. Written through the eyes of a woman whose male friend’s career implodes following accusations of sexual harassment, Gaitskill wallows in the muddy waters of sexual morality.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“I think it’s a really great read. I read this in two days when my life was very busy, and I really shouldn’t have been taking time off to sit in the corner and read, but I just kept wanting to return to it because I was marvellously entertained and engaged by it.” Read more...
“American by Day is engagingly written. It’s the follow-up to Norwegian by Night, and sends the Norwegian cop Sigrid to upstate New York to find her missing older brother Marcus, who is suspected of having murdered his girlfriend.” Read more...
“It’s an amazing novel, this. It’s compelling. It’s a novelization of a real event: the second last hanging in New Zealand. It’s a case that Fiona remains convinced was a miscarriage of justice, and that gives her an opportunity to debate the validity of the death penalty.” Read more...
Letters to the Future: Black Women, Radical Writing
Ed. by Erica Hunt & Dawn Lundy Martin
“Day pulls down the sky/a filament in a gold leaf is a collaboration between Asiya Wadud and Okwui Okpokwasili, who recently won a MacArthur grant. She’s known as a dancer and movement artist. Working together with Okwui’s songs, Asiya in meditation on those songs would produce poems. One of the most interesting things about this book is how this collaboration has been orchestrated on the page.” Read more...
“This is three kinds of examination, he says: scholarly, personal, and literary critical, or close reading. But there are all kinds of possibilities. It’s as if he could have gone on forever on this subject. The expansiveness of that imagination, the way in which a very careful critical mind is at work here, greatly interests me.” Read more...
“What’s so incredible about Hejinian’s writing is that she never seems to run out of energy; it’s as if there’s an unending supply of words and thinking. There are many important and interesting things to note about this book, but one of them is that it’s a record of a time that none of us will ever be able to return to—pre-breakup Soviet Union.” Read more...
“It is incredibly powerful and also very sparse—it has very few words. When I teach it to my students, who are undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania, they open it and say, ‘There are almost no words in this book!’ We try to work together to understand how the poems become so powerful in spite of the fact of their obvious minimalism.” Read more...
“Emily Brontë’s poems, which are mostly written for the paracosm she created of Gondel, contain huge numbers of sorceress-like women. Multiple murderers, adulteresses, faithless queens … The result is these searingly beautiful and musical poems, a lot of which are female voices, speaking confidently. It intersects superbly with her very powerful sense, again of the weather, and of the landscape, and of the history of the landscape, the people who’ve inhabited that landscape. “ Read more...
“Edward Thomas, perhaps more than anyone, was alive to the incredible strangeness of England as an entity that had been inhabited for thousands of years by people who had left ample traces, and yet those traces are still lined with other forms of life that also supersede and go beyond those local Anglo-Saxons or Romans or Celts.” Read more...
“It was completely unlike any book I’d ever read, in that it trusted the reader to make sense of things without holding one’s hand at all, or explaining anything ever. And at 15, I was so flattered by this book that seemed at once very exciting but unwilling to explain itself. So I read it over and over and over again.” Read more...
There's Gunpowder in the Air
by Manoranjan Byapari, translated by Arunava Sinha
“This is a powerful, angry, but also beautiful novel. It’s about terrifying desperation, but also relationships and hope.” Read more...
“This is a wonderful debut. It’s a big novel: an old-fashioned, multigenerational novel. Through that, the author tells a huge story, about generations, class, religion—and about Kashmir itself.” Read more...
“Perumal was on last year’s shortlist, which shows just how fast and prolific a writer he is. He’s produced three novels in the past two years. They’re very powerful. He has an incredible voice, deeply inspired by the life he sees in rural Tamil Nadu. The translations from Tamil are also very beautiful.” Read more...
“Perumal was on last year’s shortlist, which shows just how fast and prolific a writer he is. He’s produced three novels in the past two years. They’re very powerful. He has an incredible voice, deeply inspired by the life he sees in rural Tamil Nadu. The translations from Tamil are also very beautiful.” Read more...
“I really love this book. It’s written in three parts, which speak to the emotional, chronological, and sexual maturation of a gay man from the community that Sowvendra himself is from, a tribal community called the Santhals from the state of Jharkhand.” Read more...
“India is a young country. It’s dominated by its youth, and Bangalore is probably the most youth-dominated city of all. It’s the city of the tech industry, where a lot of people roll up from other places to work in those kinds of jobs, and so it has a lot of people like Roshan, middle-class young people looking to make a life in the city, and often being disappointed by the promises of contemporary India.” Read more...
