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:
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.
“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
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
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.
“This is the only literature that gives me nightmares” Read more...
Nick Groom, Literary Scholar
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.
“This book is about an old-fashioned Second World War hero and it was popular at the time but somehow it still resonates because it’s a damn good story.” Read more...
Jeffrey Archer, Novelist
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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...
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.
Rebecca
by Daphne Du Maurier
In the grand tradition of Gothic novels, it features an innocent young woman and a scary house with secrets
“Frankenstein can be seen as an experiment—or almost a laboratory—that brings together science and literature” Read more...
Nick Groom, Literary Scholar
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.
Collected Poems
by Philip Larkin
There are many writers of my age who are steeped in Larkin and, like me, incorporate the cadences of his lines, often without being aware of it. His poems are part of my mental furniture.
“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 has a barely contained, unhinged feel to it that I find completely gripping.” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Journalist
“Holmes turns to Mortimer and says, “A man’s or a woman’s?” and Mortimer delivers the greatest reply in 20th century literature, “Mr Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!” I shivered with pleasure and realised that life didn’t get much better than that.” Read more...
The best books on Sherlock Holmes
Michael Dirda, Journalist
The Maltese Falcon
by Dashiell Hammett
It was the first, and probably the greatest, hard-boiled detective novel. It pretty much invented the genre and its archetypes.
“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 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
The Time Machine
by H G Wells
This is the novel that inaugurated time travel as a sub-genre. It is a short novel, almost a novella, but it is smoothly and evocatively written
“It is one of the great post-Darwinian novels.” Read more...
Darryl Jones recommends the best Horror Stories
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
“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
If This Is a Man
by Primo Levi
Horror follows horror. It’s hard to believe that the human frame can survive under such circumstances, let alone survive to write something like this.
“It’s very short by Shakespearean standards and it’s very powerful because of that.” Read more...
Emma Smith, Literary Scholar
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
“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
“The school on Roke, a school for magic where you can learn how to be a wizard, was such a glorious idea.” Read more...
Cressida Cowell on Magical Stories for Kids
Cressida Cowell, Children's Author
“Part of the Iliad’s brilliance is that it only takes four or five days of the action but you feel like it captures the 10 years’ war as a whole.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient Greece
Christopher Pelling, Classicist
“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.
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 Hobbit
by J R R Tolkien
Tolkien’s achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could see the detail
Gone Baby Gone
by Dennis Lehane
Simon Kernick says: For me, Dennis Lehane is one of the best American thriller writers alive today. This is one of his early books from his Kenzie and Gennaro series – a male and female partnership of private investigators based in Boston.
Irvine Welsh says: This is a classic detective novel from a classic detective writer. And he brings so much to the table as thriller writer. His sense of place with this novel, which is set in Boston, is pretty much unbeatable. He is one of the few classic thriller writers who really writes about contemporary social issues. The quality of the writing is absolutely superb and it moves you along.
“The poetry is that of a mature person who is capable of expressing the disillusionment of middle-aged love as well as the raptures.” Read more...
Stanley Wells recommends the best of Shakespeare’s Plays
Stanley Wells, Literary Scholar
Staying Alive
by Neil Astley (editor)
This is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems. Anyone interested in poetry should own it.
A Moveable Feast
by Ernest Hemingway
A book tainted with sadness. Hemingway writes it as an old, bitter man trapped in his Idaho home while he dreams of his youth in Paris.
Persuasion
by Jane Austen
Jane Austen’s Persuasion tells a story set years after an initial period that’s looked back on retrospectively, in which the protagonist, Anne Elliot, turned down a marriage proposal from Frederick Wentworth, a man who genuinely loved her. A close family member had advised her not to marry him on the grounds that his social class was not up to snuff. It was a difficult decision at the time; she genuinely loved him.
Catch 22
by Joseph Heller
The most wonderful novel ever written, because of its absurdist sense of humour and the way it looked at war
“Beloved was Morrison’s fifth novel. It’s a gripping story, inspired by a famous abolitionist case, the true story of a woman who runs away from slavery with her children, but when the slave catchers catch up with her, she kills one of her own and tries to kill the others, rather than returning them to slavery.” Read more...
Dancer from the Dance
by Andrew Holleran
This has some of the most lyrical writing, plus it’s very, very funny. It’s about an ex-lawyer who comes to New York in order to have a gay lifestyle
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.
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Which translation of the book War and Peace is best? What kind of reviews did Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece get when it was published? Why has the book War and Peace been chosen by philosophers, historians and novelists as one of the most important ever written? Find out more about one of our most recommended books by reading the expert commentary about War and Peace below. The audiobook is also highly recommended, narrated by the RADA-trained actor, the late Neville Jason.
“It’s an extraordinary book…One of the things that he is examining in the novel is the various games that we play, many of them recursive.” Read more...
Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher
Underworld
by Don DeLillo
A virtuosic piece of writing. It begins with a long overture set in the most famous professional baseball game of all time: “The Shot Heard Round The World,” the home run hit by Bobby Thomson [on 3 October] in 1951.
The Talented Mr Ripley
by Patricia Highsmith
Ripley just set so many characters in motion because he was one of the first entirely amoral central figures
“The House of the Seven Gables is a deeply psychological novel set during the 1840s in Salem. Like much of Hawthorne’s work, it’s a meditation on the way in which the past and the present intertwine in New England, and I believe it’s Hawthorne at his best.” Read more...
“To read Wheatley is to understand the world she lived in. She wrote many odes, the great poetic genre of the period. She also wrote topical poems. Although young, she was an astute observer.” Read more...
Dorothy Parker: Selected Stories
Dorothy Parker (read by Elaine Stritch)
“Any Alice Munro story is a horrid story to boil down to an elevator pitch. I still don’t even know what the story “Nettles” is about, except I know that it’s about a woman who feels at home in the Alice Munro universe: she’s a writer, she’s a Canadian, she’s a mother, she’s sexually alive.” Read more...
“How to describe Brookner’s prose? It’s sophisticated and a little musty. She’s known for writing about spinsters, or about women who are not in possession of the brass rings that maybe those around them have come to get. They’re outsiders, and often very curious observers. There’s something both calming and disturbing about her writing that brings me back over and over.” Read more...
