Must Read 438 Historical Fiction Books

List Academy
August 29, 2021
October 1, 2023
History / Education

A Bend in the River

A Bend in the River is a 1979 novel by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul.
The novel, telling the story of Salim, a merchant in post-colonial mid-20th century Africa, is one of Naipaul’s best known works and was widely praised. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1979. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked A Bend in the River #83 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. A Bend in the River has also been criticized for a perceived defence of European colonialism in Africa.

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A Brief History of Seven Killings

A Brief History of Seven Killings is the third novel by Jamaican author Marlon James. It was published in 2014 by Riverhead Books. The novel spans several decades and explores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Jamaica in 1976 and its aftermath, through the crack wars in New York City in the 1980s and a changed Jamaica in the 1990s.

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A Death in the Family

A Death in the Family is an autobiographical novel by author James Agee, set in Knoxville, Tennessee. He began writing it in 1948, but it was not quite complete when he died in 1955 (with reputedly many portions having been written in the home of his friend Frances Wickes). It was edited and released posthumously in 1957 by editor David McDowell. Agee’s widow and children were left with little money after Agee’s death and McDowell wanted to help them by publishing the work. Agee won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958 for the novel. The novel was included on Time’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.

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A Handful of Dust

A Handful of Dust is a novel by the British writer Evelyn Waugh. First published in 1934, it is often grouped with the author’s early, satirical comic novels for which he became famous in the pre-World War II years. Commentators have, however, drawn attention to its serious undertones, and have regarded it as a transitional work pointing towards Waugh’s Catholic postwar fiction.

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A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities is an 1859 historical novel by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie, whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror.

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A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and illustrated by John Leech. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder, gentler man.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the Christmas stories of other authors, including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold.

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A Farewell to Arms

A Farewell to Arms is a novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, set during the Italian campaign of World War I. First published in 1929, it is a first-person account of an American, Frederic Henry, serving as a lieutenant (“tenente”) in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by the 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.
The novel, set against the backdrop of World War I, describes a love affair between the expatriate Henry and an English nurse, Catherine Barkley. Its publication ensured Hemingway’s place as a modern American writer of considerable stature.

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A Fine Balance

A Fine Balance is the second novel by Rohinton Mistry, published in 1995. Set in “an unidentified city” in India, initially in 1975 and later in 1984 during the turmoil of The Emergency, the book concerns four characters from varied backgrounds – Dina Dalal, Ishvar Darji, his nephew Omprakash Darji and the young student Maneck Kohlah – who come together and develop a bond.
First published by McClelland and Stewart in 1995, it won the 1995 Giller Prize. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. It was one of the only two Canadian books selected for Oprah’s Book Club, and was one of the selected books in the 2002 edition of Canada Reads, championed by actress Megan Follows. In 2014, A Fine Balance was ranked in The Telegraph as one of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels. Emma-Lee Potter of The Independent listed it as the book with the strongest prose and character development out of 12 Indian novels “that everyone needs to read.”An acclaimed stage adaptation of the novel by the Tamasha Theatre Company was produced at the Hampstead Theatre in London in 2006 and later revived in 2007.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany is the seventh novel by American writer John Irving. Published in 1989, it tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New Hampshire town during the 1950s and 1960s. According to John’s narration, Owen is a remarkable boy in many ways; he believes himself to be God’s instrument and sets out to fulfill the fate he has prophesied for himself.
The novel is also an homage to Günter Grass’s most famous novel, The Tin Drum. Grass was a great influence for John Irving, as well as a close friend. The main characters of both novels, Owen Meany and Oskar Matzerath, share the same initials as well as some other characteristics, and their stories show some parallels. Irving has confirmed the similarities. A Prayer for Owen Meany, however, follows an independent and separate plot.

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A Room with a View

A Room with a View is a 1908 novel by English writer E. M. Forster, about a young woman in the restrained culture of Edwardian era England. Set in Italy and England, the story is both a romance and a humorous critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century. Merchant Ivory produced an award-winning film adaptation in 1985. The Modern Library ranked A Room with a View 79th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century (1998).

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A Separate Peace

A Separate Peace is a coming-of-age novel by John Knowles, published in 1959. Based on his earlier short story “Phineas”, published in the May 1956 issue of Cosmopolitan, it was Knowles’s first published novel and became his best-known work. Set against the backdrop of World War II, A Separate Peace explores morality, patriotism, and loss of innocence through its narrator, Gene.

