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...
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
Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus
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; or 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).
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
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
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
“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
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
“I read Moby-Dick about 13 years ago, way before I started to write naval fiction. I read it because I really like the film Jaws, and the main character in that was based on Ahab in Moby-Dick. I read it and I just really, really liked it. Moby-Dick was the book that really started my love of sea stories. It’s about crews at the extreme facing quite formidable forces and seeing how they behave in those situations. I like the way the sea is treated as a character all the way through the book, even before they get on board the ship. The sea is prevalent in everything, this ominous force in the background. I like the characters and the different dynamics between them. Starbuck, the first mate, is maybe my favorite fictional character of all time.” Read more...
The Best Naval Historical Fiction
Katie Daysh, Novelist
“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
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.
“I only read Jane Eyre for the first time a couple of years ago. I’m in my 50s now, at the stage where I’m thinking that I’d better get to reading all those books I told myself I’d get to ‘someday,’ before it’s too late. Jane Eyre was one of those books. I expected to enjoy it, but not to love it as much as I do. It isn’t really horror, but so what? It’s certainly Gothic. It’s full of darkness, and it does have some moments of real, striking horror. It’s about Jane Eyre, of course, a woman who comes of age into a world in which really the only way of maintaining any kind of independence is becoming a tutor for some rich person’s kid. So this is the path that she takes, and that’s how she meets Mr. Rochester – a rich, imposing man, apparently a widower, with a child he needs looked after.” Read more...
Nathan Ballingrud, Novelist
“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 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
“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
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate, a novel set in World War II by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books on Five Books (including by historians). Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman brought into it his experience as a journalist, accompanying the Red Army at major battles, including Stalingrad and Berlin. He was also among the first to enter Treblinka and witness firsthand the horrors of the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, the book was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
Life and Fate is a long novel. If you want to listen to it as an audiobook, there’s no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version of Life and Fate, starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad is the precursor to Life and Fate, translated into English for the first time in 2019 and also well worth reading)
“Life and Fate…is probably the most important work of fiction about World War II. But, in fact, it is more than just a fiction because it is based on very close reporting from his time with the soldiers. It is a deliberate act of literary homage to Tolstoy as one can see in the title. It is definitely the War and Peace of the 20th century.” Read more...
The best books on World War II
Antony Beevor, Military Historians & Veteran
“It’s the first novel to come out of the 1940s and 50s that attempts a comparative indictment of Hitlerism and Stalinism, the two varieties of totalitarianism that Grossman knew too well.” Read more...
The Best Vasily Grossman Books
Maxim D Shrayer, Literary Scholar
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.
“Pride and Prejudice really is the GOAT of enemies-to-lovers romance! Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet come from different social classes and face societal expectations and family pressures that they must overcome but their banter reveals how similar they are and their personalities are well-suited to each other.” Read more...
The Best Enemies-to-Lovers Books
Lauren Ford, Novelist
“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
“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
“BAFTA-winning actor Jake Gyllenhaal becomes Nick Carraway, our guide through the glittering yet destructive pull of materialism in pre-Depression New York. Listening time is just under five hours.” Read more...
“The book showcases both the allure and the ricketiness of the American dream. The story shows the American dream is fragile despite its potency and persistence. It shows its perpetual obsolescence. We often hear that it’s harder to rise from the bottom to the top in the US than it is in many other countries. Even in Fitzgerald’s day, the fluidity of society was fading. Perhaps The Great Gatsby still seems germane because of the way it showed the mismatch between American actualities and American ideals, the two-faced character of the American dream, its materialism and idealism.” Read more...
“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
“The Haunting of Hill House is a ghost story. She was inspired by people going into places to hold seances and get in touch with ghosts or spirits. She wanted to write a story about it, which she did, and she did it really well. As always in horror, it isn’t just about the ghost. It’s about the people who have come to this place. It captures what’s going on internally with these individuals who are at the house” Read more...
The Best 20th-Century American Horror Books
V. Castro, Novelist
“Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is, to me, the perfect horror novel. It’s one of the magnificent achievements of literature in the 20th century.” Read more...