“So many people who work in the world of literature, and who love humorous, poignant writing, still haven’t gotten to Barbara Pym yet. But that’s part of the beauty of her—she was so overlooked and so marginalized, and that’s why she’s able to write about that kind of character” Read more...
“The friendship in it is very sweet, actually: it’s about two women, one of whom doesn’t have a name, and her best friend, Reva. They’re both brilliant comic characters, but Reva really lived on with me. Ottessa Moshfegh has this ability to say so much with little spiky details that linger.” Read more...
Stalingrad
by Vasily Grossman, translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
Vasily Grossman’s masterpiece Life and Fate is one of our most recommended books, especially popular with historians. It remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1964, but went on to attract enormous acclaim—and has been described more than once as “the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Stalingrad is its precursor. Initially published in the 1950s under the Russian title ‘For a Just Cause’, it has now been translated for the first time into English by Elizabeth and Robert Chandler, as well as being significantly reworked to reinsert text from earlier manuscripts that were censored during the Soviet era.
Equal to Life and Fate in its size and epic scope, the publication of Stalingrad is—as Marcel Theroux has remarked —“like discovering the Bayeux tapestry has a prequel.”
“It’s the most moving set of lyrics. If you know Troilus and Criseyde, there are poems which utterly capture Chaucer’s spirit for a split second or two. There’s a brilliant interplay between the original and this book.” Read more...
“This is an exhaustive, brilliant thinking-through of almost every detail in Chaucer’s Troilus and Crisyede. The tragic argument is that Troilus is a noble figure, through his philosophy and through the ennobling features of love, who loves Criseyde too much, and falls into all sorts of follies.” Read more...
“This is quite a short book. It’s written beautifully clearly. It’s a wonderfully lucid articulation of what the features of this text are which make its ultimate meaning debatable.” Read more...
“This book is so efficient in the way it gives you the information you need to see the range of possibilities in the poem in 300 or 400 pages. None of the editions of Troilus and Criseyde quite have space to do this. Windeatt gives you information about the sources that we’ve been talking about, and about Chaucer’s structuring of the plot, its symmetry and repetitions, the architectural mirroring of events in the first half and events in the second half.” Read more...
“This edition contains the source—the springboard from which Chaucer is writing, Boccaccio—on facing pages in an English translation of the Italian. I like it because you can see where Chaucer is translating word by word. But there are also these wonderful moments where you get blank space on one side, and you realize Chaucer is expanding and inventing.” Read more...
“Each individual tale can be interpreted in so many ways—Chaucer really opens up possibilities of multiple interpretations. Even when he seems to give you a clear moral, that moral is never effective or convincing. He’s always saying: ‘Find your own moral; find your own meaning.’” Read more...
“The romance part of the story is delightful and funny and Wilson really does allow you to suspend your disbelief. While I love the Miss Congeniality and The Parent Trap combination, there are also all these little nods to Harry Potter and Pride and Prejudice.“ Read more...
“The thing that I really loved about this story is that their happily ever after is rooted in hard-earned teamwork and totally for the right reasons. They both have their baggage, of course. The way they come together is so much fun because Alexis Daria has us following along in this dance competition: all of the prep, all the behind-the-scenes work. There are some heartfelt (family) moments, but it’s just a great ride, it really is.” Read more...
“This story is mainstream erotic romance. It could also be considered a romance with erotic elements, if you want to label it. There are scenes where they are really describing what’s happening. And it’s actually perfectly approachable because you’re going through it with Stella. It’s often very light.” Read more...
“It stood out, for me, because of the royal connection. In romance, the royals have always been big; it’s a sub-genre, and all the tropes that come along with that. But Red, White and Royal Blue was interesting to me because of the United States politics side of it.” Read more...
“I really picked it because of the opening scene. I’ve never seen or read anything like it before, this surprise proposal via jumbotron at Dodger Stadium. It goes spectacularly wrong.” Read more...
“Family Lexicon, which is more like a novelized memoir, is a valuable testimony of how private life unfolded during Fascist Italy.” Read more...
“The Decameron specifically is a story about ten people who decide to escape the plague by going to a lovely country house with their servants. They tell stories there: ten stories a day for ten days, so there are 100 stories. The stories tend to be very, very funny. A lot of them are very rude.” Read more...
“House of Fame is in fact my favourite Chaucerian text. It’s a crazy text. It’s unfinished—or seemingly unfinished. It’s a dream vision. It’s also the poem of Chaucer’s that seems to be the most autobiographical—though ‘seems’ is an important word there. The main character is called Geoffrey: he’s a writer, works as an accountant (as Chaucer did in the Customs Office), and then goes home at night to read books and try to write.” Read more...
“It’s really fascinating that born out of this very autobiographical story of abandonment and the suffering that that caused and then the desire to reconnect with one’s roots, we have this exceptional novel that fills in the gaps of a story that can never be fully told or fully understood—and that really does encompass the history of Quebec, and its place in North America more broadly.” Read more...
“When I read it, it blew me away. It just describes a woman’s experience of being abandoned and trying to rebuild her life after that abandonment, in the most sensitive, kind and yet starkly painful terms.” Read more...
“In this novel, Laferrière is a writer in full possession of his talent. He is a virtuoso in the way he weaves together his own personal story of exile from Haiti with the whole political aspect of the successive Duvalier regimes, which caused the Haitian diaspora to come into existence beginning in the 70s and 80s.” Read more...
“This is a novel which is an extraordinarily limpid fable, almost, of twin brothers who are caught up in war, and who, in a tragically Greek or Shakespearean manner, end up substituting one for the other: one must die and one survives.” Read more...
“Kim Thúy is not the first Vietnamese francophone writer in Canada, but she is certainly is the most well-known, the one who’s had the most meteoric rise to fame. Mãn is her second novel. It’s really a beautiful story about a woman who has three mothers, only one of whom is her biological mother.” Read more...
The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem: From Baudelaire to Anne Carson
Jeremy Noel-Tod (editor)
“Obviously, it’s been admired and acclaimed, but I do feel the general reception of it has underplayed its artfulness. Its technical subtlety and overall arrangement has been neglected, because it has been classified as a kind of documentary work.” Read more...