Agent Running in the Field: A Novel
by John le Carré
Agent Running in the Field is the latest spy novel from the number one New York Times bestselling author John le Carré.
John Le Carré (real name: David Cornwell) is a very widely recommended author on Five Books. His books turn up again and again in interviews on both literary thrillers and espionage more generally. His most recommended books include The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
Weather: A Novel
by Jenny Offill
The new, highly anticipated novel from the author of the bestselling Dept. of Speculation – a fantastically wise, fragmentary work of fiction about marriage and early parenthood, which was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, the Pen Faulkner Award and the International Dublin Award – will be released in February 2020, and is already available for pre-orders. We at Five Books are awaiting its publication in near-breathless suspense.
“It’s an elegant little novel about decidedly inelegant subject matter. I’ve taught it a number of times and I just love how it opens up for the reader. It’s certainly not pyrotechnic or linguistically excessive in the way that both Blood Meridian and Suttree are, but there’s so much going on with it. The reader really has to negotiate her own reaction to the character as the character changes over the course of the book.” Read more...
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was published in 1847 and achieved immediate success. This essential classic book is still relevant in today’s world. It is a successful mixture of romantic novel and gothic fiction.
The audiobook of Jane Eyre is narrated by the British actress Thandie Newton. Listening time: 19 hours 10 minutes.
“What the rest of Great Expectations shows is that having Christmas lasting all the way through your life might not be a good thing. Having a Santa Claus figure who keeps throwing gifts and money at you when they’re not necessarily wanted or deserved might be a handicap.” Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people’s first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother’s omnipresent, unitary police state is not a reality we live with in the West), it makes fascinating reading.
Some of Orwell’s inventions from 1984 entered the English language, like ‘Thought Police,’ ‘Big Brother’ ‘Newspeak’ and of course, the general concept of an ‘Orwellian’ society or future.
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
The audiobook of Dracula by Bram Stoker is brilliantly narrated by British actors Greg Wise and Saskia Reeves (listening time: 18 hours)
Dracula by Bram Stoker is the classic 1897 Gothic horror story. The most famous vampire story, Dracula has underlying themes of race, religion, superstition, science, and sexuality. Find out why Dracula is one of Five Books’ most recommended books. Also worth looking at are Bram Stokers Notes for Dracula which contains Stoker’s research notes.
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name Mary Anne Evans), was first published in 1871 and is a quintessential Victorian novel. The novel is set in the fictitious English town of Middlemarch during 1829–1832, and follows several distinct, intersecting stories with a large cast of characters. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
” I think it’s probably his happiest book. Which is a little weird to say but it does have the most sincere and overt love relationship of all of his works, between the father and the son. It’s very purely represented. You can’t doubt the importance of that love and the sustained power of it, and its priority both for the characters and the premise of the book as a whole.” Read more...
“What’s wonderful about the Arabian Nights is that the tales are really rather stripped down and there’s not a lot of deep psychology. You’re not reading Middlemarch. There’s not all that much in the way of description. The palaces would be conventionally described, the beautiful woman would have eyebrows like this and lips like that, all conventional similes – they rush through it. What you’re getting is a pure story; the Nights is kind of like an engine of stories. It’s wonderful to see how stories work in a very nuts-and-bolts way as you work through them: how tension is managed and how characters are introduced and so on” Read more...
“It’s a novel about the clash of cultures, the intermixture of cultures. It’s a novel about what happens to a man, or two men, when they leave their village and go north, to England, the land where the fish die of cold, and get a western education, and some of the dangers of that. It’s a very strange and very complex novel” Read more...
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War
by Max Brooks
World War Z is told from multiple different perspectives, and multiple different cultures and how different cultures respond to the impending apocalypse.
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley started writing the Frankenstein story when she was 18, and it was published in London two years later. Her chilling tale of how Victor Frankenstein put together a creature by sewing together human parts is said to be the first true science fiction story. If you’ve never read it, or read it a long time ago, it’s definitely worth picking up again, as the subtleties of the original book, entitled Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus, may have been displaced in your mind by the various cartoons and monster-movies connected to the original only by the name ‘Frankenstein’ (and some people, who haven’t read the book, think Frankenstein is the name of the monster, rather than the name of the scientist who put the creature together).
Read below why it’s one of the books most frequently recommended by the experts we’ve interviewed—on subjects as diverse as fear of death, women and society, and transhumanism.