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A Suitable Boy

A Suitable Boy is a novel by Vikram Seth, published in 1993. With 1,349 pages (1,488 pages in paperback), the English–language book is one of the longest novels published in a single volume.A Suitable Boy is set in a newly post-independence, post-partition India. The novel follows four families during 18 months, and centres on Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s efforts to arrange the marriage of her younger daughter, Lata, to a “suitable boy”. Lata is a 19-year-old university student who refuses to be influenced by her domineering mother or opinionated brother, Arun. Her story revolves around the choice she is forced to make between her suitors Kabir, Haresh, and Amit.
It begins in the fictional town of Brahmpur, located along the Ganges between Banares and Patna. Brahmpur, along with Calcutta, Delhi, Lucknow and other Indian cities, forms a colourful backdrop for the emerging stories.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

A Thousand Splendid Suns is a 2007 novel by Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini, following his bestselling 2003 debut The Kite Runner. Mariam, an illegitimate teenager from Herat, is forced to marry a shoemaker from Kabul after a family tragedy. Laila, born a generation later, lives a relatively privileged life, but her life intersects with Mariam’s when a similar tragedy forces her to accept a marriage proposal from Mariam’s husband.

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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a 1943 semi-autobiographical novel written by Betty Smith. The story focuses on an impoverished but aspirational adolescent girl and her family living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, during the first two decades of the 20th century.
The book was an immense success. It was also released in an Armed Services Edition, the size of a mass-market paperback, to fit in a uniform pocket. One Marine wrote to Smith, “I can’t explain the emotional reaction that took place in this dead heart of mine… A surge of confidence has swept through me, and I feel that maybe a fellow has a fighting chance in this world after all.”The main metaphor of the book is the hardy Tree of Heaven, whose persistent ability to grow and flourish even in the inner city mirrors the protagonist’s desire to better herself.

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Absalom, Absalom!

Absalom, Absalom! is a novel by the American author William Faulkner, first published in 1936. Taking place before, during, and after the American Civil War, it is a story about three families of the American South, with a focus on the life of Thomas Sutpen. Absalom, Absalom! details the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a white man born into poverty in western Virginia who moves to Mississippi with the dual aims of gaining wealth and becoming a powerful family patriarch.

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All the Pretty Horses

All the Pretty Horses is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy’s earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is also the first of McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy”. The book was adapted as a 2000 film starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

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American Tabloid

American Tabloid is a 1995 novel by James Ellroy that chronicles the events surrounding three rogue American law enforcement officers from November 22, 1958, through November 22, 1963. Each becomes entangled in a web of interconnecting associations between the FBI, the CIA, and the mafia, which eventually leads to their collective involvement in the John F. Kennedy assassination.
American Tabloid was Time’s Best Book (Fiction) for 1995. It is the first novel in Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, followed by The Cold Six Thousand and Blood’s a Rover.

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Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-using historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.
Stegner’s use of substantial passages from Foote’s actual letters as the correspondence of his fictional character Susan Burling Ward was and remains controversial among some scholars. The controversy is somewhat tempered since Stegner had received permission to use Foote’s writings, implying as much in the book’s acknowledgments page.In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Angle of Repose #82 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

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Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina (Russian: «Анна Каренина», IPA: [ˈanːə kɐˈrʲenʲɪnə]) is a novel by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published in book form in 1878. Many writers consider it the greatest work of literature ever written, and Tolstoy himself called it his first true novel. It was initially released in serial installments from 1873 to 1877 in the periodical The Russian Messenger.
A complex novel in eight parts, with more than a dozen major characters, Anna Karenina is spread over more than 800 pages (depending on the translation and publisher), typically contained in two volumes. It deals with themes of betrayal, faith, family, marriage, Imperial Russian society, desire, and rural vs. city life. The story centers on an extramarital affair between Anna and dashing cavalry officer Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky that scandalizes the social circles of Saint Petersburg and forces the young lovers to flee to Italy in a search for happiness, but after they return to Russia, their lives further unravel.

Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables is a 1908 novel by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (published as L.M. Montgomery). Written for all ages, it has been considered a classic children’s novel since the mid-twentieth century. Set in the late 19th century, the novel recounts the adventures of Anne Shirley, a 13-year-old orphan girl, who is mistakenly sent to two middle-aged siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had originally intended to adopt a boy to help them on their farm in the fictional town of Avonlea in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The novel recounts how Anne makes her way through life with the Cuthberts, in school, and within the town.
Since its publication, Anne of Green Gables has been translated into at least 36 languages and has sold more than 50 million copies, making it one of the best selling books worldwide. The first in an anthology series, Montgomery wrote numerous sequels, and since her death, another sequel has been published, as well as an authorized prequel. The original book is taught to students around the world.The book has been adapted as films, made-for-television movies, and animated and live-action television series. Musicals and plays have also been created, with productions annually in Europe and Japan.

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For WP enthusiasts :

Arrowsmith

Arrowsmith is a novel by American author Sinclair Lewis, first published in 1925. It won the 1926 Pulitzer Prize (which Lewis declined). Lewis was greatly assisted in its preparation by science writer Paul de Kruif, who received 25% of the royalties on sales, although Lewis was listed as the sole author. Arrowsmith is an early major novel dealing with the culture of science. It was written in the period after the reforms of medical education flowing from the Flexner Report on Medical Education in the United States and Canada: A Report to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1910, which had called on medical schools in the United States to adhere to mainstream science in their teaching and research.

Asterix the Gaul

Asterix the Gaul is the first volume of the Asterix comic strip series, by René Goscinny (stories) and Albert Uderzo (illustrations). In Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century, a 1999 poll conducted by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde, Asterix the Gaul was listed as the 23rd greatest book of the 20th century.

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At Play in the Fields of the Lord

At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a 1965 novel by Peter Matthiessen. A film adapted from the book was released in 1991. A 2009 audiobook version was read by actor Anthony Heald.
“In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante. Out of their struggle Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.” –Synopsis from Goodreads

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Atonement

Atonement is a 2001 British metafiction novel written by Ian McEwan. Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl’s half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
Widely regarded as one of McEwan’s best works, it was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for fiction. In 2010, TIME magazine named Atonement in its list of the 100 greatest English-language novels since 1923.In 2007, the book was adapted into a BAFTA and Academy Award-winning film of the same title, starring Saoirse Ronan, James McAvoy, and Keira Knightley, and directed by Joe Wright.

Austerlitz

Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald’s final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian’s list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.

Babbitt

Babbitt (1922), by Sinclair Lewis, is a satirical novel about American culture and society that critiques the vacuity of middle class life and the social pressure toward conformity. The controversy provoked by Babbitt was influential in the decision to award the Nobel Prize in Literature to Lewis in 1930.The word “Babbitt” entered the English language as a “person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards”.

Ballet Shoes

Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage is a children’s novel by Noel Streatfeild, published by Dent in 1936. It was her first book for children, and was illustrated by the author’s sister, Ruth Gervis. Diane Goode illustrated a 1991 edition published by Random House.Ballet Shoes was a commended runner up for the inaugural Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year’s best British children’s book by a British subject. (The author would win the award later for another book.)

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress (French: Balzac et la petite tailleuse chinoise) is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Dai Sijie, and published in 2000 in French and in English in 2001. A film based on his novel directed by Dai was released in 2002.

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Bathsheba

This account of the Old Testament legend of Bathsheba tells the well-known stories of the rape of Tamar, the fall of Rabbah, the exile and rebellion of Absalom, and the death of King David.

Before We Were Free

Before We Were Free is a realistic book by Julia Alvarez. In this book, Anita de la Torre is a 12-year-old girl living in the Dominican Republic in 1960. Many of his relatives emigrated to the United States, Tío Toni disappeared, Papi received mysterious calls about butterflies and Mr. Smith. The secret police started terrorizing his family, claiming that they were against the country’s dictator.