“I’ve never met Alan Ziegler, but I feel a lot of sympathy with him, because this anthology is the closest thing to what I was trying to do in mine. I also admire him because when confronted with this question—where does the prose poem begin, and how do you define it?—he actually opens it up more and says, ‘No, what I’m interested in is this perhaps even more elusive mode which is the short prose piece.'” Read more...
“Unfinished Ode to Mud is perhaps my favorite translation of Ponge, although there are a number of other good ones. In the history of the prose poem, there’s a case for saying that that Ponge brings it to a kind of perfection.” Read more...
“Tender Buttons in particular was the book that made her notorious. She knew that there was something about her writing that fascinated people, and it fascinated them partially because it irritated them. But it irritated them because they were sort of attracted to it, without knowing why. It irritates the rational part of the mind which expects to be able to explain things.” Read more...
“They have this very mysterious, elusive, hallucinatory quality. They’re the product of what Rimbaud said he wanted to do as a poet: the systematic derangement of the senses. But the amazing thing about them is that they are so lucid. T S Eliot called the effect on the reader an “instant and simple impression.” Read more...
The Testaments: A Novel
by Margaret Atwood
In November 2018, the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood announced that a sequel to her bestselling, Booker-nominated blockbuster novel The Handmaid’s Tale would be published the following autumn under the name The Testaments.
The Testaments is said to be set 15 years after the close of The Handmaid’s Tale and will be narrated by three female characters. The book will be published on the 10th of September 2019, but is already available for pre-order.
“Cane is one of the most beautiful novels in all of American literature. It eschews straightforward storytelling; it’s a very experimental book in both form and content.” Read more...
“Hurston gives us one of the first true love stories in African American writing.” Read more...
“Petry writes in a social realist mode and addresses the social impediments to the progress of an African American woman who does everything right to escape a tragic fate. This is the novel that I think is her master work.” Read more...
“The restored Ariel is a volume of rebirth and hope: it begins with the word “love” and ends with “spring.” We sometimes caricature Plath as some kind of doom-laden depressive. That’s absolutely not what the trajectory of Ariel conveys.” Read more...
“What Plath most often wrestles with is a sense that, as the metaphor of a bell jar suggests, she’s seeing the world through glass. She’s trapped. She’s constrained. She knows that there’s something greater within her, but it can’t break through. She’s struggling; she’s puzzled. To borrow one of her titles as a metaphor, she’s writing ‘stillborn’ poems.” Read more...
“It’s an exercise not in the virtuosity of translation, but a more humble approach to the original, if you like, which relates to what I was talking about with the idea of knowing or not knowing a language when translating. She uses not only Catullus, but also bits of Herodotus and Plutarch in an ongoing meditation on history.” Read more...
“Kolatkar was born in 1931 in Kolaphur, but moved to Bombay at the age of eighteen and there he remained till his death in 2004. His poems, panoptic and casually incisive, are a celebration of the city’s seedy and burgeoning sprawl. Almost anywhere you open the book there are treasures of wry observation and breathtakingly inventive imagery.” Read more...
“This is her third book, and it shows her coming into her own. Its humor is more dismaying, its control of language ever more precise. Her often dysfunctional speakers stumble into catastrophes with their eyes wide open.” Read more...
“Admirers of Hofmann’s work have waited a long time for this book—it’s been something like 20 years since his last collection. The new work is as challenging and original as ever. It takes on, a bit like Hayes, the present moment, and with breathtaking reach and virtuosity: Trump’s America, Brexit—politically a confederacy of dunces. He turns the ugliest, dumbest material (the detritus of everyday life, from acronyms to social media) into grimly brilliant assemblages.” Read more...
“There are really a hundred ways in which, despite having the ‘right’ ideas, a poem can go wrong. But the energy, agility and invention of Hayes’s work guards against most of them, and emphatically win the reader over.” Read more...
The Silence of the Girls: A Novel
by Pat Barker
Hailed as a “feminist Iliad”, this newest novel from Pat Barker, author of the much-lauded Regeneration trilogy, has been hard to miss. In the year since its publication, it’s been shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction as well as the Costa Novel Award, and has won an Indie Bookshop Week Award.
The Silence of the Girls has been recommended multiple times on Five Books—an unusual feat for a book that isn’t yet several decades (or even several hundred years) old. Choosing the novel as one of the best she’s read lately, novelist Daisy Johnson—whose book Everything Under was shortlisted for the Booker Prize—remarked, “The Silence of the Girls is a retelling of the Iliad and is entirely devastating.”
“Though any volume of poetry may be a balm for sadness, I would say that Geoffrey Hill is an extraordinary poet of broken love and grief.” Read more...
Sophie Ratcliffe, Literary Scholar
“Though any volume of poetry may be a balm for sadness, I would say that Geoffrey Hill is an extraordinary poet of broken love and grief.” Read more...
Sophie Ratcliffe, Literary Scholar
“Young adult books often cut to the heart of human relationships. Literature for young people sometimes simplifies things by making them metaphorical, by moving them into a fairy-tale world. That often means YA stories give us some of the most profound stories of human relationships. Howl’s Moving Castle is a story of this caliber.” Read more...
“In explaining to the reader how these characters relate to one another, Mizamura is never writing about it as a strictly personal interaction. She details how socioeconomic changes in Japan in the post-war years, the relative status of the different families in the novel and the changes in Japan’s status around the world shape the fate of her characters and the dynamic between them.” Read more...
“This is my favorite novel by James Baldwin; it was his last one, published in 1979. You don’t hear as much about it as you do about his early novels.” Read more...
“The Emily Dickinson Archive is a feat of scholarly effort and a cutting-edge digital project. It’s like Costco, an enormous warehouse for her enormous body of work.” Read more...
“Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry brings readers right up to the poets of today; there isn’t another anthology that does that. She devotes about half of its pages to recent poets.” Read more...
“The work of Elizabeth Bishop is its own world, that has its own mesmerizing power.” Read more...
“O’Hara writes these poems in a casual voice that’s characteristically his. He called them ‘I do this, I do that’ poems. You follow him around New York City and watch his imagination hunger after and take satisfaction in things. It’s like entering into intimacy with an extraordinary human being.” Read more...
