The Best Books of All Time?
Looking for a good book? We have the world’s largest collection of expert book recommendations. Over the past decade-and-a-half, we’ve asked hundreds of experts to pick the five best books in their field—and to explain in detail why those particular books are so important. The results of this 15 year project are listed below. These are books that have been recommended over and over again, suggesting they are some of the most important books ever written. The experts who picked them for us range from philosophers to politicians, economists to novelists, eminent historians to comedians. With one or two noteworthy exceptions, our most recommended books are not new books being promoted by publishers, but books that have stood the test of time. Many are already out of copyright and available for free, though if your budget can stand it, there’s a lot to be said for the informative introduction and footnotes that a good editor, selected by an established publisher, can provide.
Our book recommendations are listed in order, so our most recommended books appear at the top. Each entry includes the number of experts who have recommended that particular book. Click on each book title to find out what experts we interviewed said about it in greater detail.
Browse by subject: Best Philosophy Books of All Time |
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name: Mary Ann Evans), was first published in 1871. The novel is set in the fictitious English town of Middlemarch during 1829–1832.
“I think one does often turn to novelists to get a sense of other people’s lives. It was written in 1871, but it’s written about a period 40 or so years before, the period when Ada Lovelace flourished. It’s about an intelligent woman trapped by the expectations and the circumstances of the society she finds herself in.” Read more...
The best books on Ada Lovelace
Ursula Martin, Mathematician
“It’s one thing to enjoy a book, and quite another to to cherish the time spent with a set of characters. I’m envious of anyone getting to know Dorothea Brooke, Tertius Lydgate, Mary Garth and Casaubon for the first time. If I could wipe my memory clean and go back and reread it fresh, I would.” Read more...
On Liberty
by John Stuart Mill
Is diversity of opinion valuable? Why should we care about free speech? When can someone legitimately interfere in our lives to stop us from doing something? What should restrict the scope of our personal liberty?
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill was originally published in 1859, but his exploration of these questions still feels incredibly contemporary. On Liberty remains a central text of the modern liberal tradition, as our interviews below with philosophers, politicians, historians and political commentators make clear.
“What this book does is hammer home one truth. Mill described it as a ‘philosophic textbook of a single truth’. According to him it was hugely influenced by his discussions with his wife, Harriet Taylor, though she didn’t physically write it, and it’s his name on the cover. As the title suggests, it’s focused on liberty, on freedom. It puts forward what’s come to be known as ‘the harm principle’ which is that the only justification for the state or other people interfering with the lives of adults is if they risk harming others with their actions” Read more...
Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“On Liberty is the classic statement of traditional liberal values about the limits of state coercion. It’s an eloquent argument for personal liberty on the grounds that it’s the condition in which human beings are most likely to flourish and be happy.” Read more...
The best books on The Rule of Law
Jonathan Sumption, Historian
Frankenstein (Book)
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.
“Brian Aldiss has famously argued that science fiction starts with Mary Shelley’s novel, and many people have agreed with him.” Read more...
Adam Roberts, Novelist
“Frankenstein can be seen as an experiment—or almost a laboratory—that brings together science and literature…Frankenstein is very much a novel for the twenty-first century. Mary Shelley was trying to push the boundaries of science and technology. The details of the science have changed, but the big questions remain as important for us today as they were for her. “ Read more...
Nick Groom, Literary Scholar
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels ever written. In our interviews, philosophers, historians and novelists have recommended it as critical reading for understanding a variety of subjects. Like many great books, it was greeted with some scepticism on publication.
“Tolstoy famously said of War and Peace that it wasn’t even a novel. In a sense, it’s a total history of that epoch in Russia in a fictional form…It’s very interesting what happens with the novel linguistically. There’s been a study of the French words in the novel, because there are a large number, and they feature particularly in the early phases of the novel. Towards the end, the novel becomes more Russian in its literary and vernacular style, in its lexicon and syntax. In a sense, the Russian language is the true character of the novel. The growing Russianness of the language is the epiphany, that moment of self-discovery, that the Russian aristocracy goes through at that time.” Read more...
Orlando Figes, Historian
“War and Peace was ground-breaking in its age, because up until then, war had always been something that was glorified; he looked at war through the psychology of the people experiencing it, and the way they expressed that experience in their lives. That was a profound breakthrough. For instance, he shows people suffering from post-traumatic stress.” Read more...
Steve Killelea, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
“In terms of how technology is working in our modern surveillance powers, it’s a terrifyingly prophetic book in some of its implications for 21st-century human life. Orwell would deny that it was prophecy; he said it was a warning. But in fact, distinguished Orwell scholar Professor Peter Davis once made a list of all the things that Orwell got right, and it was a couple of fairly long paragraphs, and it was really rather terrifying.” Read more...
D J Taylor, Biographer
“Nineteen Eighty-Four is seriously read in China by intellectuals, who see similarities between the world of George Orwell and present-day China.” Read more...
The best books on Dystopia and Utopia
Chan Koonchung, Novelist
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 Stoker’s Notes for Dracula which contains Stoker’s research notes.
“Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it.” Read more...
The best books on Sex in Victorian Literature
Claire Jarvis, Literary Scholar
“I like to read Dracula as one of the great novels of London. Stoker himself was an Irish immigrant to London. The Count is a central European immigrant to London. He initially moves to Carfax Abbey, in the suburbs, before gentrifying himself and moving to Piccadilly.” Read more...