“It is his opus, his great work. Blood Meridian is really the masterpiece, it’s just such a rich mixture of history and metaphysics.” Read more...
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
by Mohsin Hamid
What’s especially useful about it is the way in which it describes the transformation in this man’s thinking. The protagonist is somebody who had been living in New York and been a banker and he gradually turns into, as the title says, a reluctant fundamentalist. This is something that I have seen among my friends in Pakistan. People who I have always thought of as very, very Westernised. They went to school abroad and certainly didn’t have the habits of religious types. But they are increasingly angry with the West and sympathetic to an anti-Western agenda and propaganda and very receptive to all kind of thoughts.
Collected Ghost Stories
by MR James
MR James’s Ghost Stories are also available as an audiobook, read by the legendary British actor Sir Derek Jacobi.
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
“The older I got and the more wars I covered – I have done about 18 – the more true it became”–Veteran BBC journalist Martin Bell on Evelyn Waugh’s journalistic satire Scoop.
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier
In the grand tradition of Gothic novels, it features an innocent young woman and a scary house with secrets
“The setting of The Left Hand of Darkness is a world where the inhabitants are humans, or very closely related to humans, with the exception that they don’t have a gender most of the time . . . This is a setting that makes us challenge and question some of the things that most of us consider pretty fundamental to our human identity.” Read more...
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell in 1847, just a year before Emily’s death in 1848. Below, in our interviews with literary critics and journalists, you’ll see why many people still view it as one of the greatest novels ever written in English. Also worth looking at are the contemporary reviews, some of which were found in Emily’s desk after her death. These are available on the web (see links below), but are also included in the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights.
Ulysses
by James Joyce
The thing about Ulysses is it has all kinds of language. It is a kind of equaliser of language by making the everyday into an epic. You have the language of the pub and of drinking, which is this coarse unliterary language that he makes famous through this book.
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Recommended five times on Five Books by economists, politicians and others, Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s brilliant dystopian masterpiece.
The Thirty-Nine Steps
by John Buchan
Award-winning actor Robert Powell, who also played Richard Hannay in the brilliant 1978 movie adaptation of The 39 Steps, is the narrator of the audiobook of John Buchan’s 1915 adventure novel (listening time: just under 4 hours).
“Set in Lagos, it follows hardworking nurse Korede as she attempts to cover up the crimes committed by her insatiable sister Ayoola, a beautiful sociopath with black widow tendencies. As well as a crime thriller, it’s a razor-sharp dissection of gender dynamics that never feels preachy or pretentious.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019
Cal Flyn, Journalist
The Odyssey
by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson
The audiobook of Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey is performed by the American actress Claire Danes (listening time: 13.5 hours).
“Exhaustively researched yet philosophical and poetic in its delivery, How to Do Nothing will make you rethink your relationship to thought itself. Incorporating history, journalistic narrative, scientific studies, literature, philosophy and even the study of trees and birdwatching, Odell mounts a convincing defense of individual attention.” Read more...
“The premise of the book is that a group of young noblemen and -women, people of great privilege who have been able to flee the plague-ridden city, are telling each other stories to while away their time together in the luxurious villa to which they’ve retreated. The description of the plague in the frame narrative is very vivid and quite horrifying; it sets a dark tone.” Read more...
The Testaments: A Novel
by Margaret Atwood
**The Testaments was the joint winner of the 2019 Booker Prize**
Publication of The Testaments has been, without a doubt, the literary event of 2019. Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated sequel to her seminal feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale was shortlisted for the Booker before it was released, and published to global fanfare and almost universal acclaim in September.
Set 15 years after the close of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is narrated by Aunt Lydia – who readers will remember as a cruel instructor during the handmaids’ induction programme – and two younger women, Agnes and Daisy.
Writing in the Guardian, Anne Enright reminded us of Atwood’s extraordinary prescience in her imagining of Gilead back in 1986. Endlessly invoked by commentators considering the political turmoil in today’s troubled world, The Handmaid’s Tale has never seemed more relevant. The Testaments promises more of the same. “If she was right in 1985,” Enright assures us, “she is more right today.”
The Long Take
by Robin Robertson
The audiobook of The Long Take is narrated by Canadian actor Kerry Shale, listening time 5 hours and 26 minutes.
“Platonov’s novel concerns the destruction of a Russian village or town and the digging of a foundation pit for a vast communist housing-block that the reader slowly realises will be the size of, or just will be, the world.” Read more...
Joshua Cohen, Novelist
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
Paradise Lost is considered to be John Milton’s “major work,” and it helped to solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of his time. Paradise Lost reflected Milton’s personal despair, yet affirmed an ultimate optimism in human potential.
