Most Recommended Books
Looking for a book? We have the world’s largest collection of expert book recommendations. With hundreds of topics to choose from, we have you covered from ancient history to Zionism. Our experts range from philosophers to politicians, economists to novelists, historians to comedians. They’re all at the top of their professions and able to give insightful and engaging reading lists on their particular area of expertise. Here are our most recommended books to help you discover your next great read:
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.
“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...
“Mill points out that very often, throughout history, people have thought that they were certainly right, and then turned out to be quite wrong.” Read more...
Peter Singer on Nineteenth-Century Philosophy
Peter Singer, Philosopher
Nineteen Eighty-Four
by George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell is a dystopian novel written in 1948. Often a standard text in school for teenagers, 1984 is many people’s first introduction to totalitarianism. Ominously prescient in some ways, (such as the scope for surveillance to reach into our lives through the ubiquity of screens) and wide off the mark in others (Big Brother’s omnipresent, unitary police state is not a reality we live with in the West), it makes fascinating reading.
Some of Orwell’s inventions from 1984 entered the English language, like ‘Thought Police,’ ‘Big Brother’ ‘Newspeak’ and of course, the general concept of an ‘Orwellian’ society or future.
“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...
“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
War and Peace (Book)
by Leo Tolstoy
Which translation of the book War and Peace is best? What kind of reviews did Leo Tolstoy’s masterpiece get when it was published? Why has the book War and Peace been chosen by philosophers, historians and novelists as one of the most important ever written? Find out more about one of our most recommended books by reading the expert commentary about War and Peace below.
The audiobook of War and Peace is narrated by the RADA-trained actor, the late Neville Jason.
“Classics of literature often seem intimidating, especially when they’re long. What’s interesting about them is that often they’re very easy reads, especially once you adjust to the language, which normally takes a few chapters. For me, War and Peace was, literally, a beach read. I read it on holiday the year I turned 19. I spent the days on the beach clutching it in the sand. At night, I stayed awake in the hut where we were staying to find out what happened next by the light of a small lamp, long after everyone else had gone to sleep and trying my best not to disturb anyone.” Read more...
“One of the key questions that Tolstoy asks in the appendix is the central question of War and Peace: how can we explain the fact that, on orders, millions of people go out and kill one another, when they know that killing another human being is morally wrong?” Read more...
Cécile Fabre, Philosopher
Scoop
by Evelyn Waugh
“The older I got and the more wars I covered – I have done about 18 – the more true it became”–Veteran BBC journalist Martin Bell on Evelyn Waugh’s journalistic satire Scoop.
“I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered.” 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
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
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot (real name Mary Anne Evans), was first published in 1871 and is a quintessential Victorian novel. The novel is set in the fictitious English town of Middlemarch during 1829–1832, and follows several distinct, intersecting stories with a large cast of characters. It is one of Five Books’ most recommended books.
“Middlemarch is staggeringly brilliant, but it’s a labour of love—it’ll take even the most diligent weeks to read…. 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...
“I was in my early twenties and hungry for long, character-driven narratives. Dorothea Brooke was a wonder to me—Tolstoyan in her richness, truly good without a forced or irritating saintliness.” Read more...
Esi Edugyan on Books That Influenced Her
Esi Edugyan, Novelist
“What he’s making is an incredibly modern, intimate, psychological diagnosis of the human condition.” Read more...
Simon Yarrow, Historian
“A lot of people think becoming a Christian is a decision you make. St Augustine doesn’t really think that.” Read more...
A N Wilson recommends the best Christian Books
A N Wilson, Biographer
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.
“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
“Shelley had no truck with modesty and restraint, or doing what was expected of her. She let her imagination go as far as it could.” Read more...
Sarah Perry recommends the best Gothic Fiction
Sarah Perry, Novelist
“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...
“One of the ideas in this book is that minds are predictive, not reactive. It feels to us like we just react to the things that are happening to us, but in fact our brains are constantly guessing what’s going to happen in the next moment. Dan’s book was one of the first books that really took on this idea of prediction – which is, I would say, one of the great innovations in the last decade or two of neuroscience research.” Read more...
Lisa Feldman Barrett, Psychologist
Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë was published in 1847 and achieved immediate success. This essential classic book is still relevant in today’s world. It is a successful mixture of romantic novel and gothic fiction.