Nathan Ballingrud, Novelist
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
“The idea that you want him to succeed even though he’s a psychopath is a real feat of literary genius. Because if anyone put that in a synopsis, you’d think, ‘That’s not going to work.’ Even though every part of your moral consciousness is telling you that it’s wrong, there you are thinking, ‘I want you to get away with this, I want it to go your way.’ To get us, as the reader, to empathize with somebody who is such a horrific, damaged person is just such brilliant writing.” Read more...
“It fascinates me that René Clément, the French film director, adapted this novel into a film called Plein Soleil (known as Purple Noon in the United States). In the story, Tom Ripley is sent from New York to Italy by the father of Dickie Greenleaf to bring Dickie back to the United States. As he ingratiates himself with his son, Tom Ripley adopts increasingly dangerous, amoral and murderous measures to reap the rewards of his lifestyle and finally, steal his inheritance. The novel starts in a gloomy Manhattan, where Ripley meets Dickie Greenleaf’s father. It’s not bright, it’s claustrophobic. And then we come to this Mediterranean world of plein soleil where in the movie everything is brightness—there’s a yacht, these lovely towns, and everybody is wearing lovely styles and costumes.” Read more...
The Best Book-to-Movie Adaptations
Peter Markham, Film Director
“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
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 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
“Beloved is hard to categorize. I read this when I was at university many years ago, for my undergraduate degree. I remember feeling that I had never read anything like this in my life; the way it’s written is so unique. It’s very much a gothic fantasy, but it’s using the Gothic to look at slavery, and that horrific past that affected so many people. The protagonist, Sethe, was born a slave and is haunted by her ghost baby. The intrigue for me was that she had killed this child, and yet it was very clear that she loved this child. Why would you do such a thing? – and that really takes you into the horrors of slavery, and the kind of life that she did not want for her child.” Read more...
“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
“She goes right back, in a very conventional structure, to relate an extremely unconventional life: Gauguin’s revolutionary grandmother, his beautiful artist mother, his growing up in France, but feeling himself to be alienated from it, ‘a savage from Peru’. She shows the comedy of his nature and character, coupled with, often, the extraordinary sadness of the reversals and sufferings that he endured…It’s also beautifully illustrated. There are wonderful juxtapositions—of Gauguin’s portrait of van Gogh with van Gogh’s portrait of Gauguin. There are intelligently, understatedly captioned, huge, luscious Gauguin paintings throughout the book. It’s a very pleasant, beautiful object to handle, to touch, as much as to look at.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2025 Duff Cooper Prize
Minoo Dinshaw, Biographer
“It’s about one of the most important painters of his age, a man who helped to steer art towards post-Impressionism and was a huge influence on a whole generation. It’s also rather an extraordinary life…Sue Prideaux is a master storyteller and a wonderful biographer, and the book really argued its way onto the shortlist without much resistance.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books: The 2024 Baillie Gifford Prize Shortlist
Isabel Hilton, Journalist
Patriot: A Memoir
by Alexei Navalny, translated by Arch Tait with Stephen Dalziel
“It starts as an autobiography of his life: how he grew up, the various military towns he lived in, where he spent his summers in Ukraine, and what the best time he had was. He then goes through his political evolution in Russia, and then the most dramatic pages of the book and most transformative reading is when Navalny writes from prison. It’s his prison diaries. Then, that prison diary turns into his testament, the last words of a person who knows where this is going.” Read more...
The Best Nonfiction Books on Russia: The 2025 Pushkin House Prize
Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, Political Scientist
“Alexei Navalny’s Patriot is the whole package: it tells a compelling story of a man whose life was important and impactful and it’s a very literary book. The writing is beautiful! It’s not just a journalistic account of Navalny’s struggles under Putin’s authoritarianism, but it also showcases Navalny’s talent as a writer. Bravo to the translators because the writing flows very well in English.” Read more...
The Best Memoirs: The 2025 NBCC Autobiography Shortlist
May-lee Chai, Short Story Writer
“Harris is a great historical thriller writer. He has a deftness of touch and way of writing that depicts the classical period as being very vivid and very modern – and most importantly, not without humour and the ability to subvert himself from time to time. Imperium is not just about Cicero and his servant Tiro, but it’s a profound comment on the last days of the Roman Republic.” Read more...