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre was published in 1847—with the novel’s author listed as ‘Currer Bell’—and was an immediate commercial success. The main protagonist, Jane, is an orphan who has an extremely tough life before meeting the man of her dreams. Unfortunately, he has dark secrets and the sense of foreboding that pervades the novel makes it also something of a thriller.
“Jane Eyre in some respects…is the original domestic noir…there’s a sense of building threat and building crisis in the book. But I also love the social commentary and the feminism. It’s my favourite book of all time…I read it out loud to my daughter when she was about 15 and it’s just an incredible book” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Novelist
“It wasn’t until my third reading of the book that I realised Brontë had slipped the supernatural into Jane Eyre.” Read more...
Sarah Perry, Novelist
The Odyssey
by Homer and translated by Emily Wilson
“Tell me about a complicated man.
Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost
when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
and where he went, and who he met, the pain
he suffered in the storms at sea, and how
he worked to save his life and bring his men
back home.”
Odyssey, opening lines (Emily Wilson translation)
If you’re interested in Homer and the poem of the Odyssey, the 2017 translation by Emily Wilson, Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, is a great place to start. Not only is it a highly readable translation, but the introduction provides a lot of context and historical background for anyone wondering who Homer was, when the poem was first written down etc.
Many of us would love to listen to the Odyssey, as that’s how it was first delivered back in 700 BCE. Fortunately, the American actress Claire Danes has narrated the audiobook—so stick in your headphones, put your feet on the sofa, and press play.
“I find the Odyssey so fun to read because it is partly about impression management. In addition to being a strong, savvy, competent hero figure, Odysseus is a storyteller with great powers of persuasion and negotiation. He influences people and convinces them that he’s trustworthy. At times, he needs to trick people.” Read more...
“Homer was prototypical literature, and in a sense the holy book of ancient Greece. It laid out much of the fundamental mythology; and for a certain period it was even performed on state occasions. It was the ultimate classic for the ancient world.” Read more...
Sarah Ruden, Literary Scholar
Republic
by Plato
In Ancient Greek, Plato’s famous dialogue was known as Politeia. The Romans called it Res Publica, the title we now use. Below, philosophers and political scientists recommend which edition of Plato’s Republic to read and explain, in detail, why it remains a work of such significance (Our interview about all Plato’s books and his life is with Melissa Lane of Princeton).
“The Republic is a mixture of metaphysics, political philosophy, and a kind of psychology about the balance of the different parts of the soul. Many of its ideas have subsequently resonated throughout the history of philosophy.” Read more...
Key Philosophical Texts in the Western Canon
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“It’s very readable even if you aren’t a professional philosopher. Take the story of ‘The Ring of Gyges,’ which raises the question of whether you would continue to act like a good person if you had a ring of invisibility that let you get away with doing whatever you wanted to do. That’s a fascinating thought experiment that anybody can appreciate.” Read more...
The best books on World Philosophy
Bryan Van Norden, Philosopher
“I first read it as a student, and I remember finishing this book while I was sitting on a train and weeping, and people looking at me, wondering if I was going through some kind of crisis. It was the first time I’d ever just wept at a book. It’s a strange feeling. And it made me think: this is what literature can do. This is the power it has.” Read more...
The best books on The End of the World
Paul Cooper, Historian
“The Road is a very spare novel by Cormac McCarthy. Humanity has been wiped out, for the most part. There’s a man and his son traveling on a road to try to get to where it’s rumored that sprouts of civilization are starting to grow again. It’s a very minimalistic book. It’s very sparse and elegiac, just with those two characters.” Read more...
Elliot Ackerman, Military Historians & Veteran
“I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered. It’s still very relevant to this rather ridiculous life. When I was covering the early days of the Congo, a group of us were there, maybe five or six correspondents, and somebody had a battered copy of Scoop that we passed around. It just read straight – the life we were living was hardly exaggerated.” Read more...
Richard Beeston, Foreign Correspondent
“Everything about this book is perfect, from the prose to the characters to the Swiss-clock workings of the plot.” Read more...
Andy Borowitz recommends the best Comic Writing
Andy Borowitz, Comedians & Humorist
“Arthur Dent, his hero, is a very ordinary—dull, some would say—Earth man, who discovers that his house is about to be demolished by bulldozers. As he’s dealing with county council officialdom, a friend called Ford Prefect helps him escape the destruction of the Earth, which is being blown up by alien bureaucrats. It’s one scale up. That’s the joke. For the novel, he took the first four episodes of the radio show and made them work as a novel with his own unique sense of flair and verve. That sense of humour. People who hate science fiction liked it because they thought it was taking the piss out of science fiction. And people who like science fiction liked it anyway. So it appealed broadly, to different audiences.” Read more...
Kevin Jon Davies, Film Director
“I miss Douglas Adams. He’s been dead since 2001. He occupied that area for me between friend and acquaintance. He was, I suppose, a work friend. The first book I ever wrote that did anything was The Companion to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I got to work with Douglas on it. Douglas Adams was a genius. A lot of the pleasure in reading Douglas Adams is in jokes that are elegantly and delightfully tuned while also commenting on the human condition.” Read more...