“I think Charlotte Brontë’s most accomplished book is Villette. It’s probably a better book, it’s tighter and more sophisticated in some ways. But there’s something about Jane Eyre that is just deeply emotionally compelling for me.” Read more...
Lucy Atkins, Journalist
“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 recommends the best Gothic Fiction
Sarah Perry, Novelist
“The beginning is hard going. Once you get past that, then suddenly you’re into these beautiful and inspiring descriptions of nature.” Read more...
“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...
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:
“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
“Living today in Trump’s America, I am constantly reminded of specific passages in the Republic, most saliently his warnings of how a demagogue might arise in the midst of a democracy by fanning up resentments and fears.” Read more...
Rebecca Goldstein on Reason and its Limitations
Rebecca Goldstein, Philosopher
Man's Search for Meaning
by Viktor Frankl
***Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl has been recommended 5 times in our expert interviews***
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...
“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 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...
“It’s a long book and it covers many things. But it’s particularly important for the history of reading.” Read more...
William St Clair on Reading the Romantics
William St Clair, Historian
“Possibly more so than any other leader today, she lives strong values in her every decision. There is no more powerful leadership story.” Read more...
Brett Wigdortz, Nonprofit Leaders & Activist
“For more than two decades, every conversation in Burma or about Burma has ended up being about Aung San Suu Kyi.” Read more...
The best books on Human Rights
Steve Crawshaw, Journalist
Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
This is about a guy using econometrics to predict which baseball players will do better in advancing wins, a remarkable use of economic thinking.
“I like this book because statistics is a very dry subject, but Lewis makes the numbers come to life by integrating them into Beane’s life story.” Read more...
Timothy J. Jorgensen, Biologist
“What the book is really about is a guy who is using some econometrics to predict which players will do better in advancing wins, which is a remarkable use of economic thinking.” Read more...
Books that Show Economics is Fun
Daniel Hamermesh, Economist
To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
To Kill an Mockingbird was Harper Lee’s only published novel and it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961. This celebrated novel depicts the issues of racism that she observed as a child in her hometown in Alabama. To Kill an Mockingbird was first published in November 1960. Subsequently an early 1957 version was published in 2015 under the title Go Set A Watchman.
“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
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations
by David S Landes
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998) was written by Harvard economics and history professor David Landes (1924-2013). An unlikely bestseller that took on Adam Smith’s key question—why some nations are rich and others poor—it’s also a great read. See what our experts have said about this book and why it’s so important below:
“Landes argues, for example, that the most significant invention of the last 800 years was the mechanical clock, because until you…can reliably subdivide time, you can’t have capitalism” Read more...
The best books on Negotiating the Digital Age
Nick Harkaway, Novelist
“It’s the most erudite examination of what causes economic development and growth that’s been written in many decades.” Read more...
The best books on Understanding the Burmese Economy
Sean Turnell, Economist
” I think it’s probably his happiest book. Which is a little weird to say but it does have the most sincere and overt love relationship of all of his works, between the father and the son. It’s very purely represented. You can’t doubt the importance of that love and the sustained power of it, and its priority both for the characters and the premise of the book as a whole.” Read more...
“In my view, The Road is the greatest novel ever written, and McCarthy one of the most important writers of the last hundred years. Its bleakness is interspersed with sentences so beautiful I wept.” Read more...
Dracula
by Bram Stoker
Dracula by Bram Stoker is the classic 1897 Gothic horror story. The most famous vampire story, Dracula has underlying themes of race, religion, superstition, science, and sexuality. Find out why Dracula is one of Five Books’ most recommended books. Also worth looking at are Bram Stokers Notes for Dracula which contains Stoker’s research notes.
“Dracula is very explicit. That’s what’s so surprising about it.” Read more...
“Personally, 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” Read more...
Darryl Jones, Literary Scholar
The Argumentative Indian
by Amartya Sen
In sixteen linked essays, Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen discusses India’s intellectual and political heritage and how its argumentative tradition is vital for the success of its democracy and secular politics.
“Depending how you count, almost any nation could be portrayed as argumentative. But he uses this central theme to range over an amazing breadth of scholarship” Read more...
The best books on The Indian Economy
Kaushik Basu, Economist
“He shows that in fact there were roots of a democratic culture in India long before the British ever got there, and that is what he means by the ‘argumentative Indian’.” Read more...
The best books on The End of The West
David Marquand, Political Scientist
“If I had to pick just one self-contained book that lays out Dawkins’s philosophy and methodology, and shows his literary skills, I would have to pick this one.” Read more...