Mike Downey, Film Director
“It’s the story of Cicero, but it’s narrated by his slave and secretary Tiro. You have this interesting tension, wherein we have a story of all-consuming ambition, narrated by someone whose own ambitions and prospects are completely limited by their enslavement—and yet he does love and is devoted to Cicero. Beyond all of this, it’s just a very fun, propulsive narrative and brilliantly-done courtroom drama—or sequence of courtroom drama set pieces—taking place within this vividly conjured, well-researched late Republic Rome. It’s an excellent character study and a fun, fantastic read.” Read more...
Historical Novels Set During the Classical Era
Ferdia Lennon, Novelist
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez, translated by Gregory Rabassa
“Our greatest classic of all time, One Hundred Years of Solitude, is a fantasy novel. But when you go to libraries, you never see it in the fantasy section. They put it in the section of Latin American literature, or of classic literature or of Nobel Prize literature. But it is a fantasy…One Hundred Years of Solitude is a saga. It’s the story of a family, from the couple that had the first kids to the end of the family, which is also the end of times. When you read reviews of One Hundred Years of Solitude, they’ll say it’s the story of Latin America—and perhaps it is. But, essentially, it’s the story of a town from when it is founded until it finishes its history…It really amazes me that a person from a tiny town in the Caribbean area, which is not the most developed in the country, was able to accomplish this huge achievement. Cien años de soledad is a great novel like Don Quijote de la Mancha. It’s that big.” Read more...
Pilar Quintana, Novelist
“Rabassa has accomplished something utterly terrific in his translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude. This novel, which was revolutionary in its structure and its use of imagination, is now absolutely compelling in English as well as in Spanish. On the assumption that most people who have been influenced by García Márquez in the English speaking world have been influenced through Rabassa’s translation, it had a huge effect on novel writing in English. Writers like Toni Morrison, for example, or Salman Rushdie.” Read more...
Edith Grossman, Translator
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
“With Wolf Hall, I was right there in the Tudor era. Thomas Cromwell—or her version of Thomas Cromwell—really came alive for me. You live with him and his family. You have sympathy with him and his life and the way he operated. That’s what I want from books: that they take me into another world and immerse me in it…I forgot that she was a contemporary writer. I could have been reading something that was a journal of the times, it felt so real. It’s so clever how she uses the language. You’re not bogged down with the way they might have talked, but you have the rhythm of the language.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction Set in England
Lesley Thomson, Thriller and Crime Writer
“Hilary Mantel possesses an extraordinary historical imagination and her recreation of the world of the 1530s through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell is, I think, utterly convincing.” Read more...
Thomas Penn, Historian
“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
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
“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
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
The Aeneid (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
by Virgil
“Arms and the man I sing, who,
forced by fate,
And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,
Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore”
—Aeneid, opening lines (Robert Fitzgerald translation)
The Aeneid was written by the Roman poet Virgil, in the age of Augustus, as a founding myth for the emerging Roman empire. See below why experts picked it as an important book on a variety of subjects. Author Selina O’Grady, author of And Man Created God, specified the translation by the American poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald (1983), though in this New York Times review, you can see the arguments for also reading the translation by Robert Fagles (2006), the late American academic and poet.
If you want to read the Latin alongside the English, you can turn to the Loeb Classical Library, though it inconveniently stretches over two books and the English is a little dated.
In classical times poems were meant to be listened to and rather excitingly the British actor, Simon Callow, has narrated an audiobook of the Aeneid, based on Robert Fagles’s translation.
“It’s beautiful and poetic. Fitzgerald was a poet by calling. And I find this the most beautiful and high-flown of the mid-century American translations” Read more...
Sarah Ruden, Literary Scholar
“Virgil’s Aeneid gives an account of the Trojan Horse and the sacking of Troy.” Read more...
Stephen Fry, Comedians & Humorist
“It’s a brilliant novel about an alt-reality Victorian England where translation has actual power. If you find these pairs of words that almost mean the same thing but not quite, you can inscribe them on silver bars, and they generate energy. These silver bars are used to power industry. So the British Empire is bringing linguists from all the colonised countries, from the most far-flung places, but then these linguists rebel. There’s an amazing scene where all the rebel linguists are in Oxford. These people speak everything and love languages—they have mad combinations of languages that no one but a linguist would have learned. And that love of real, arcane languages has brought them together, and in fact is what makes them start a revolution. It’s a deceptively fun book.” Read more...