“It is a detailed compendium compiling information on all kinds of books that don’t exist but which have at some point been referenced elsewhere. I can only say that I’m attracted to the idea which to my mind lies at the heart of all books: the idea that perhaps there isn’t a single book in the whole world that is true; or, better said, there isn’t a single book that we should take entirely at face value.” Read more...
“The title is deceptive and sounds like something heavy, something strictly encyclopaedic, when really the book is so far from being heavy it’s almost weightless. The mixture is what really appealed to me about the book: the idea that one can talk about anything and everything, even if, in the end, one leaves almost everything out.” Read more...
“There are texts that don’t exist, invented by Perec, Robert Derain, Manganelli, John Webster Spargo… But the most interesting part is what goes on on the outside, let’s say beyond the catalogue itself: the life that those books lead when they escape from themselves…The strange thing about these tales of invented authors and stories is that sometimes they really travel.” Read more...
Flight Behaviour
by Barbara Kingsolver
Flight Behaviour offers a counter-example to the argument social realism is not fit for purpose when it comes to climate change
“This trilogy is the gold standard in terms of fantasy writing.” Read more...
Philip Reeve recommends the best Science Fiction and Fantasy
Philip Reeve, Children's Author
“Reading Angela Carter for the first time was a revelation to me–I’d never read anything like it.” Read more...
Alan Lee on Books Drawn From Myth and Fairy Tale
Alan Lee, Cartoonist/Illustrator
“In this novel, you find stories that interlock like Russian dolls…an obvious example of a writer learning clever postmodern tricks, but domesticating them.” Read more...
Robert Eaglestone, Literary Scholar
“The joy of Riddley Walker is that it’s a fully realized universe and it never lets up – it’s very, very difficult all the way through” Read more...
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, Novelist
“Marriage as a social institution, marriage as a form of power—these are at the heart of the story here.” Read more...
Katie Kitamura on Marriage (and Divorce) in Literature
Katie Kitamura, Journalist
“It is one of the great post-Darwinian novels.” Read more...
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
“It has a barely contained, unhinged feel to it that I find completely gripping.” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Journalist
To the Lighthouse
by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is widely regarded as one of the greatest artistic achievements of the twentieth century.
(The audiobook of To the Lighthouse has been performed separately by two great actors: Australian actress Nicole Kidman and British actress Juliet Stevenson. Listening time: 7-8 hours).
Antony and Cleopatra
by William Shakespeare
Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare is a romantic tragedy. The play follows the relationship between Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
“I’ve only read it twice, but it’s lingered in my consciousness: the images and the feel of it.” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Journalist
“What I really like about this play is its sexual playfulness. It seems very modern in that way. There’s no way to play it straight.” Read more...
Emma Smith, Literary Scholar
Macbeth
by William Shakespeare
Macbeth is a spectacularly violent and dark tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is much talked about in our interviews with Shakespeare experts.
“What I find so interesting about How Should a Person Be? is the way that the existential quest of the character Sheila—who is also sort of like the author in this autofictional hybrid—is paralleled by the narrative’s quest for the right genre. You see the text working through these different possible genres before it settles on its final autofictional form. It even incorporates skeletal remainders of other genres it’s experimented with, like the aborted play Sheila writes.” Read more...
“Chris Kraus is a liberator. I didn’t know that I was allowed to write about these elements of my life. She writes about things that we are socialised as women to conceal: failure, abjection, not being hot in the right way, fights, illnesses, disappointments. All taboo. And then she shifts genre and tone so much.” Read more...
Olivia Laing, Memoirist
Jacob's Room
by Virginia Woolf
Alexandra Harris says: It’s a very ghostly book in that we have a very likable hero and want to get to know him a lot, but he keeps disappearing
Mona Simpson says: What would female fiction be without Virginia Woolf? She picks out exactly the right details to reveal the character’s interiorities
“Of all the books that I have selected…this is the easiest to read as a novel and it’s the one that has the classic novel plot that will engage even the most ardent lovers of popular fiction.” Read more...
Tim Parks recommends the best Italian Novels
Tim Parks, Novelist
William Wordsworth: The Major Works
by Stephen Gill (editor)
The poems are selected with considerable care, and the book gives a very even account of Wordsworth’s whole life as a writer – prose as well as poetry – both in his publications and his unpublished, more private moments.