Jerry Coyne, Biologist
“In the Dawkins book I chose, The Blind Watchmaker, he brilliantly explains how complex mechanisms and structures are put together by the process of evolution. It is true that he makes certain theological points that I don’t agree with.” Read more...
Kenneth Miller recommends the best Arguments against Creationism
Kenneth Miller, Biologist
“Most military historians and most students of war will say there’s never been a book as important as Clausewitz’s On War.” Read more...
The Best Military History Books
Hew Strachan, Military Historian and Veteran
“The key message is that strategic principles that we, as practitioners, might use in war depend on what the nature of war is. Which is where we get to a shifty terrain because there are any number of ideas about what the nature of war is.” Read more...
The best books on Military Strategy
Antulio Echevarria II, Military Historian and Veteran
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
Recommended five times on Five Books by economists, politicians and others, Brave New World is Aldous Huxley’s brilliant dystopian masterpiece.
“It 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, Miscellaneous
“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
“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 Iliad is absolutely extraordinary. I read it every so often, from the beginning it has the most incredible evocation of place, on the beach with the camp fires and Achilles sulking in his tent. There’s such a sense of camaraderie between these warriors. It’s an ancient culture, completely foreign to us now, and yet somehow we are brought to feel their day-to-day emotions. Not just on the Greek side, on the Trojan side as well. There are poignant moments, for example where Hector’s going in to fight and his wife Andromache doesn’t want him to. It’s an extraordinarily vivid account of war and a very graphic one…..A lot of people who had public school educations, classical educations, might have gone into the First World War thinking that they were fighting Homer’s war.” Read more...
Kate McLoughlin, Literary Scholar
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.
“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
“The smartest thing that I have read, of book length, about social media and what it means and will mean.” Read more...
The best books on The Changing Business of Journalism
Richard Tofel, 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
“If you want to get a perspective on how the politics of power and ruthlessness work, or simply see some of the thinking behind Game of Thrones, this short, slightly fragmentary book, written in the 16th century, is still the best around.” Read more...
Summer Reading: Philosophy Books to Take On Holiday
Nigel Warburton, Philosopher
“It was a book about how to deal with the crisis of Italy after the French invasions. Machiavelli’s response, in The Prince, was that the only way Italy was going to maintain its independence, and freedom, and drive out the barbarians—which is a term he always used for northern Europeans—was to beat them at their own game, to be more violent, more vicious, more brutal, and more faithless” Read more...
Kenneth Bartlett, Historian
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 was a trailblazing book, not least because it has served as the template for every romance novel and Mills & Boon written since. The countless book and screen adaptations of Pride and Prejudice speak to a story that has universal appeal, its characters and plotline appearing in everything from Bridget Jones’s Diary to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
But Pride and Prejudice is more than just a happily-ever-after story. Philosophers and literary scholars are just some of the experts we’ve interviewed who have chosen Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as essential reading on their topic. Along with many other people, it is Austen scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks’s favourite Austen book. As she explains below, it’s also a serious work. Exploring that theme, she produced Pride and Prejudice: An Annotated Edition, published by Harvard University Press, which includes over 2,000 annotations to the text.
You can read all our interviews featuring Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice—and browse some of the original reviews and 19th century commentary on the book—below.
“I think it’s always been my favourite, as it’s many people’s favourite among Austen’s novels. But I was always vaguely embarrassed by that as a scholar, because I didn’t think it was the best.” 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 challenging, learned, filthy, and hilarious. In it, Joyce pushes the boundaries of language and the novel form. It’s easy to see how it was thwarted and censored four times during publication. At first, no one wanted to print it, because they could’ve been found liable for publishing pornography. Ulysses is one of those great novels that demands a level of concentration one can only get in isolation. Yes, it’s difficult and frustrating, but that’s because it wants to frustrate you—and the payoff is immense pleasure: no book gets closer to the ineffable experience of human play and tragedy, of being a fleshy mass of blood and bones in the modern world. It pays dividends for the reader who pays it serious attention. Reading Joyce, you feel incredibly close to the mind of a writer whose conviction was that he could do anything with language; no novel I’ve ever read has been more daring or eye-opening” Read more...
“This novel is still—after nearly a century—powerful, innovative and exhilarating. There is more going on in one sentence in Ulysses than there is in most contemporary novels.” Read more...