“There is no better scholarly compendium than The Cambridge History of American Poetry. In its pages, one finds many of the best critics of the last thirty years, absolute authorities, in fine form, distilling their classic takes.” Read more...
“Maurice Dekobra was a French author, writing in the 1930s mostly. He is a very literary and fascinating writer in a populist way, and Honeymoon in Shanghai is one of his most interesting stories. He writes about a foreign woman with her young attractive daughter, stuck in Shanghai. She’s almost pimping her daughter out, trying to find her a boyfriend or suitors—not necessarily husbands, but people who will take her out and give the family some money so that they can survive.” Read more...
“The book was published in 1999, but Wei Hui was really writing about the mid-1990s, which was the absolute apex of Shanghai in its second embodiment as a wide-open city, under Jiang Zemin’s administration of China.” Read more...
“It’s impossible to spend any time in Shanghai without picking up an Eileen Chang book. This is a great novel about Shanghai, and also Hong Kong, at that period when people were forced to make choices. I would suggest Lust Caution as a good way of getting into Eileen Chang because it is a novella, about the shortest thing that she ever wrote, and it’s very Shanghai.” Read more...
“I think Mao Dun’s Midnight is the best Chinese view of the city in the 1930s. Dun looks at the two sides of the Chinese experience in Shanghai: the terrible and awful conditions in the factories that lead to the organisations of trade unions and socialist and communist organisations; and, at the other side, the incredibly wealthy class of Shanghainese.” Read more...
“Man’s Fate is about the suppression of the labour movement and the nascent Communist Party of China on April 12th, 1927, a massacre which at that time was on the front-page of every newspaper in the world. It’s an incredible novel, and has one of the best opening scenes of any novel I can think of.” Read more...
“In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge has visions of three spirits; in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Jasper, who is the anti-hero and probably the murderer, also has visions, which are probably caused by opium. He too finds it hard to tell what is real and what is not real—which, in some ways, is the dream of fiction, isn’t it? To not really know the difference between what is real and not real.” Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“Dickens wrote it quickly and happily; you can see the atmosphere of the approach of Christmas and a snowy landscape all the way through the episode itself. It’s a world of blazing log fires, and punch bowls, and friendship, and a return to childhood games. “ Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“Dickens sees Christmas as a time for reflection, for thinking about the passage of time, for not only measuring how things have changed (and how they’re not changed) but also showing that you can redirect the paths of your life in a different direction should you should you choose. “ Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“It’s something like a modern myth: like most myths, you can dress it up in lots of different clothes and populate it with different characters. You can do almost anything with it—the basic story will still remain the same. It’s ancient and it’s modern; it’s foreign and it’s familiar.” Read more...
The best books on Dickens and Christmas
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Literary Scholar
“A beguiling mix of nature writing, history and memoir takes in his childhood in bleak and beautiful Lewis, but moves further afield too, to peatland cultures in Ireland, Holland and Germany.” Read more...
Editors’ Picks: Highlights From a Year in Reading
Cal Flyn, Journalist
“Mary Webb is a bit like Thomas Hardy – there are elements about the wildness of the countryside, rather like Tess of the d’Urbervilles or The Woodlanders– both of which I absolutely adored.” Read more...
Clare Morpurgo on Penguin Paperbacks
Clare Morpurgo, Children's Author
“This book has an ingenious structure. It flows, year-by-year through her young life, through collected chronologically-ordered stories from her life that each are labelled with a title, a year and an age.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“Aline Kominsky-Crumb has a totally nutty style that I find unbelievably charming. She has called it scratchy and raw and ugly; I’ve always loved it.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“Sabrina has a really startling story and a really startling style. It’s an amazing economical example of comics fiction today and was appropriately embraced by the world of fiction.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“Julie is widely revered by all sorts of people, so the publication of the Complete Julie Doucet in a box set composed of two hardcover volumes was a huge event in the world of comics.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“This book shows how political the personal is, if it makes any sense to invert that idiom. It balances attention to the world historical stage with attention to what is happening within this family.” Read more...
Hillary Chute, Literary Scholar
“It’s terrifying. Her publisher Victor Gollancz described it as a ‘masterpiece’ and much of that is down to the pacing.” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“The dual power and danger of the imagination is a fascination of du Maurier’s. What went wrong with Branwell? Why the brother? He should have had everything in his favour, and yet it was the sisters who became successful. Why?” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“For readers who think Du Maurier is all dark Gothic, The Parasites is packed with plenty of wit, both in the narrative voice and in the form of farcical, slapstick humour.” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“Honor Harris is one of the great du Maurier heroines. She’s strong, rebellious, adventurous, independent, and a writer keen to have her own voice.” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“Really captures the richness of Daphne’s time in Paris in the 1920s and the enduring importance of her French heritage throughout her writing life.” Read more...
The Best Daphne du Maurier Books
Laura Varnam, Literary Scholar
“If I could have written any book, I would have written this.” Read more...
Tom McLaughlin, Children's Author
“Feels at the beginning like a series of short stories, each of which has some important thing about a tree or a kind of tree in it, but also holds some human character. You’d be a very strange person if you came away from this book not caring about what’s happening to the trees.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
“I really love the Penelopiad. It’s wonderful at bringing out some of what I already hinted was important in my work of a translator: teasing out the multiple perspectives, multiple voices, in this poem. I also love how it juxtaposes different styles and different voices. It has both ballad-like verse and prose intermixed, which is not what the Odyssey does, but I think it speaks to something which is in the Odyssey, about the mixture of different modes, different ways of seeing things.” Read more...
Emily Wilson, Classicist
“Helen by Euripides is in many ways the most Odysseyean of the tragedies we have, not least because it features Helen as the central character. It’s a complete re-write, which turns Helen into a new version of the Homeric Penelope: she’s the miserable chaste wife, whose beauty brings her harassment from annoyingly, scarily persistent local guy(s), and whose marriage is defined by grief.” Read more...
Emily Wilson, Classicist
“It exists in two halves. In the first half, ‘Michelle’ is clearly closely related to Michelle Tea. The second half leaps forward in time and takes all of that textural detail that’s been built up about 1990s queer San Francisco society and throws it into a post-apocalyptic future.” Read more...