Neil Gaiman, Novelist
“It is an endlessly capacious, inventive, stimulating book. I won’t say it has something for everyone but it has, for its sheer blend of different approaches, a great deal for a great number of people. The fact that the whole thing is presented as a conversation with God, for a start. And Augustine is remarkably self-exposing and self-disclosing. It’s an extraordinary book for someone who’s just been ordained as a bishop to write. The Confessions had to be on this list and it is most people’s way into Augustine. It is this unbelievably pliant and fruitful work. Every time you read it, you notice new things.” Read more...
Catherine Conybeare, Classicist
“St Augustine is, in some ways, misunderstood and misappropriated in modern scholarship and popular perception. I can understand why, because reading him can be a bit of a hard slog to begin with. His Confessions can seem unfashionably self-hating, and the drama that’s being played out, the way he makes a first-person address towards this God figure, feels a bit artificial and it can put people off. But if you work out what’s going on, what his motivation is, and what the context is, what he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition.” Read more...
Simon Yarrow, Historian
“We tend to see ourselves as not unlike rats, creatures driven by the short-term reward centres in our brains. But what Gilbert does fantastically well is to argue that, actually, humans are better at long-term thinking than almost any other animal. A chimpanzee may strip off the leaves from a branch to make a tool to poke into a termite hole, but that chimp will never make a dozen of those tools and put them aside for next week. Yet this is exactly what humans do.” Read more...
The Best Books for Long-Term Thinking
Roman Krznaric, Philosopher
“Dan Gilbert, a dear friend of mine at Harvard, is the best writer in our field and one of our greatest thinkers. He is extremely creative and insightful.” Read more...
The best books on Behavioral Science
Nicholas Epley, Psychologist
The Looming Tower
by Lawrence Wright
The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright is a detailed narrative history of the events leading to 9/11, based on five years of research and hundreds of interviews. Find out below why it is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
“Reading this one book gives you an excellent grasp of the human story and the context from which al-Qaeda emerged.” Read more...
Audrey Kurth Cronin, Political Scientist
“Former counterterrorism agent John O’Neill, who died in 9/11, is the hero of this book. He played a central part in trying to take Al-Qaeda apart.” Read more...
The best books on Osama bin Laden
Peter Bergen, Journalist
“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
“It is one of the most perfect novels ever written.It’s got a wonderful plot. It’s about good and bad money, you don’t know who Pip’s benefactor is, you’re wrong-footed—as he is—all the time. It’s about terrible damage. It’s got this fantastic suspense about what happens to Magwitch. It’s sad, but also it’s got wonderful humour in it and wonderful characters. It’s got Wemmick, one of the first commuters. It’s just brilliant.” Read more...
The Best Charles Dickens Books
Jenny Hartley, Biographer
“I thought about responding to your call for a list of the top 5 American novels with ‘1) Moby-Dick 2) Moby-Dick 3) Moby-Dick’—an obsessive answer that would be true to the spirit of this monomaniacal book! I won’t go full Ahab and claim that it is THE great American novel, but I will confess it is my favorite. There’s something about its dizzying mix of high and low, Herman Melville’s exuberant love of language, and the novel’s remarkable capaciousness (everything reminds me of Moby-Dick!) that makes me love to read it, reread it, teach it, joke about it, tweet about it, reference it at the slightest provocation.” Read more...
The Best 19th-Century American Novels
Nathan Wolff, Literary Scholar
“It showcases the susceptibility of this republic and others, to being overcome by populist demagogues, the danger of democracy being usurped by tyranny. In Moby Dick, the crew are proxies for a cross-section of society. They enter an almost parody version of ‘the social contract’ to ship out with the Pequod. They find themselves at the mercy of Captain Ahab’s regime. During Melville’s day, the plot provided a way of reflecting on slavery; it continues to call attention to the danger of authoritarianism. My book ended before 2016; since then, there were umpteen new readings of Moby Dick in light of Donald Trump’s election. That’s part of the afterlife of Moby Dick. It has been seized upon in popular culture and by the media as a reference point for misadventures that overtake the United States.” Read more...
Pride and Prejudice (Book)
by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice was published more than 200 years ago, in 1813, but the book still speaks to us across the centuries. Written by Jane Austen when she was only 20, its original title was First Impressions. Like many great books, it was initially rejected by publishers and did not appear till years later, now under the title we know it by, Pride and Prejudice. By then, Austen had already had commercial success with Sense and Sensibility, a novel that also compares and contrasts two characters with the qualities (flaws) signalled in the title of the book.
“I have read Pride and Prejudice, I would guess, 40 or 50 times. I’ve taught it at every level of college, of graduate school…I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels…I loved it because it’s a fairy tale; it’s about the poor girl growing up and marrying Prince Charming. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best…When I was asked to annotate it, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about the idea. I was finally persuaded because I thought I could annotate it out of my head – I know the book practically by heart. I was so wrong” Read more...
Patricia Meyer Spacks, Literary Scholar
“The book is about the pleasure of being wrong. We forget that wrongness can be deeply pleasurable, but thankfully we have literature and art to remind us.” Read more...
Kathryn Schulz, Journalist
“It’s dated in many ways; it’s extremely sentimental. But it’s beautifully done – you can’t take a thing away from it.” Read more...