Robin Robertson on Books that Influenced Him
Robin Robertson, Novelist
Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
The novel Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, was first published under the pen name Ellis Bell in 1847, just a year before Emily’s death in 1848. Below, in our interviews with literary critics and journalists, you’ll see why many people still view it as one of the greatest novels ever written in English. Also worth looking at are the contemporary reviews, some of which were found in Emily’s desk after her death. These are available on the web (see links below), but are also included in the Norton Critical Edition of Wuthering Heights.
“Wuthering Heights is a strange novel in a lot of ways. It’s a standalone—there’s not really another book like it.” Read more...
“In Wuthering Heights once again it’s the landscape that underlines the choices the characters must make. Cathy must choose between the grand house in the lush valley: protected, comfortable and tame; or the wild, exhilarating bleakness of Wuthering Heights.” Read more...
Rachel Hickman recommends the best Novels Set in Wild Places
“What Michael Lewis points out very forcefully is that they were deliberately created by Wall Street banks in order to produce non-transparent securities that could not be adequately evaluated by the rating agencies, which then could be sold to less sophisticated investors, who would buy the idea that this junk debt actually had triple A ratings. So what this book does quite brilliantly is show that there was actually a high degree of intentionality in creating the crisis. “ Read more...
Francis Fukuyama recommends the best books on the The Financial Crisis
Francis Fukuyama, Political Scientist
“If I had any criticism of the book, it’s that he makes it seem too obvious. It becomes mysterious how anyone could have been confused.” Read more...
The best books on Unexpected Economics
Tim Harford, Economist
Life and Fate
by Vasily Grossman and translated by Robert Chandler
Life and Fate, the masterpiece by Soviet writer Vasily Grossman, is one of our most recommended books (even in history book interviews—even though it’s a novel). Modeled on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, it bore witness to the horrors of both the Soviet experience of World War II and the Holocaust. Sadly for Grossman, it was considered too harmful to be published in his lifetime.
If you want to listen to Life and Fate as an audiobook, there’s no unabridged version, BUT there is a dramatised version, starring Kenneth Branagh and David Tennant, that lasts a manageable 8 hours.
(Stalingrad is the precursor to Life and Fate, newly translated into English.)
“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 Historian and 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
On the Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
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 Five Books’ most recommended 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 recommends his Favourite Science Books
Mark Kurlansky, Science Writer
“I still have an image of Odysseus in my head from when I was a child – he’s very Anglo-Saxon and stubbly, a bit like Michael Fassbender” Read more...
Max Porter on the Books That Shaped Him
Max Porter, Novelist
“These stories enable us to rehearse bad situations without actually having to be in danger.” Read more...
The Best Philosophy Books for Children
Peter Worley, Philosopher
“It’s hard to believe that the human frame can survive under such circumstances, let alone survive to write something like this.” Read more...
Kate McLoughlin, Literary Scholar
“Levi regains reason, by treating his experience in Auschwitz as something that is subject to rational analysis.” Read more...
Aleksandar Hemon on Man’s Inhumanity to Man
Aleksandar Hemon, Novelist
This Time Is Different
by Carmen Reinhart & Kenneth Rogoff
In this book, written after the 2008 financial crisis, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff explore the characteristics common to every financial crisis over centuries.
“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
“Reinhart and Rogoff are two macroeconomists who have done a marvellous job in bringing together a lot of historical and international data about how unstable financial systems are. The title of their book, This Time is Different, tells you the whole theme. In many respects, the Wall Street crisis was not at all different from Argentina or Britain in the early 1990s or any number of other crises that have been fuelled by credit bubbles and mismanaged macroeconomic policy.” Read more...
Francis Fukuyama recommends the best books on the The Financial Crisis
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, Lawyer
“Tocqueville was seized by the sharp contrast between Paris and America, where people did not wait for the central government, but went ahead on their own, and I think that’s vital part of what it is to be both an American and a vital part of what is America.” Read more...
The best books on Compassionate Conservatism
Karl Rove, Political Commentator
“She looked at what biology, history and literature had to say about what it meant to be a woman and she came to the conclusion that these things really only gave people a definition of what it meant to be a woman from the standpoint of famous men. Nobody had ever asked, to her satisfaction, the question of what it means to be a woman to women themselves.” Read more...
“Beauvoir argued that we need to be free from oppression in order to be free to live and love authentically.” Read more...
The best books on Philosophy of Love
Skye C Cleary, Philosopher
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.