The best books on Endangered Languages
Samantha Ellis, Memoirist
“There’s such an original magical concept at the heart of this book. A silver bar is engraved with the ‘same’ word in two different languages. However, the translation can never be direct, and whatever is lost in translation is produced magically by the silver. For example, gardens can be made magically tranquil if the word in one language conveys this tranquillity, and the other word does not.” Read more...
“Lots and lots of people know the phrase, that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ means a split personality: good on one side, evil on the other. They might even have seen one or two film adaptations of the book. But I think one of the things that would surprise folk who haven’t read the original book, first of all, is that it’s very short. It’s a novella, only about 150 pages long, yet it’s dealing with such amazingly deep themes.” Read more...
Landmarks of Scottish Literature
James Robertson, Novelist
“It’s amazingly intricate and perfectly structured, and even though now we know the twist – we know that Doctor Jekyll is Mr Hyde – it still works. I assume that when it was first published it must have been like Fight Club or The Sixth Sense where people who had read it would tell their friends, you won’t believe the ending of this. You will never see it coming because it is completely out of left field.” Read more...
Kim Newman, Novelist
“Scholars have been able to find some really interesting conversation between the texts of Phantastes and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In structure, the novels are very similar. There are even certain sections, like the conversation with the flowers, where Dodgson is using the exact same words, the exact same names of the exact same plants as MacDonald. So they’re clearly having fun back and forth with each other, playing with the words and the ideas of someone else.” Read more...
The Best Victorian Fantasy Novels
Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, Literary Scholar
“I love Alice’s growing sense of wonder at the topsy-turvy universe she enters. Wonder, as Plato and Aristotle tell us, is the beginning of philosophy, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a deeply philosophical book. Alice is besieged by humans, some enraged, others just plain eccentric. Surrounded by falling objects, bewildered by beasts, and doing her best to stay afloat in a pool of tears, poor Alice is so disoriented that she’s in a state of permanent existential crisis. In the end, she stands up to all the outlandish creatures in Wonderland, and then skips off to have a cup of tea, leaving you wondering about Alice and her close encounters with nonsense, disorder, and lawlessness.” Read more...
Maria Tatar, Literary Scholar
“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
“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
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 my friends and I lived in the concentration camps. And if I can do it there, and suffer at that level, so can you.” Read more...
The best books on High Performance Psychology
Michael Gervais, Psychologist
“This is an English country house mystery, although people don’t think of it in those terms. Probably because it’s more brutal. It’s gothic. The house in this case is much more isolated than is typical, up on these lonely moors, and there’s this eerie, deadly spectre…. It contrasts with what we usually think of in country house mysteries, which is ladies in pearls and evening gowns, gentlemen in black time. In this case, it’s a demonic dog pursuing people across the moors.” Read more...
The Best Country House Mystery Books
Gareth Rubin, Journalist
“Most people when you ask them what the best Sherlock Holmes story is will say The Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s one of the four novels featuring Holmes. Probably the best novel in my mind that he wrote, and probably the most atmospheric: the moor in Dartmoor with a convict prison nearby, and with very few potential suspects. I understand that Doyle went there on holiday and had a friend who told him the local lore about a hound from hell. The only downside to the novel is that there were so few people living there that the suspect pool was very limited.” Read more...
David Baldacci, Novelist
“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
“I defy anyone to read those opening pages…and not have it slightly get under their skin and haunt them…I believe that there’s been a lot of dispute about whether Mikhail Bulgakov was writing against Soviet atheism or in favour of it, against religion or in favour of it. Like all great art, it’s shot through with ambivalence. But I don’t think he could ever have written this other than through the collision of the creative impulse and the soulless worldview of Soviet communism. I just don’t think it would have been created other than through that rather disfiguring collision between creativity and conformity. And, for that reason alone, I just think it’s an astonishing book.” Read more...
Nick Clegg on his Favourite Books
Nick Clegg, Politician
“The Master and Margarita is brilliant, not only for its interweaving of past and present and linking of different timelines with the Pontius Pilate story, but also the complexity of the relationship between good and evil in it. You really feel for the evil characters — you find yourself backing them completely in their worst actions. The Rolling Stones song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ was heavily inspired by The Master and Margarita. It’s a beautiful commentary and reflection on questions like ‘what are we doing in our lives, why are we here?'” Read more...