Olivia Laing, Memoirist
“I think Myles is probably my favourite living poet. This particular poem is a perfect little novel. It does genuinely set up a character and put them out into the world and tell a fiction. At the same time, it also sneaks in all kinds of political content.” Read more...
Olivia Laing, Memoirist
“This book is very much about Acker’s own experiences with breast cancer. She’s telling a story that happened to her and that is agonisingly painful. At the same time, she’s making it into a myth. She’s making it into a universal story about illness, death, descent.” Read more...
Olivia Laing, Memoirist
“Christopher Isherwood is such a fascinating example of how complicated autofiction can be. In Goodbye to Berlin, he foraged from his own life to write a semi-fictionalised version of his own experiences, at first sexual and domestic and then political, in Weimar/Nazi-era Germany.” Read more...
Olivia Laing, Memoirist
“I looked at everything written about Miyazaki, met with many of the people who worked with him and interviewed Miyazaki myself. This gave me a chance to see this amazing auteur from the inside out.” Read more...
“Murakami is writer who creates wonderful visions the stranger aspects of our mundane world. Some people call him a magical realist; Murakami has our normal world being invaded by, by strange things.” Read more...
“It’s an excellent history of manga. It catalogues manga’s most important genres, creators, and characters. Fred Schodt really, really knows his stuff.” Read more...
“This is probably Hayao Miyazaki’s manga masterpiece. It’s a very entertaining work. What’s particularly appealing is it has a very strong female protagonist, a woman named, named for the Greek princess in Homer’s Odyssey.” Read more...
“Its range is astonishing. It’s an adventure story, so it’s beautifully written, but a lot of the time—and this is why it was good to read it more than once—you rush through because it’s so exciting.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
“This was the first book of his I came to, and it remains for me his most shocking and blistering.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“I have read it a few times now, and I’m still trying to puzzle out how he fit those strands together so beautifully. It is a miracle of a novel.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“Johnson’s language is beautiful. It evokes a world that’s extremely unfamiliar, but makes it feel like a natural world. It’s incredibly well done.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
“This is a novel set in a part of modern life unfamiliar to most of us: a women’s prison. This novel is the one that made me feel I should go out and do something—that I should vote for prison reform.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
“It is a poem, mostly; it’s in free verse. Anybody who reads seriously admires writers who can make the constraints work—who can set themselves a challenge, a formal challenge, and solve it.” Read more...
Kwame Anthony Appiah, Philosopher
“It is a very compelling, weird little book, hidden inside the genre of the dimestore novel.” Read more...
Rachel Kushner on Books That Influenced Her
Rachel Kushner, Novelist
“The book is unique and fits in no genre … It’s a “telling” of life, about life. A reflection.” Read more...
Rachel Kushner on Books That Influenced Her
Rachel Kushner, Novelist
“Field Work is about the way we exist within place, the comfort we take from place and what happens when that apparent solidity and belonging is challenged. You can’t really narrow this collection down with ‘this is a good one.’ I’d read you every single poem in it.” Read more...
“It’s a modern, cinematic re-rendering of the Greek epic which manages to re-cast Homer’s battles for twentieth-century readers, suggesting (as Jones does) that all wars are the same wars.” Read more...
Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him
Robin Robertson, Novelist
“An extraordinary first-hand account, in poetry and prose, of the author’s time as a private in the Battle of the Somme. Jones is the great lost Modernist, and was as important an artist as he was a writer.” Read more...
Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him
Robin Robertson, Novelist
“I came late to Anne Enright and wish I’d found her earlier.” Read more...
Daisy Johnson on Books That Influenced Her
Daisy Johnson, Novelist
“It is one of the best reworkings of a haunted house I’ve ever read. My favourite writers to read while I’m writing are the ones who teach us that writing, really, can do anything.” Read more...
Daisy Johnson on Books That Influenced Her
Daisy Johnson, Novelist
“Evie Wyld writes about isolation and the terror of guilt like no one else.” Read more...
Daisy Johnson on Books That Influenced Her
Daisy Johnson, Novelist
“So much of that novella is about personality, and about the way one is liberated by personality or burdened by it.” Read more...
The best books on Personality Types
Merve Emre, Literary Scholar
“Isabel Briggs Myers’s detectives function as a well-oiled machine; each of them has a different part to play, and only through cooperation can they solve the case.” Read more...
The best books on Personality Types
Merve Emre, Literary Scholar
“The text is highly emotional, and it makes the reader sympathize with these characters trying to crawl out from under the ruins of the Soviet Union. The form of the novel is also very original and interesting.” Read more...
The Best of Georgian Literature
Gvantsa Jobava, Novelist
“Besik Kharanauli is perhaps the most important contemporary Georgian poet there is. He refused to follow writing norms and brought something genuinely new to the sound of Georgian poetry.” Read more...
The Best of Georgian Literature
Gvantsa Jobava, Novelist
“Even the Iron Curtain could not stand against the greatness of The Knight in the Panther Skin, which has been translated into about 60 languages.” Read more...
The Best of Georgian Literature
Gvantsa Jobava, Novelist
“Mikheil Javakhishvili is one of the main architects of 20th-century Georgian literature, and in his first, picaresque novel Kvachi Kvachantiradze he laid the foundations for realism in Georgian literature” Read more...
The Best of Georgian Literature
Gvantsa Jobava, Novelist
“Medea is the first character in literature to be from Georgia, and this is a novel about Medea, Aeetes and his kingdom, love, betrayal, and the destruction of the world. “ Read more...
The Best of Georgian Literature
Gvantsa Jobava, Novelist
“Lahirihas a great knack for showing both the closeness and the distance of peoples and cities. They seem so close together at the same time, they’re incredibly far apart.” Read more...
Jane Kamensky, Historian
“Team Seven follows a young black boy who lives outside of Boston, and it’s largely about his relationship with his father. He’s having to make some hard decisions about his involvement with a local gang. He’s also an athlete and is realising that he possibly has a future in basketball. It’s a beautiful novel about an urban landscape. There aren’t enough books like this one.” Read more...
Alexia Arthurs, Novelist
“There’s much to admire about this book, but what I find especially compelling is the focus on return migration to the Caribbean, which we don’t read a lot about.” Read more...