“In fiction the writer has some licence to deviate from what is real – it’s a work of art, ultimately, for people’s interest and enjoyment, but I think that the character is very recognisable of many people with Asperger syndrome. I think the author has done a very good job.” Read more...
The best books on Autism and Asperger Syndrome
Simon Baron-Cohen, Psychologist
“It looks at the world through someone else’s eyes and sees how things that we take for granted might be a terrifying experience for other people.” Read more...
Simon Baron-Cohen, Psychologist
“This book taught me something I knew on a much deeper level but did not have the language or the reasoning to state: that innocence is something very durable and interior, and also evanescent.” Read more...
Rachel Kushner on Books That Influenced Her
Rachel Kushner, Novelist
“A host of deep philosophical questions are at work in the book: about, say, the existence of God, the nature of morality without God, and the role of free will.” Read more...
The best books on Moral Character
Christian B Miller, Philosopher
“What would that be like? What would it be like to be unable to lay down any new memories, to think it’s 1945 all the time and everybody you meet is new? It’s fascinating to imagine, and I feel a lot of sympathy for the Mariner even though he doesn’t know how bad he has it.” Read more...
“When I was embarking on my medical career, this was a very influential book for me. I have fond and warm memories of lying on a beach in Thailand reading it, thinking wow, maybe I’ll be doing this sometime. I didn’t choose neurology because of it but the way Oliver Sacks writes about neurology is very compelling. He’s such a beautiful writer, and the way he presents the cases reminds you what an astonishing organ the brain is. What astonishing things it can do and what astonishing things happen when it goes wrong.” Read more...
The best books on Psychosomatic Illness
Suzanne O'Sullivan, 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
In Cold Blood
by Truman Capote
Truman Capote’s classic ‘nonfiction novel’ – a genre-defining example of true crime – applies literary techniques to a real life story of the grisly 1959 murder of four members of the Herbert family in rural Kansas.
“It chilled my blood. No pun intended . . . In some of my books, I’ve taken to heart that if you turn right instead of left, either nothing will happen to you, or something really bad will happen to you just because of a seemingly random confluence of events. I learned that lesson vividly from In Cold Blood.” Read more...
“One of the reasons I like this true crime novelisation is down to the fact it was so out of character for Capote and took everyone by surprise. It is also an excellent, almost biographical, insight into the two young killers’ minds.” Read more...
Lynda La Plante recommends the best Crime Novels
Lynda La Plante, Thriller and Crime Writer
In Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
In Search of Lost Time is Marcel Proust’s masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of a part of his life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold. His story is in line with a whole genre of stories, James Joyce’s Ulysses being one and Robert Musil’s A Man without Qualities another one.
“Proust’s reflection on the nature of time is deep and spread over his writing.” Read more...
Carlo Rovelli, Physicist
“A famous masterpiece which is an excruciatingly detailed chronicle of Proust’s life in which every single element and thought is captured and retold.” Read more...
The best books on Memory and the Digital Age
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Technologist
The Nicomachean Ethics
by Aristotle
It is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others. It’s incredibly subtle and precise, especially when you compare it with the way a lot of moral words are used today.
“According to Aristotle, it is hard to become virtuous, and hard to become vicious too. The character of most people is somewhere in the middle.” Read more...
The best books on Moral Character
Christian B Miller, Philosopher
“It is a sophisticated and subtle analysis of the various virtues: courage, temperance, and wisdom among many others.” Read more...
Edward Skidelsky, Philosopher
Ordinary Men
by Christopher Browning
How was it that a group of middle-aged men from Hamburg, most not even members of the Nazi party, led by a 53-year-old career policeman, carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust? Ordinary Men by American historian Christopher Browning, first published in 1992, sifts through their testimony to try and find some answers. In doing so, it reveals some unsettling truths for any human being reading its pages.
“The takeaway from reading this horror-filled book is that depredations on the scale of those that Browning describes can be perpetrated anywhere and by anyone.” Read more...
The best books on US Intervention
Lawrence Kaplan, Journalist
“The reason this is such an important book is that when you study the Holocaust you ask almost immediately: How could people do this? How could men who had their own children, go out and murder other children? Or husbands take women and rip open their wombs and kill their infants and shoot them behind the ear? This book raised that question in a very, very strong and powerful way, based on firsthand testimony.” Read more...
The best books on The Holocaust
Steven Katz, Historian