The best books on Surrealism and the Brain
Bradley Voytek, Medical Scientist
“I’m going to say something stupid, because, yes, of course, it was a best-seller that was turned into a film starring Brad Pitt. So it’s hardly unknown. But when I started reading it I thought: why did nobody tell me how good this book is? Fundamentally, I think so many people think: ‘zombies are not for me.’ I’m one of them. But this book totally transcends that category. The realism is extraordinary; it’s a wild feat of imagination.” Read more...
The Best Near-Future Dystopias
Rosa Rankin-Gee, Novelist
“World War Z is a novel that bridges the gap between pulp and high literature. It takes a subject matter which we would think of as mainstream geek culture, but it finds universal human themes, develops characters that you care about, and also manages to be culturally critical. It is clearly critical of many of the post-9/11 choices made by the United States and Britain.” Read more...
Greg Garrett, Literary Scholar
“I, Claudius is dazzling. It gives voice to one of Imperial Rome’s most unlikely chroniclers. Claudius is crippled, he stammers and he’s dismissed by his family as an idiot. It’s precisely because he’s overlooked in a murderous world of power-hungry elites that he survives and eventually becomes emperor. Though none of Claudius’ real-life writings remain, Graves creates a compelling voice for him: garrulous, vital, and very funny.” Read more...
The Best Historical Fiction About Real People
Louisa Treger, Novelist
“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
“It’s a poem that comes out of conflict in Florence in various ways. In a most literal sense it comes out of Dante’s exile – he was exiled in 1302 as a result of the conflicts between several political factions and he remained exiled, in various parts of Italy, for the remainder of his life (he died in 1321). The Commedia reflects that acute sense of the loss of one’s homeland and the resentment of that – Florence gets attacked quite viciously by characters in the Inferno. And then there’s the epigraph for the Inferno: ‘A Florentine by birth but not by disposition.'” Read more...
Nick Havely, Literary Scholar
“Dante is of importance to Leonardo in two respects. One is a fairly obvious one in that he really set in train…the standard Florentine poetic genre of the beloved lady. In his work, Beatrice is never really somebody he knows that well but she is idealised and sublimated into this extraordinary object of rarefied desire. He set in motion a tradition that goes through Petrarch and beyond, and one that was still thriving in the Leonardo courts…The other aspect to it is that Dante is the supreme poet-natural philosopher. We know about Dante’s imagination, we know his great storytelling abilities, but we tend to take into account rather less that in The Divine Comedy and in all his works – the Convivio (the Banquet) not least – there is an enormous amount of learning about objects, about physics, about the behaviour of things in the natural world and about light, above all. The Paradiso is about light. And also about the act of seeing. So, I think, for Leonardo, it was not just that Dante was the most potent poet he could read but that he set in train a sense of the science of art; the poetic imagination – ‘fantasia’ as Dante and Leonardo called it – is compatible with ‘intelletto’ – with the intellect – and that these are two strings to the poet’s bow. So, it’s the ability to understand how the natural world operates and the ability then to transmute that into an imaginative realm.” Read more...
The best books on Leonardo da Vinci
Martin Kemp, Art Historians, Critics & Curator
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
“Ishiguro’s literary trick is that the world Klara knows is limited by what she can see or what she is told about. As readers, we might have a better idea of some of the things she doesn’t realise—what she has got herself into, say—but the narrative might not go where we expect or perhaps hope. We’re assembling Klara’s world alongside Ishiguro. And the idea of the Sun as potentially a God is fascinating; in science fiction it could, of course, be a superior being.” Read more...
The Best Science Fiction of 2022: The Arthur C. Clarke Award Shortlist
Andrew M. Butler, Film Critics & Scholar
“I love this book. This is told from the point of view of an ‘artificial friend.’ Klara is a robot who’s conscious, sentient—a person—who is designed to be a companion to a wealthy disabled girl. Her whole purpose is to be as good a companion as possible to this girl, Josie. Ishiguro is brilliant in giving you the world through the eyes of Klara. It’s a very meditative, reflective book.” Read more...
Science Fiction and Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, Philosopher