The Road
by Vasily Grossman
It contains The Hell of Treblinka, his literary treatment of the legacy of the Treblinka death camp, originally published in 1944 – which was arguably the first published prose literary treatment of a concentration camp based on eye-witness accounts and whatever information Grossman could have gathered by himself.
The 2020 Audie Awards: Audiobook of the Year, recommended by Mary Burkey & Robin Whitten
Every year, the Audie Awards celebrate the best audiobooks published over the previous year. Veteran audiobook reviewer Robin Whitten of AudioFile Magazine and Mary Burkey, who has served on multiple audiobook judging panels, explain what makes a good audiobook and talk us through the brilliant books that were finalists in the 2020 ‘Audiobook of the Year’ category.
The Best Books to Read in Quarantine, recommended by Jenny Davidson
Times of disease and pestilence have much to tell us about the human condition. Jenny Davidson, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, suggests some of the best books to read if you’re self-isolating or in quarantine.
The Best of Speculative Fiction, recommended by Ken Liu
Ken Liu, the multi-award winning author of The Paper Menagerie, explains how using elements of fantasy and science fiction can help us examine deep truths about the human condition, as he recommends the best of contemporary speculative fiction.
The Best Self-Help Novels, recommended by Beth Blum
Since the publication of Samuel Smiles’ Self-Help (1859) in Victorian Britain, self-help has become a billion dollar industry—and its influence is even felt in the contemporary novel, says Harvard literary scholar Beth Blum, author of The Self-Help Compulsion, a new history of the rise of self-help narratives in modern literature.
Editors’ Picks: Notable New Novels of Early 2020, recommended by Cal Flyn
Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn rounds up the most hotly anticipated new novels of early 2020, including the final instalment in Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy and new work from the authors of Dept. of Speculation, Eileen and Station Eleven.
The Best Elena Ferrante Books, recommended by Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre
From her early novellas to the Neapolitan quartet, the elusive Elena Ferrante has achieved deserved superstar status for the compulsively readable, addictive quality of her writing. Two of the authors of The Ferrante Letters, Sarah Chihaya and Merve Emre, introduce us to Ferrante and recommend what to read next after My Brilliant Friend.
The Best Iris Murdoch Books, recommended by Miles Leeson
Iris Murdoch gained fame as a novelist, a philosopher and, perhaps most prominently of all, for her public and rapid decline (and posthumous immortalization by her husband John Bayley) after an early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease. But now, a hundred years on from her birth, the attention is returning back to her work: Miles Leeson, Director of the Iris Murdoch Centre at the University of Chichester, recommends what books to read from her canon of 27 novels.
The Best Poetry Books of 2019, recommended by Simone White
New collections of poetry are increasingly pushing the bounds of language and performance in intelligent, creative, perceptive ways, says Simone White, a poet and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. Here, she recommends some of her favorite poetry books published (or republished) in 2019.
Editors’ Picks: Notable Books of 2019, recommended by Cal Flyn
Five Books deputy editor Cal Flyn reflects on a year of spectacularly rich literary output, highlighting notable new books from Mary Gaitskill and Robert Macfarlane, as well as sparkling debuts that mark the arrival of exciting new literary voices in 2019.
The Best Crime Fiction of 2019, recommended by Val McDermid
It’s been a great year for crime fiction – with soaring sales and global bestsellers emerging from writers all over the world. Crime writing is rightly in the ascendancy, says the celebrated Scottish novelist Val McDermid as she selects the best crime fiction of 2019: five books that stand as great novels in their own right.
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1
Red Shift
by Alan Garner -
2
The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia
by Neil Price -
3
Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs
by Rane Willerslev -
4
The Annotated Collected Poems
Edward Thomas (ed. by Edna Longley) -
5
The Poems of Emily Brontë
Emily Brontë (ed. by Derek Roper)
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
The best books on Witches and Witchcraft, recommended by Diane Purkiss
For centuries, the witch has been an index not only of what we fear most in others, but also what we cannot cope with—the powerfully abnormal, strange and often irrational elements—in ourselves. And the best way to understand the history of witches and witchcraft is to first understand the supernatural, according to Diane Purkiss, Professor at Keble College, Oxford and author of the lauded book The Witch in History.
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Ib's Endless Search for Satisfaction
by Roshan Ali -
2
My Father's Garden
by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar -
3
Trial by Silence
by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan -
4
A Lonely Harvest
by Perumal Murugan, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan -
5
The Far Field: A Novel
by Madhuri Vijay -
6
There's Gunpowder in the Air
by Manoranjan Byapari, translated by Arunava Sinha
The Best New Indian Novels, recommended by Rana Dasgupta
The Best New Indian Novels, recommended by Rana Dasgupta
India has a thriving literary community working in 22 official languages plus English, says Rana Dasgupta, the literary director of the JCB Prize: a major award for the best new novel by an Indian author. Here, he talks us through their 2019 shortlist.