Scott Turow, Thriller and Crime Writer
“The case is about racism, but it’s also about white sexual fear of the black man, and the failed effort of white America to stop intermixing. I think the notion of the scary black man still permeates the American justice system today. I don’t think To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the greatest pieces of literature ever, but it is a very good window into the ingrained sexual fear that permeated at least the southern American justice system.” Read more...
The best books on Sex and Society
Eric Berkowitz, Journalist
“I think that the most important contributions, the best books, in the philosophy of religion are these two little books that David Hume writes” Read more...
The best books on Atheist Philosophy of Religion
Graham Oppy, Philosopher
“Hume is the main man….It’s an interesting question whether he’s a good writer or not. I’ve always thought him a good writer, but I know some people read Hume and find him difficult. It’s partly just a question of period style. He does tend to write in very long sentences. I think that was just the typical writing of the time. In the 18th century people put a lot of commas and semicolons in, and there weren’t so many full stops. Present day readers can find that quite awkward.” Read more...
Julian Baggini, Philosopher
“It was criticised as being poverty porn, but I don’t really see that. It does risk being wildly sentimental, but I kind of like that. It’s old school. It has a confident, Dickensian snap and brio, a broad, swinging-for-the-fences ambition, and it worked for me. And the ending is the complete clichéd happy ending. Yet, because it’s such an enormous book, when you get there you feel like you’ve earned the big sentimental pay-off. I really liked it. It had me welling up.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in the American South
Xan Brooks, Novelist
“The Women’s Prize for Fiction is, in my opinion, brilliant at highlighting those books that sit nicely in that intersection in the literary fiction/popular fiction Venn diagram—that is, the sort of book I’m looking for when I’m looking for an enjoyable and well-written book to lose myself in during a long journey, or while on holiday” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“The beginning is hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature.” Read more...
The Best Books on the Philosophy of Travel
Emily Thomas, Philosopher
“Thoreau can be thorny to read but Walden is a tremendously important work in the history of environmental thinking and in the history of understanding our relationship with nature.” Read more...
Mark Peterson, Historian
“It is an important book because it is the first attempt to link together inflation and output. In some sense it is the basis for many of the books that have been written since about inflation, monetary policy and the real side of the economy.” Read more...
Federica Romei, Economist
“A Monetary History provides the story of the struggle over successive monetary regimes to get the monetary system right. It doesn’t get to the last part of the story, but it gets a lot of the story, at least from a US perspective.” Read more...
The best books on Monetary Policy
Lars Christensen, Economist
“Dominic Hoffman narrates this reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but this time Jim tells his own story. Hoffman’s performance captures the varying tone of Jim’s dialogue, highlighting the shifts in his vocabulary and rhythm. With its subtlety and attention to detail, Hoffman’s narration reinforces Jim’s character and narrative arcs as Jim takes back his agency in life.” Read more...
“James is obviously connected to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. It is not a retelling of that story, but in a way it’s the same universe. Percival has said himself that it’s not a correction. But is it a revisionist book? Yes, I guess it is. It’s from the perspective of Jim, or James, and we look at slavery from his perspective. We look at his incredible struggle, how his family is affected, how he has been separated from them and his struggle to reach them again. It has a revenge theme, kind of. But I guess I look at it as there being some historical catharsis, reading this book in relation to historical racism and slavery. It’s more of a cathartic narrative than a derivative one.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2024: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Nitin Sawhney, Musicians, Music Critics & Scholar
“Today the vast majority of scholars agree that slavery was the single most important factor leading to the Civil War, touching virtually every other major political and cultural issue of the day – from economics to state autonomy to national expansion. As a professor of American literature, I know of no novel that better illustrates the dehumanizing nature of slavery and the personal traumas it produced than Beloved. Part ghost story, part historical novel, the plot follows the protagonist, a Black woman named Sethe who escaped slavery with her four children. When slave-catchers track her down to Ohio with plans to return the family to slavery, Sethe chooses to kill her children rather than see them live a life of bondage. She manages to kill her oldest daughter, Beloved, and wounds her two sons. This act of violence at once horrifies all who witness it, black and white, and yet it stands as a powerful repudiation of the institution of slavery and the evils it promotes.” Read more...
Classic Novels of the American Civil War
Craig A. Warren, Literary Scholar
“For me, Beloved is like an object that light bends around – I can’t think about American literature without it…Beloved is at least partly about looking that fallacious dream of American unity directly in the face and excavating the utter horror on which it’s built…I have spent a lot of time thinking about the final pages of Beloved, because in that epilogue Morrison acknowledges the paradox of what it means to remember something that unspeakable, something that has ruined your body and your mind and the bodies and minds of millions of others. Because how can you go on carrying that?” Read more...
“It shows the ways in which technology, our need for certain creature comforts and consumer culture can be used to manipulate us.” Read more...
The best books on Alternative Futures
Catherine Mayer, Politician
“It is a hilarious, and also very prescient, parody of utopias. Huxley goes back to the idea that coming together and forming a community of common interests is a great idea – it’s the basis of civil society. At the same time, when communities of common interests are taken to utopian degrees the self starts to dissolve into the larger community, you lose privacy and interiority; that becomes frightening. In Huxley’s parody, the people are convinced that they are melding together and that they are completely happy, but in the end it is utterly empty.” Read more...