Alexia Arthurs, Novelist
“The writing is beautiful—the language of the book is impressive and the relationships are really well manoeuvred. Thematically it’s a muscular book. I especially appreciated how Dennis-Benn explores Caribbean sexuality—what does it mean to live in the Caribbean as a queer woman? That narrative thread is compelling, moving and important.” Read more...
Alexia Arthurs, Novelist
“One of the things I really appreciate about this novel is that, while other books like this, about immigration, tend to want to make really tight comparisons between the place that the protagonist has left and the place that he or she has come to, Lucy doesn’t do that. The narrator isn’t as interested in that comparison—to my mind, it’s a story about a person who is evolving personally, as an individual, and place is of course a part of that, but it’s much more subtle than is often the case.” Read more...
Alexia Arthurs, Novelist
“I appreciate the intimacy and humour of the book, it feels so true to the Caribbean. It captures our idiosyncrasies, and the experiences of living in a small place. And it represents my favourite kind of collection: stories that all together bloom and bloom, revealing a larger world. But like many Caribbean people, I have a complicated relationship with V.S. Naipaul.” Read more...
Alexia Arthurs, Novelist
“It engages a number of literary traditions—the high modernism of Joyce, Eliot and Pound, but also Dostoevsky and Marx. It’s filled with allusions to African American folklore, folk culture and history. It’s just a rich and dynamic novel.” Read more...
“It’s an image that defines a working-class thought – that you’d sooner fail on your own terms than win on somebody else’s.” Read more...
The best books on Human Imperfection
Henry Normal, Poet
Jazz
by Toni Morrison
It’s set in the 1920s and in it there’s a beautiful commingling of jazz, Harlem streets and a sense of romance and possibility.
“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
“It consists of a single sentence: a monologue being delivered to a gang of women sunbathing topless behind a church. The subject of the monologue is nothing less than the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” Read more...
Joshua Cohen, Novelist
“The Cleft tells of an island of women—an entire female society based on an island—that is, suddenly, “disrupted” by the introduction of a new species: males. No men have ever existed before, and then, out of nowhere, one man appears, bringing sex with him, and so bringing chaos. It’s a creation myth, created out of creation myths.” Read more...
Joshua Cohen, Novelist
“This is one of the most beautiful short novels, or novellas, ever written. And only one thing ever happens: Kertész’s narrator looks out a window and sees a jeep go by flying the Union Jack. That’s it.” Read more...
Joshua Cohen, Novelist
“What Conrad cares about is individuality—the possibility or impossibility of a world of individuals—and how each of them, each of us, might be trapped, or might resist being trapped, in the positions and circumstances into which we were born.” Read more...
Joshua Cohen, Novelist
“Mark Twain is a great comedian, and he gives you easy access to the whole Enlightenment push against the Adam and Eve story.” Read more...
The best books on Adam and Eve
Stephen Greenblatt, Literary Scholar
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.
“George Eliot is one of the great intellectuals of British history. It took a great deal of intellect and moral courage to move to try and make her way in London as a single woman in the field of journalism.” Read more...
David Russell on The Victorian Essay
David Russell, Literary Scholar
“Polar City Red was the first novel ever to published and promoted explicitly as cli-fi novel” Read more...
Dan Bloom, Environmentalist
“Reilly’s book is a cli-fi novel of the current moment. A major east coast storm, remnants of a hurricane, turns Vermont upside down.” Read more...
Dan Bloom, Environmentalist
“Historical fiction set in Canada around the mid-1800’s. Grace Marks, the main character, really was a person. She was put into prison for her role in the murder of a farming family.” Read more...
The best books on Navigating the Future: a reading list for young adults
Chris Kutarna, Political Scientist
“He adopted two girls with a view to keeping them and marrying whichever one turned out best – marrying off the one that didn’t turn out so well. Which is a really creepy idea.” Read more...
Geraldine McCaughrean on Her Books Based on True Events
Geraldine McCaughrean, Children's Author
“In my book I explain how, after reading Naked Lunch, Burroughs and I drew up a Faustian pact.” Read more...
“Cuando te pones a estudiarla, ves que Marguerite Duras fue de esa clase de autores que no te dejan indiferente: o la odias o la amas, pero es imposible cualquier término medio. Yo estoy entre los que aman su obra, y considero L’après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas su mejor libro.” Read more...
“Incluir a De nasis en mi lista ha sido, ahora me doy cuenta, mi forma de poder acabar nombrando la novela de Laurence Sterne, que no sólo fue y sigue siendo muy importante para mí, sino que, encima, es una especie de talismán personal; necesito que esté ahí en las ocasiones que lo merecen, como ésta misma.” Read more...
“When you study Duras, you see that she belonged to that class of authors who don’t leave you indifferent: you either love her or you hate her, and anything in between is impossible. I fall into the group of those who love her work, and to my mind L’après-midi de Monsieur Andesmas is her best book.” Read more...
“Including De nasis on my list was, I now realise, my way of getting in Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristam Shandy, which not only was and continues to be important to me, but more importantly is a kind of personal talisman; when the right occasion calls for it, like now, I need it to hand.” Read more...
“Heather Cass White shows you to what extent the later Moore rewrote, re-edited, eclipsed her earlier work and changed it from the poetry which earned her so much of her reputation. And it’s a real shocker – excitingly shocking – to find out that I can get the newly minted poems of the 1920s and 30s before the Moore of the 40s 50s and 60s decided to ‘improve them’ by taking out most of the detail and playing up the moral dimension.” Read more...
“I really love this book. It hums with energy. Tara’s worked a lot on translation and you see in this book a real playful joy in exploring what it means to move from one tongue to another, what it means to rephrase something, what it means to take a life and relive it or take words and re-say them.” Read more...
“What I like about Morrissey is that she moves forward. She is aware of the need to interrogate where you are at any given time. And she draws on the past. Her winning collection On Balance is largely about giving the past a voice and also drawing attention to the impossibility of knowing whether or not that voice is correct. It’s provisional.” Read more...
“The novels speaks so clearly, and so chillingly, about the hard edges of intimacy.” Read more...
“Han Yujoo toys with reality, crafting scenes that might be real, but could be fantasy or imagined, too – there’s a surreal, hallucinatory quality to it. She does that so well. She sucks you in to an interrogation of reality, of how much reality is actually out there and how much of it is in our heads.” Read more...