The Best Fiction of 2019, recommended by Peter Florence
Each year, a panel of esteemed judges reads over 100 novels to determine which titles will vie for the award of the Booker Prize for Fiction. Peter Florence, chair of the 2019 judges and founder of the famous Hay Festival, tells us why the books on this year’s shortlist are gripping, enthralling must-reads.
The Best Cormac McCarthy Books, recommended by Stacey Peebles
From All The Pretty Horses to Blood Meridian to The Road, Cormac McCarthy has achieved deserved status as a living titan of literary fiction for his philosophical, violent, often deeply moving novels. Cormac McCarthy expert Stacey Peebles introduces us to the author’s oeuvre—and tells us that despite its apocalyptic bleakness, The Road is actually McCarthy’s “happiest book.”
The Best Historical Fiction: the 2019 Walter Scott Prize Shortlist, recommended by Katharine Grant
The best historical novels are those so immersive and natural in tone that their period setting is a ‘by-the-way,’ says Katharine Grant, the novelist and judge for the Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. Here she discusses the six brilliant books that made the 2019 shortlist.
The Best George Orwell Books, recommended by D J Taylor
Seventy years on from its initial publication, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is just as resonant in today’s era of misinformation and fake news as it was in the incipient Cold War era. D J Taylor, author of a lauded biography of Orwell and a forthcoming biography of Nineteen Eighty-Four, takes us through the extraordinary impact of the author’s fiction and reportage.
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Letters to a Young Painter
by Rainer Maria Rilke -
2
The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence
by Alice James -
3
Letters to Felice
by Franz Kafka -
4
Letters: 1925-1975
by Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger -
5
Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence
by Elizabeth Bishop & Robert Lowell
The best books on Literary Letter Collections, recommended by Lucas Zwirner
The best books on Literary Letter Collections, recommended by Lucas Zwirner
The next release in the ekphrasis series from David Zwirner Books is Oscar Wilde’s The Critic as Artist, including an introduction by Michael Bracewell and a colour portrait of Wilde by Marlene Dumas. Head of Content Lucas Zwirner talks to Five Books about the inspiration he’s drawn from literary letters and how they inform the editorial direction of publishing house.
The Best Sci Fi Books for Beginners, recommended by Nicholas Whyte
Interested in science fiction, but not sure where to begin? Sceptical of spaceships, but never really given them a chance? We asked Nicholas Whyte, administrator of the World Science Fiction Society’s renowned annual Hugo Awards, to recommend five of the best sci fi books that should appeal to readers new to the genre
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Troilus and Criseyde
Geoffrey Chaucer (ed. by Stephen Barney) -
2
Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde
by Barry Windeatt -
3
The Double Sorrow of Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’
by Ida L. Gordon -
4
The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde
by Gerald Morgan -
5
A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde
by Lavinia Greenlaw
Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer: A Reading List, recommended by Jenni Nuttall
Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer: A Reading List, recommended by Jenni Nuttall
Troilus and Criseyde has a centuries’ old backstory. Long before Renaissance dramas or realist novels, Chaucer wrote a love story set in a besieged city that was a deep psychological exploration of character and human relationships. Jenni Nuttall, author of Troilus and Criseyde: A Reader’s Guide, shares her reading recommendations after over a decade of teaching the poem to Oxford undergraduates.
The best books on Friendship, recommended by Lauren Mechling
Friendships: they can be hard to keep and even harder to understand. Yet so often they end up having enormous impacts on our lives. Lauren Mechling, contributing editor at Vogue and author of the novel How Could She, picks the novelists that best portray the thorny underside of friendship as well as its joys.
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Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones -
2
Celestial Bodies
by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth -
3
The Years
by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer -
4
The Pine Islands
by Jen Calleja & Marion Poschmann -
5
The Shape of the Ruins
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean -
6
The Remainder
by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
The Best Novels in Translation: the Booker International Prize, recommended by Bettany Hughes
The Best Novels in Translation: the Booker International Prize, recommended by Bettany Hughes
Bettany Hughes, author of Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities and chair of this year’s Booker International Prize judging panel, talks us through the six books they have shortlisted for the title of best novel in translation.