Ellen Wayland-Smith, Miscellaneou
Democracy in America
by Alexis de Tocqueville
“Among the new objects that attracted my attention during my stay in the United States, none struck my eye more vividly than the equality of conditions. I discovered without difficulty the enormous influence that this primary fact exerts on the course of society; it gives a certain direction to public spirit, a certain turn to the laws, new maxims to those who govern and particular habits to the governed.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Harvey Mansfield and Delba Winthrop translation), opening paragraph.
“Tocqueville, in a way, was the first sociologist, though that field didn’t exist in the 1830s, when he wrote the book. In it, he looks at the formal institutions of American democracy—Congress, and the presidency, and so forth—but what everybody really takes away from it is that those institutions ride on top of the morals and mores and habits of the underlying society…Tocqueville gives you a different analysis that looks beneath the surface of the visible institutions and tries to understand the moral habits that underlie the workings of those institutions. It’s really looking at the society rather than just the formal laws and whatnot.” Read more...
The best books on Liberal Democracy
Francis Fukuyama, Political Scientist
“It’s a masterpiece of sociological and political analysis. Tocqueville’s work still helps us understand America, 170 years after he wrote it.” Read more...
Stephen Breyer on his Intellectual Influences
Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court Justice
“It’s about his 11 months in Auschwitz. I was reading this over the weekend—just to bone up for this interview—and just like every other time I’ve read it, it stretches my ability to comprehend. The physical and emotional pain is extremely intense. Even the most inured cynic is taken aback by the infrastructure of human cruelty in the camp.” Read more...
The best books on Philosophy and Prison
Andy West, Philosopher
“When it came out in the States it was known as Survival in Auschwitz. I think it’s a work of genius…some of it is testimony. But what I admire so much about it is that it is a book without pathos, or sentiment. Levi was a scientist, a radical empiricist. His ability and his care in describing the camp structure is unrelenting. It’s almost as if he answers his own question: have we got rid of rational man? Answer: No, because here I am, observing, writing, and thinking.” Read more...
The best books on Human Rights and Literature
Lyndsey Stonebridge, Literary Scholar
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a charming, prize-winning novel by Mark Haddon. Written as a mystery, the story is told through the eyes of a teenage boy who is great at maths but finds many other aspects of life difficult.
“This book is actually brilliant for any age. The story pitches the theme of autism implicitly. It’s set in a plot, a story, and the autism is not the main point. For me, that was a great way of presenting it. The story is sad, it’s funny, it has twists and turns. So I recommend it to everyone.” Read more...
The Best Books for Parents of Autistic Children
Syreeta Brown, Memoirist
“The main character is a young boy who is completely confused by the social interactions of people in his community and in his family, but he’s also very precocious in mathematics. The book describes, albeit fictionally, the disconnect between his understanding of systems – in this case mathematical, numerical systems – and his major difficulties in understanding people.” Read more...
The best books on Autism and Developmental Psychology
Simon Baron-Cohen, Psychologist
The Wealth of Nations
by Adam Smith
The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, is the founding text of modern economics. But as our interviews with experts below make clear, its author, Adam Smith, was a moral philosopher and no unabashed cheerleader for the capitalist system he saw flourishing around him in Glasgow, a city grown rich from trade with the American colonies:
“The Wealth of Nations is, of course, one of the most famous, though certainly not most read or understood, books of all time. It was first published in 1776. In fact, I was once asked on an exam in high school ‘Who invented capitalism in 1776?’” Read more...
Dennis Rasmussen, Philosopher
“What is amazing about Smith is that he tried to relate economics to morals and ethics, in the sense that economics is only a small part of what society should be thinking about.” Read more...
The best books on Globalisation
Stephen D King, Economist
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl
In Man’s Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, argued for the existentialist belief that even in the worst possible conditions, as human beings we still have control over how we think about our situation. The original title of the book, when it was first published in 1946, was Saying Yes to Life Anyway: A Psychologist Survives the Concentration Camp.
“What’s interesting about his account, which I found absolutely fascinating, is the way he explores the importance of meaning in life as the key to survival.” Read more...
Mary Fulbrook, Historian
“Frankl says, let me tell you and show you how I and my friends lived in the concentration camps. And if I can do it there, and suffer at that level, so you can you.” Read more...
The best books on High Performance Psychology
Michael Gervais, Psychologist
The Iliad
by Homer
“The rage of Achilles—sing it now, goddess, sing through me
the deadly rage that caused the Achaeans such grief
and hurled down to Hades the souls of so many fighters,
Leaving their naked flesh to be eaten by dogs
and carrion birds, as the will of Zeus was accomplished”
—Iliad, opening lines (Stephen Mitchell translation)
The Iliad, a Greek poem dating from around 700 BCE, is a defining text of western literature. If you want to see what academics say about it and its author(s), Homer, start with our interview with Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek Emeritus at Oxford University, below.
Which translation of the Iliad should you read? British actor and author Stephen Fry recommends either Robert Fagles’s translation (1969), or that of poet and translator Stephen Mitchell, which was published in 2011.