Conversations with Friends
by Sally Rooney
Irish writer Sally Rooney’s debut novel took the literary world by storm.
“This is an astonishing novel about two white American hipsters who set up a studio that remixes rare blues records. They’ve got this self-righteous authenticity to their music. ‘This is what real jazz is. This is what we’re doing. We’re giving you the real thing, unadulterated’, and so on. But, basically, it’s a ghost story.” Read more...
“This truly is a beautiful book. I don’t think it’s perfect, and I don’t think it needed to be. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights isn’t a perfectly written book either – that’s a big part of why I love it. It is a bit sprawling, and a bit all over the place, and melodramatic. Mozely reminds me of that and I can’t wait to see her writing and her storytelling develop.” Read more...
“A dark, gothic and truly scary modern classic.” Read more...
Rachel Hickman recommends the best Novels Set in Wild Places
“I have to say while I did love it, it wasn’t an uncomplicated reading experience for me. It’s a reworking of King Lear, and if you really love King Lear, as I do, it actually it makes it quite a weird read, because you’re constantly guessing at what the author is doing: ‘Ah, is she doing this here?’ ‘Is she subverting that?’ ‘Is this supposed to be read like this?’” Read more...
“The Iron Age does two things very well indeed. First, it conjures Finland, which strikes me as a very mysterious place, especially in the early 20th century when this story is set. It’s steeped in myth and that is deeply entrancing in itself; it feels Other, like if one was stranded in Finland, one wouldn’t necessarily be able to operate with one’s western coordinates. “ Read more...
“Quite apart from the rendering of its themes, what makes this book so wonderful for me is its gentle sentence-making. Boyle was (and might still be) poet. I love the way, in about a page and a half, Boyle reduces something essential about Englishness, colonialism, the public school system to the self-sufficiency of Robinson Crusoe, and then just riffs on that, with erudition, wit and warmth. What more do you want from a short fiction than to do all that?” Read more...
“Writing puts us right into the middle of someone’s consciousness, wraps us up in someone else’s interior world. Lefebvre does this extremely successfully.” Read more...
“This is a really well executed portrayal of a specific kind of synesthesia. It is also interesting within the context of the story of Eric Satie and 20th Century Paris.” Read more...
“What does George Eliot do in The Mill on the Floss? She creates a situation that’s not autobiographical in the sense that it actually happened, but it’s autobiographical in the sense that it’s the sort of thing that George Eliot and Marian Evans are most interested in. It’s a humiliating middle-ground. That’s to say, Maggie begins to elope with Stephen, but half-way through on board ship, she decides that she can’t go through with it. It is the worst of both worlds: she has lost her reputation but also given up her man.” Read more...
“Janet’s Repentance’ is the best story in Scenes of Clerical Life, George Eliot’s first work of fiction. It is about a woman, Janet, who is married to Dempster. He is a local lawyer and alcoholic who, in his increasing degeneration, abuses and beats his wife. The first move that Eliot makes as a realist novelist is this: of course, Janet is a victim of her husband. But this is not a simple category. Where normal people will have one thought, Eliot will have many. Janet, though the victim, begins to collude in what has happened to her and begins to drink herself. That makes her life more complicated.” Read more...
“From a narratological point of view, what Kirkman is pointing out here is that the zombie apocalypse becomes a genre in which we have a laboratory of human behaviour ramped up. We get a similar effect in war stories. What this scenario does is ratchet up our everyday normal human behaviour to force ten levels. It allows us to ask those really challenging questions about character in a much more rapid way.” Read more...
“The title story is about a man who in the course of his scientific experiments accidentally shrinks his wife. You have seen that in movies, or the converse where she’s a fifty-foot woman. He takes this science fiction trope and turns it into a relation story about what happens when relationships go bad.” Read more...
“It’s effectively three linked stories. The first story’s about a very young girl – an underage girl – who falls on hard times and ends up being looked after by someone who then asks her to do a favour for them… and it ends up in prostitution. One of the older prostitutes she meets is then the subject of the second story, and then there’s a third one. They’re all first-person narratives…. It is a masterpiece.” Read more...
“It’s an interesting premise. What’s great about the book is its subtlety – there’s a great economy of language. The paperback edition I have has five pages of rave reviews at the front, from every publication. One of them said: ‘Almost certain to be on the Booker list.’ It was talked about in those terms.” Read more...
“The Sioux is about this eccentric family of French origin who live in New Orleans. The mother is awfully protective of the son, and it could be mildly incestuous, you’re never quite sure, and everyone is dysfunctional, and they’re all extremely rich, and it’s very dark and very funny.” Read more...
The Swan Book
by Alexis Wright
The Swan Book exists in an incredibly heightened kind of reality, both in terms of the world itself, which is rich and beautiful as well as violent and profoundly disturbed, and the language, which is vivid and raw and repetitive in ways that sometimes seem almost incantatory
Aurora
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Despite its deliberate dismantling of so many of science fiction’s core assumptions, Aurora is simultaneously a celebration of the possibilities of both science fiction and the spirit of human endeavour that animates so much of it
Barkskins
by Annie Proulx
The story is told through the lens of the families, but its real subject is the destruction of the forests of North America, and the environmental and human cost of that process
“In the introduction to The Weird, the 2011 anthology that Jeff Vandermeer and his wife Ann edited, they suggest the weird isn’t a genre or a form so much as a technique or an affect, a thing that lurks in the interstices, and which emerges in unexpected and unsettling ways. I rather love this idea, not least because it captures something of what makes both Annihilation and its two sequels, Authority and Acceptance, so compelling, the way reading them leaves you feeling like you’ve been colonised yourself, your brain permanently altered by your descent into the world of the books.” Read more...
The Best Climate Change Novels
James Bradley, Novelist
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
“It’s a remarkably empathetic and beautifully written book…It deals with a lot of the anxieties about physical failings, and anxieties about legacy. It really makes you feel that you’re being put in the mind of someone who hasn’t got long and is coping with that.” Read more...
Kathleen Taylor, Science Writer
“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
“This book takes you from the breaking of the sound barrier by Chuck Yeager up to the start of the Apollo programme. It’s before all of the stuff that people would say is the heyday of NASA, like the moon landings and so on. It’s everything that happened before.” Read more...