The Canterbury Tales: A Reading List, recommended by Marion Turner
Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales not only revolutionized English poetry—they’re also extremely funny and moving. Oxford Professor Marion Turner, who has written the first full-length biography of Chaucer in a generation, tells us about the extraordinary man who wrote them and why we should all read the Canterbury Tales.
The Best Thrillers of 2019, recommended by Anthony Franze
Looking for a pacy, suspenseful thriller that keeps you racing through the pages? Look no further. Anthony Franze, author and coordinator of the International Thriller Writers' annual awards, talks us through some of the books that made the shortlist for the best thrillers of 2019.
The Best Sci Fi Books of 2019: The Arthur C Clarke Award Shortlist, recommended by Tom Hunter
If you’re hoping to travel to a galaxy far, far away with your next book, these six excellent sci fi novels will help you on your way. Tom Hunter, the director of the Arthur C Clarke Award for science fiction books, discusses the 2019 prize shortlist.
The Best Quebec Books, recommended by Miléna Santoro
“I’ve been reading Quebec literature since the 1980s. I can tell when I’ve found a voice that I resonate with, when something is really beautiful or when it’s just trash.” Georgetown University Professor Miléna Santoro picks her favourite Quebec writers and showcases some of the region’s best contemporary fiction and poetry translated from the original French.
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Emerson: The Mind on Fire
by Robert D Richardson -
2
Emerson: Essays and Lectures
by Ralph Waldo Emerson -
3
Emerson in His Journals
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joel Porte (editor) -
4
Emerson in His Own Time
Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (editors) -
5
One First Love
by Ellen Louisa Tucker & Ralph Waldo Emerson
The best books on Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommended by James Marcus
The best books on Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommended by James Marcus
Known to many of us as the American Transcendentalist champion of individualism and self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson is a much more soulful and sorrowful, brilliant but deeply contradictory thinker than we often give him credit for, says James Marcus, as he recommends the best books by – or about – Emerson.
Robert S Miola on Shakespeare’s Sources
William Shakespeare has a strong claim to be the most influential writer of all time. But whose works influenced him? And how? Robert S Miola discusses the breadth of Shakespeare’s reading, the vexed question of how we can reconstruct what he read, and the staggeringly innovative ways that Shakespeare shaped his sources
The Best Prose Poetry, recommended by Jeremy Noel-Tod
It’s not quite poetry, yet not quite prose: the prose poem is “the defining poetic invention of modernity,” argues Jeremy Noel-Tod, editor of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem. Here he chooses five of the best prose poems from Arthur Rimbaud to Claudia Rankine.
The Best Climate Change Novels, recommended by James Bradley
The best fiction allows us to hold ideas in our heads about time and space and causality and connection that are difficult to articulate in other ways, argues the Australian author James Bradley. It helps its readers engage with dangers and possibilities that are at the very edge of imagination
Sylvia Plath Books, recommended by Tim Kendall
Though biographical sensation has often diverted attention from her work, Sylvia Plath remains one of the finest lyric poets of the twentieth century, argues Professor Tim Kendall, Academic Director of Arts and Culture at Exeter and author of Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. Here, he recommends the best places to start (or return to) with Plath, from a fresh look at Ariel to illuminating an oft-overlooked, brilliant appendix in her unabridged journals.
The Best Poetry to Read in 2019, recommended by Jamie McKendrick
Looking for recent collections of poetry to read this year? Longtime Faber poet and virtuosic translator Jamie McKendrick recommends the five best poetry books he’s read in the last year, from a peculiar book of grief by Anne Carson to a long-awaited volume by Michael Hofmann.
The Best African American Literature, recommended by Farah Jasmine Griffin
An ever-growing body of authors are writing about the reality of what it means to be black in America, says Farah Jasmine Griffin, director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Here she recommends five works of African American literature, from greats like Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison to lesser-known gems by Ann Petry.
The Best American Poetry, recommended by Elisa New
With the help of a good anthology and a heaping dose of American classics, anyone can be converted to being a lover of poetry. Elisa New, Harvard scholar and host of the new PBS series Poetry in America, recommends her favorite American poets, from Emily Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop.
The best books on Spies, recommended by Ben Macintyre
The British public-school system, with its hidden homosexuality and feelings of loneliness, encouraged subterfuge and led to a generation of great spy writers and spies, suggests author and journalist Ben Macintyre. He picks the best books on spies.