Of course all those millennia ago, the Iliad would have been principally listened to, and modern technology means that’s once again easily possible by listening to the poem as an audiobook. Our own Iliad audiobook is the Robert Fagles translation, magnificently narrated by the British actor—and veteran of the British Classics scene—Derek Jacobi. You can also opt for the audiobook of the Stephen Mitchell translation, which is narrated by the English-American actor Alfred Molina.
So find a fireside to settle down next to, imagine a bard who has memorised hundreds of lines of poetry, plug in your headphones, and press play.
“It is worth remembering of course that Homer’s Iliad doesn’t cover the causes of the War … the Apple of Discord, the Judgement of Paris, birth of Achilles and Abduction of Helen and so on – nor the end of the war. The action of the Iliad begins in the final year of the ten year siege of Troy and dramatises the weeks that begin with the feud between Agamemnon and Achilles and end with the death of Hector.” Read more...
Stephen Fry, Comedians & Humorist
“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. There is a choice that Achilles has to make. He is told that he has two alternative fates: he could stay away from the war and live out a long life and nobody would ever know or remember him. Or he could go and win eternal fame and glory, but would have a short life. In a way, that is a version of a dilemma that keeps coming back.” Read more...
The best books on Ancient Greece
Christopher Pelling, Classicist
Half of a Yellow Sun
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The most celebrated of a new generation of Nigerian novelists bravely and brilliantly tackles an event that still seems to whisper in the heart of the country’s affairs perhaps more than any other: the devastating civil war of 1967-70.
“Half of a Yellow Sun centres around a family as they transition from a position of influence and privilege to being just regular citizens of the newly formed Republic of Biafra. I don’t know how much I need to tell you, but, basically, about six years after Nigerian independence there was a civil war known as the Biafran War. It’s a beautifully written, big swing of a novel with lots of themes: moral responsibility, ethnic allegiances, class, race. And it’s all set against the backdrop of this pivotal time in Nigerian history.” Read more...
Chioma Okereke, Novelist
“This novel came out to a real fanfare of people acclaiming it as a superb piece of fiction. I’d heard a lot of people talk about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and what a brilliant writer she is. I thought, ‘I’ve got to give this a go.’ Oh my goodness! It’s another really big, immersive novel by somebody who really knows their stuff. And because it’s such recent history—late 60s and 1970—she has been able to draw on primary sources. That’s a rare thing when you’re writing historical fiction, that it’s still within living memory. So you know it’s right, that the details are correct. It’s like reading news reports, but in this incredible narrative, in which you’re really bound up with the characters.” Read more...
Historical Fiction Set Around the World
Jane Johnson, Historical Novelist
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin & James Costa
On the Origin of Species is Charles Darwin’s book on evolution that changed our understanding of the world, and our place in it, irrevocably. It is one of our most recommended books on Five Books.
“An educated person is someone who knows at least a little bit about the major disciplines in human endeavour. And in biology, this is what you need to know – not only historically but also contemporaneously, because Darwin was right, and still is right, about so many things.” Read more...
Jerry Coyne, Biologist
“It is one of the most important books written, and I always urge people to read it.” Read more...
Mark Kurlansky, Science Writer
“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...
“The Arabian Nights was a collection of popular, vernacular tales that was actually rather despised by scholars – the Arabic apparently is quite rough, compared to the elegance of the Farsi used in the much better known, more established and highly valued Persian romances of the time. The Nights tales were considered trifles and not looked after – the same has happened with a lot of early children’s literature. We don’t have a lot of it because no one saw fit to preserve it.” Read more...
Marina Warner, Novelist
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
by Malcolm X and assisted by Alex Haley, Laurence Fishburne (narrator)
“The story is that Malcolm X was in a very busy period of his life. He would turn up in the evenings and tell Alex Haley the story of his life, and Haley would write it down. But Haley was a wonderful journalist, so he turned it into a great narrative. As with all great biographers, there’s clearly a sympathy between them but not necessarily a fawning sycophancy. It’s one of the great books of American self-invention, and a great coming of age book. It’s a page-turner in every sense.” Read more...
The Best Intellectual Biographies
Henry Oliver, Biographer
“This is a text that you’ve got to read for yourself. It allows you to see how faith shapes Malcolm’s worldview, and his understanding of racism and the solution to racism. But it also allows you to see a historical figure who changes over time. Malcolm’s beliefs change over time, especially as they relate to white brothers and sisters, and the origins of racism and inequality while maintaining a commitment to black nationalism.” Read more...
The best books on The Civil Rights Era
Lerone Martin, Historian
Here Comes Everybody
by Clay Shirky
Here Comes Everybody, How Change Happens When People Come Together by Clay Shirky is an enlightening exploration of how technology can empower social and political organizers. Shirky is simply the best person at articulating what’s very weird and new about what’s going on. Read what Five Books experts have to say about this highly recommended book.
“It’s a really great book for anyone who wants to understand the social media revolution and how it completely changed the economics of organisation.” Read more...
The best books on 21st Century Foreign Policy
Anne-Marie Slaughter, International Relation
“If you had to pick one individual who was the sharpest and most prescient commentator on the web and the internet it would be Clay.” Read more...
Tyler Cowen, Economist
“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
“Hitchcock said of The Thirty-Nine Steps that it was a wonderful book to film because you didn’t need to do a storyboard, it was all there already.” Read more...