Milkman
by Anna Burns
Winner of the 2018 Booker Prize, Milkman is a disquieting tale of sexual harassment set in Belfast during The Troubles—or at least, that’s what the reader must surmise. As with many aspects of this unusual novel, its setting is never made explicit. The narrator is a young, bookish woman feeling her way through life in a society soaked in fear and paranoia; when she finds herself the focus of unwanted advances from a shadowy dissident figure known only as ‘the milkman,’ local gossips go into overdrive. Must she accept her new, unasked-for status as a paramilitary hanger-on?
Milkman also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2019, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the same year.
“Despite its subject matter, The Bell Jar is often a very funny novel. Perhaps we miss it because the pall of Plath’s biography descends across the whole work and reputation. But The Bell Jar is viciously funny. There are people still alive today who won’t talk about it because they were so badly hurt by Plath’s portrayal of them.” 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.
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate, the masterpiece by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books. Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, it was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime. Read what historians and literary scholars have to say about it below:
(Stalingrad is the precursor to Life and Fate, newly translated into English.)
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Which translation of the book War and Peace is best? What kind of reviews did Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece get when it was published? Why has the book War and Peace been chosen by philosophers, historians and novelists as one of the most important ever written? Find out more about one of our most recommended books by reading the expert commentary about War and Peace below. The audiobook is also highly recommended, narrated by the RADA-trained actor, the late Neville Jason.
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.
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.
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
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.
“If you think you know the story because you’ve seen the film then you’d be wrong. This book is an absolute classic and a great way into the vast King oeuvre.” Read more...
Daisy Johnson on Books That Influenced Her
Daisy Johnson, Novelist
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables, the book by Victor Hugo is an epic novel highlighting the victims of early nineteenth-century French society, It’s setting is the eve of the battle of Waterloo to the July French Revolution of 1830. See why it is considered one of the best novels and is still relevant in today’s world.
To Live
by Yu Hua
I normally only read non-fiction books but, as you can see, this novel is exceptional like A Good Earth by Pearl S Buck. It is all about family life in a Chinese village before and after the 1949 revolution. These are ordinary people and the book looks at how they survive this very difficult period in Chinese history. This was the time of endless political war between 1940s to 1980s.
我一般不读小说，但是这本书很例外。这本书写的是1949年中国革命之后乡村的家庭生活。写的都是寻常百姓如何渡过那段中国历史上最艰难岁月的故事。上世纪40到80年代正是一个充满了政治斗争的年代，这也是日常生活中的常态。
The Ghosts of Eden
by Andrew J H Sharp
It is a wonderful story following two children: one colonial, one native African. They grow into men and fall in love with the same woman….
“The Warden is interesting because, again, you don’t get that many books…that have an old man as the protagonist.” Read more...
Kathleen Taylor, Science Writer
I Am Legend
by Richard Matheson
It’s a short and perfectly formed book. Richard Matheson is a real model of streamlined 1950s efficiency. He writes the way Americans used to make cars – every little piece is perfect. It’s a book you can read in about two hours and there is nothing you would change about it.
Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice is a book that speaks to everyone across the centuries, with engaging characters and a well-planned plot around the fairy tale classic of a poor girl growing up and (eventually) marrying her Prince Charming.
But the book is more than just the template for every romance novel and Mills & Boon written since. Philosophers and literary scholars are just some of the experts we’ve interviewed who have chosen Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as essential reading on their topic.
Pride and Prejudice is a perennial favourite book that means it’s still well read today. Along with many other people, it is Austen scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks’s favourite Austen book. In her interview with us she spoke about the best Austen novels and what they mean to her. She has also produced Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition which includes over 2,000 annotations to text giving in-depth analysis.
Our commentary section below highlights some of the reviews of this book when it was first published in 1813. The popularity and strength of the storyline means there have been several theatre and screen adaptions of the book.
Many Five Books experts have chosen Pride and Prejudice as one of the best books in their field of expertise. You can read the reasons why they chose it below:
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Another schoolboy book. Again, the attitude among the intellectuals was that Dumas wasn’t good enough. It’s taken the French 200 years to realise that telling a good story is actually worthwhile and they’re putting statues up now. All the snooties said: “Tell a story and make money! Good God, what a terrible thing to do!” I openly tried to write a modern version of it in A Prisoner of Birth. You see, in those days, Dumas’s days, there were no blogs, nothing like that. I mean 1,700 pages! You’d never write that today. Nobody would read it. If you are writing a long novel it’s 500 pages and that’s enough, thank you very much. Today he’d be writing television scripts.
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Troilus and Criseyde
Geoffrey Chaucer (ed. by Stephen Barney) -
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Oxford Guides to Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde
by Barry Windeatt -
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The Double Sorrow of Troilus: A Study of Ambiguities in ‘Troilus and Criseyde’
by Ida L. Gordon -
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The Tragic Argument of Troilus and Criseyde
by Gerald Morgan -
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A Double Sorrow: Troilus and Criseyde
by Lavinia Greenlaw
The best books on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, recommended by Jenni Nuttall
The best books on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, recommended by Jenni Nuttall
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 -
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Celestial Bodies
by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth -
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The Years
by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison Strayer -
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The Pine Islands
by Jen Calleja & Marion Poschmann -
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The Shape of the Ruins
by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean -
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The Remainder
by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes
Summer Reading 2019: The Best Fiction in Translation, recommended by Bettany Hughes
Summer Reading 2019: The Best Fiction in Translation, recommended by Bettany Hughes
Bettany Hughes, author of Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities and chair of this year’s Man 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.
Summer Reading 2019: The Best Thrillers, recommended by Anthony Franze
Looking for a pacy, suspenseful thriller to take on holiday this summer? 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 2019 shortlist.
Summer Reading 2019: The Best Sci Fi Books, recommended by Tom Hunter
If you’re hoping to travel to a galaxy far, far away this summer, 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 -
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Emerson: Essays and Lectures
by Ralph Waldo Emerson -
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Emerson in His Journals
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Joel Porte (editor) -
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Emerson in His Own Time
Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson (editors) -
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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
Summer Reading 2019: The Best Romance Books, 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 best Daphne du Maurier book 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.