The Best Caribbean Fiction, recommended by Alexia Arthurs
From the humorous and dark stories of a young V. S. Naipaul to recent coming-of-age novels, set in a cut-throat Jamaican holiday resort or American’s urban battlefields, Alexia Arthurs explores the myriad expressions of Caribbean identity in fiction
The Best Romance Books: 2019 Summer Reads, recommended by Frannie Strober Cassano
Romance: it’s one of the bestselling and most widely-read genres, with thousands of books published each year. But where to start? And which books are at the cutting edge of the genre? We turned to Frannie Strober Cassano, the Romance Writers of America’s 2018 Librarian of the Year, for her choice of the best new romances published in the past 12 months.
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books, recommended by Laura Varnam
Daphne du Maurier is one of the most overlooked writers of the twentieth century, says Oxford University’s Laura Varnam. As Rebecca celebrates its eightieth anniversary and du Maurier enjoys a critical renaissance, Varnam explores the books which highlight this novelist’s sheer range and brilliance—from biography and fiction to history and horror.
The Best Shanghai Novels, recommended by Paul French
Though it was the fifth biggest city in the world in the years following the Second World War, there aren’t nearly as many novels set in Shanghai as there are in Paris, Berlin and other international cities. Author and expert on modern Chinese history Paul French takes a look at the literary history of an often underwritten city from the 1930s through to the new millennium.
The Best Samuel Beckett Books, recommended by Mark Nixon
Samuel Beckett remains one of the most significant writers of the twentieth century. Ruthlessly experimental, his plays, novels, and poems represent a sustained attack on the realist tradition. Dr Mark Nixon looks at the mutating nature of Beckett’s literary style and explains why he didn’t choose Waiting for Godot.
Best Baltic Literature, recommended by Jayde Will
A century ago, the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—became independent. This year, 2018, we highlight five of the best works of Baltic literature recently translated into English. Baltic literature expert Jayde Will breaks each of them down, and introduces us to an area of the world with a vibrant literary culture too often overlooked.
The best books on Dickens and Christmas, recommended by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
When it was published on December 19th, 1843, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol was an instant classic. As families settle in front of the fire to read it aloud on Christmas Eve, Oxford Professor of English Literature Robert Douglas-Fairhurst runs through the best of Dickens’s prolific writings about Christmas.
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The Living Mountain
by Nan Shepherd -
2
The Water Cure
by Sophie Mackintosh -
3
The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands
by Donald S Murray -
4
Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature is Thriving in an Age of Extinction
by Chris D Thomas -
5
Kings of the Yukon: An Alaskan River Journey
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6
Crudo: A Novel
by Olivia Laing
Editors’ Picks: Highlights From a Year in Reading, recommended by Cal Flyn
The Best Comics of 2018, recommended by Hillary Chute
Comics are taking over the world, says Northeastern Professor and comics expert Hillary Chute. Here, she introduces the best comics published in 2018, from a Booker-nominated narrative about paranoia and living in the age of fake news to feminist comics published by underground, auteur-driven independent publishers
The Best Fiction of 2018, recommended by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Looking for the best novels of the year? Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at New York University and chair of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for fiction, gives an in-depth breakdown of the six books that made this year’s shortlist, and reflects on why the novel as a form is stronger than ever.
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1
Confessions of the Fox
by Jordy Rosenberg -
2
I've Got a Time Bomb
by Sybil Lamb -
3
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
by C Riley Snorton -
4
Histories of the Transgender Child
by Julian Gill-Peterson -
5
Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility
edited by Reina Gossett, Eric A Stanley and Johanna Burton
The Best of Trans Literature, recommended by Susan Stryker
The Best of Trans Literature, recommended by Susan Stryker
Many of the current controversies over transgender rights and identities derive from false beliefs, explains the author and academic Susan Stryker. Here she selects five excellent contemporary trans titles with depth, complexity and heart, to help us reframe what has all too often become a toxic debate
The best books on The Odyssey, recommended by Emily Wilson
The Odyssey has been constantly rewritten by centuries of writers, but like so much of Greek myth, it’s always already open to revising its own narrative. Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics at the University of Pennsylvania and the first woman to translate the Odyssey into English, recommends the best books to read after (or alongside) the Ancient Greek epic, and offers sage wisdom about both translating ancient epics and why everyone can learn from the Odyssey today.
The Best of Autofiction, recommended by Olivia Laing
All writers draw from lived experience, but today’s most exciting experimental writers aren’t afraid to mine theirs explicitly. Here, the acclaimed writer and critic Olivia Laing – author of Crudo and The Lonely City – discusses five works of ‘autofiction’ that have influenced her.