Michael Farr, Literary Scholar
Red Memory: The Afterlives of China's Cultural Revolution
by Tania Branigan
If you want to understand China, there is one piece of its history that you must understand, and that’s the Cultural Revolution. Nothing about the present makes sense without it. More than 100 million people were affected and yet, unlike Rwanda, South Africa or Germany post-World War II, China has yet to come to terms with what happened during those ten years of chaos.
“What Red Memory does very powerfully, as many specialist works on the Cultural Revolution have done before it, is to show that one of the deeply disturbing things about that decade was that people could begin on one side of the perpetrator-victim divide and end up on the other or flip back and forth between them. It’s a real mistake to try to divide up the people who suffered and the people who caused suffering because it was often members of the same family who were affected in different ways, and there were individuals who were victims and victimizers during different parts of their lives. Efforts to simplify this complicated event creates real problems for understanding China.” Read more...
Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Historian
“Tania Branigan was a journalist for The Guardian in China and what she realised is that there was this spectre she kept encountering, which was the unspoken legacy of the Cultural Revolution. It was obvious everyone knew, but no one wanted to dwell on it, or talk too much about it. It was a mass, collective experience, so most people she was encountering had either been through it themselves or their parents had been through it. Essentially, it has deformed Chinese society. The book goes right through to President Xi, whose father had been a big wheel in the Communist Party. He then fell from favour and was persecuted in the Cultural Revolution, as was Xi himself. Now he’s behaving with ever-increasing authoritarian tendencies, which is quite strange.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2023 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Frederick Studemann, Journalist
“Why is the book called This Time Is Different? Because there is a common theme. The typical pattern, that the authors highlight, is that during good times, when things go well and the economy is healthy—there is low unemployment, high consumption, and economic growth— debt is accumulated either by banks or governments of individual countries. Or by households, as was the case in the United States in the 2000s. As you accumulate more debt, one could become concerned that this is dangerous. With more debt, you become more vulnerable to debt becoming very expensive and not being able to repay it. But the typical response is, ‘Don’t worry, because this time is different…for one reason or another.’” Read more...
The best books on Fiscal Policy
Sergio de Ferra, Economist
“They…took an enormous amount of time to put together datasets that allow us to look back eight centuries and ask, quantitatively, whether there are any common denominators to financial crises. And the not-surprising answer is, ‘Yes, absolutely.’” Read more...
Andrew W Lo, Economist
“There was a real murder in Moscow in 1865, two elderly women killed by axe. Dostoyevsky was deeply moved by this crime. When a writer is deeply moved, he writes a novel. When it is a great writer, the story turns out to be a great novel. Crime and Punishment is on my list because I wrote my own version of the events. In a novel called F.M. (Dostoyevsky’s initials, Fyodor Mikhailovich) I introduce a newly discovered manuscript by Dostoevsky, a first version of Crime and Punishment, and it is a 100% mystery about a serial killer.” Read more...
Boris Akunin, Thriller and Crime Writer
“Crime and Punishment is probably Dostoevsky’s most conventional novel. It’s effectively a sort of literary crime novel, and is in some ways quite typical of its time. It’s got a fascinating structure, where a full 80% of the novel comes after he’s committed the crime but before he reaches the punishment. So for the majority novel, you are in suspense and, despite the title, a part of you genuinely believes he might get away with it.” Read more...
The Best Fyodor Dostoevsky Books
Alex Christofi, Literary Scholar
“What’s really neat in The Dispossessed is that we’re comparing two worlds that are right next to each other, because we have a world and then a moon on which people are also living. The moon has had an anarchist, collectivist revolution, and is living by a set of very strict, collaborative, cooperative philosophical principles, which leads to a life of equality, austerity, hard work, and many other elements…Then the neighbour world is beautiful, and full of rich and gorgeous things…but also full of decadence and corruption and inequality – because when everybody who’s an idealist of that type leaves your planet for the moon, your planet gets philosophically pushed in the other direction. The book holds these two worlds up next to each other.” Read more...
Ada Palmer, Novelist
“The Dispossessed is as much a political and cultural thought experiment as it is a novel, though it is also extremely entertaining to read and moves really nicely, with characters that you really relate to. It’s about two worlds, a planet and its moon. One is a society very much like our own, patriarchal and capitalist, and constantly various parts of it are at war with various other parts of it. And on the moon, colonists from the first world have seceded to set up their own anarchist, entirely equal society. The Dispossessed is about taking this political concept and picking it apart forensically: what exactly would life be like, if we could do it – if we were living in an anarcho-syndicalist world? Would it work? Would everyone be on board? The cynics would obviously say no, it would fall apart immediately. Ursula Le Guin is much more intelligent than that. Neither world is inherently good; neither world is inherently bad. It’s just about exploring the differences between them.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction Worlds
Tom Huddleston, Novelist
“The Brothers Karamazov is a real detective novel, a very rare phenomenon for 19th-century Russian fiction. We have a mysterious murder here, we have several suspects, we have a courtroom investigation, and we do not know eventually, not for sure, who is the culprit.” Read more...
Boris Akunin, Thriller and Crime Writer
“Dostoevsky was a devout Christian and The Brothers Karamazov, his last and possibly greatest novel, was a heartfelt plea for the necessity of faith. The phrase ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted’ is often attributed to Dostoevsky. He actually never wrote that, but the sentiment certainly runs through much of his work, and most especially through The Brothers Karamazov.” Read more...
The best books on Morality Without God
Kenan Malik, Science Writer
“Annihilation itself is very short, and intense and creepy and beautiful. We follow four women on an expedition into Area X: the anthropologist, the psychologist, the surveyor, and our protagonist the biologist. We don’t know names, or much more about Area X; we are told very early that two of the band especially don’t need to be named, as they will die imminently. This is the whole tone of the novel – sparse, tense, mysterious. For all that, the descriptions are incredibly evocative.” Read more...
“The Southern Reach is a research institution set up to investigate the mysterious ‘Area X’, an exclusion zone with strange and frightening effects on the human mind. We follow ‘the biologist’, one member of a four-woman team that has been dispatched into the zone. Long abandoned and fenced off, it has grown into a pristine wilderness – but it is haunted by traces of the expeditions that have gone before them. I can’t tell you how eerie and absorbing it is.” Read more...
The best books on Abandoned Places
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
“Earth has been destroyed, and we follow a young woman from the space station housing human survivors. They’re wronged, they’re angry, and they’re clearly being run as a tiny illiberal personal empire by their idolised leader. Valkyr only begins to wake up to this when she’s assigned to ‘nursery’ – child-bearing – instead of the soldierly posting she’d been expecting. From there, the unravelling of her world begins. You think you’ve got the measure of the book, and then you meet the central AI and its capabilities, and a whole new sci fi element is introduced that re-opens the game.” Read more...
“Some Desperate Glory starts as a convincing, straightforward yarn about an outpost of human survivors on a space station, Gaea. Earth has been destroyed by an all-knowing benevolent AI, the Wisdom, and the humans left behind are righteously angry. No-one is more committed to their vengeful cause than our hero, Valkyr…The Chicago Review of Books said that ‘it’s hard to overstate how good this novel is at what it’s doing'” Read more...
“The novel can be funny, it can be shocking. There are plenty of plots and counter-plots, betrayals and murders. Claudius somehow keeps surviving, almost because no one sees him as worth assassinating. And a wonderful layer of dramatic irony hovers over the whole piece, because we know that this completely ignored, marginalised figure in the Roman court is going to become the emperor. That runs like a vein of dynamite through the novel.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set During the Classical Era
Ferdia Lennon, Novelist
“I picked up the book in a bookstore one day. From the opening lines, I was completely hooked. It’s very funny in that way of English writers of a certain generation (to the extent that, inexcusably perhaps, I tend to get the author confused with Roald Dahl). I once saw an interview with Robert Graves and apparently he just wrote I, Claudius to make a bit of money, he didn’t take it seriously at all. But he was a great classical scholar and so the book feels real. It’s written in the first person, pretending to be an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, and although I know, deep down, it’s only Robert Graves pretending to be Claudius, I came away feeling I really knew Clau-Clau.” Read more...
Sophie Roell, Journalist
“A Great American Novel presupposes the experiences of a manageably unified nation, which is, of course, not the story of America. It’s maybe the dream of America, though, which is why some of my favorite American novels, like Invisible Man, have a distinctly dreamlike quality. I do think that you could perhaps call Invisible Man the most characteristic American novel, in that it so thoroughly acknowledges this struggle and embraces it in its form. I also don’t think of Invisible Man as existing purely in a textual sphere. I’ve always felt that it lies at the intersection of a number of different arts – painting, music, sculpture – and that it alternately mimics or incorporates their forms as it goes; I would use the word ‘artwork’ rather than novel.” Read more...
“For Ellison, American racism creates a condition in which the black person is unrecognizable in this sense. Using the resources of dark comedy—especially in the incredible Trueblood and Battle Royale sequences—Ellison describes the mingled, ambiguous fusion of subjection and power, imprisonment and freedom, that comprise the black condition in midcentury America. I think of Ice and Invisible Man as the two great works of midcentury modernism that most powerfully—and subtly—explore the difference race and gender make to modernism’s key themes.” Read more...
Michael Clune, Literary Scholar
“It follows the story of a young man who is brought to Oxford from China. He is brought there to learn this magic, along with several other people from various backgrounds from around the British Empire, all brought in to use their powers to further the Empire. Over time, he begins to turn against this. It turns into this beautifully written anti-colonial narrative that’s also imbued heavily with magic, as well as people’s interpersonal relationships, and then the history of the time. It’s really well done.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fantasy Books
P. Djèlí Clark, Novelist
“Set in an alternate 1830s Oxford, it tracks several real historical events, but makes one elegant magical substitution: the source of the British Empire’s economic power. In this world, Oxford makes Britain rich through the production of silver magic. A silver bar is inscribed with the same word in two languages, and what is lost in translation is magically produced by the bar. As the conceptual gaps close up between European languages, more distant languages are badly needed. But there’s a catch: the magic can only be worked by a native speaker. This conceit allows Kuang to sharply clarify relationships of extraction, co-option and complicity. Four linguists are welcomed into the hallowed halls of Oxford. Their linguistic skills are directly required for the magic at the heart of the Empire’s power. The Empire is extractive: the benefits of the magic are not extended to the countries it relies on. What are our young linguists to do?” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of 2023: The Hugo Awards