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Beloved

Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of former slaves whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Beloved is inspired by a true-life incident involving Margaret Garner, an escaped slave from Kentucky who fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856, but was captured in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. When U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, they found that she had killed her two-year-old daughter and was attempting to kill her other children to spare them from being returned to slavery.
Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist, and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974.The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a novel by Lew Wallace, published by Harper and Brothers on November 12, 1880, and considered “the most influential Christian book of the nineteenth century”. It became a best-selling American novel, surpassing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in sales. The book also inspired other novels with biblical settings and was adapted for the stage and motion picture productions. Ben-Hur remained at the top of the US all-time bestseller list until the 1936 publication of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. The 1959 MGM film adaptation of Ben-Hur is considered one of the greatest films ever made and was seen by tens of millions, going on to win a record 11 Academy Awards in 1960, after which the book’s sales increased and it surpassed Gone with the Wind. It was blessed by Pope Leo XIII, the first novel ever to receive such an honour. The success of the novel and its stage and film adaptations also helped it to become a popular cultural icon that was used to promote numerous commercial products.
The story recounts the adventures of Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince from Jerusalem, who is enslaved by the Romans at the beginning of the first century and becomes a charioteer and a Christian. Running in parallel with Judah’s narrative is the unfolding story of Jesus, from the same region and around the same age. The novel reflects themes of betrayal, conviction, and redemption, with a revenge plot that leads to a story of love and compassion.

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Berlin Alexanderplatz

Berlin Alexanderplatz (German: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn ʔalɛˈksandɐˌplats]) is a 1929 novel by Alfred Döblin. It is considered one of the most important and innovative works of the Weimar Republic. In a 2002 poll of 100 noted writers the book was named among the top 100 books of all time.

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Billy Budd

Billy Budd, Sailor is a novella by American writer Herman Melville left unfinished at Melville’s death in 1891. Acclaimed by critics as a masterpiece when a hastily transcribed version was finally published in 1924, it quickly took its place as a classic second only to Moby-Dick among Melville’s works. Budd is a “handsome sailor” who strikes and inadvertently kills his false accuser, Master-at-arms John Claggart. The ship’s Captain, Edward Vere, recognizes the innocence of Budd’s intent but the law of mutiny requires him to sentence Billy to be hanged.
Melville began work on it in November 1886, revising and expanding from time to time, but left the manuscript in disarray. Melville’s widow Elizabeth began to edit the manuscript for publication, but was not able to decide her husband’s intentions at key points, even his intended title. Raymond M. Weaver, Melville’s first biographer, was given the manuscript and published the 1924 version, which was marred by misinterpretation of Elizabeth’s queries, misreadings of Melville’s difficult handwriting, and even inclusion of a preface Melville had cut. Melville scholars Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts Jr. published what is considered the best transcription and critical reading text in 1962. In 2017, Northwestern University Press published a “new reading text” based on a “corrected version” of Hayford and Sealts’ genetic text prepared by G. Thomas Tanselle.Billy Budd has been adapted into film, a stage play, and an opera.

Birdsong

Birdsong is a 1993 war novel and family saga by the English author Sebastian Faulks. It is Faulks’s fourth novel. The plot follows two main characters living at different times: the first is Stephen Wraysford, a British soldier on the front line in Amiens during the First World War, and the second is his granddaughter, Elizabeth Benson, whose 1970s plotline follows her attempts to recover an understanding of Stephen’s experience of the war.
Faulks developed the novel to bring more public awareness to the experience of war remembered by WWI veterans. Most critics found this effort successful, commenting on how the novel, like many other WWI novels, thematically focuses on how the experience of trauma shapes individual psyches. Similarly, because of the parallel narratives WWI and 1970s Britain, the novel explores metahistorical questions about how to document and recover narratives about the past. Because of its genre, themes and writing style, the novel has been favourably compared to a number of other war novels, such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and those in Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy.
Birdsong is part of a loose trilogy of novels by Sebastian Faulks, alongside The Girl at the Lion d’Or and Charlotte Gray; the three are linked through location, history and several minor characters. Birdsong is one of Faulks’s best received works, earning both critical and popular praise, including being listed as the 13th favourite book in Britain in a 2003 BBC survey called the Big Read. It has also been adapted three times under the same title: for radio (1997), the stage (2010) and television (2012).

Black Beauty

Black Beauty: His Grooms and Companions, the Autobiography of a Horse is an 1877 novel by English author Anna Sewell. It was composed in the last years of her life, during which she remained in her house as an invalid. The novel became an immediate best-seller, with Sewell dying just five months after its publication, but having lived long enough to see her only novel become a success. With fifty million copies sold, Black Beauty is one of the best-selling books of all time.While forthrightly teaching animal welfare, it also teaches how to treat people with kindness, sympathy, and respect. In 2003, the novel was listed at number 58 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read. It is seen as a forerunner of the pony book.

Bless Me, Ultima

Bless Me, Ultima is a coming-of-age novel by Rudolfo Anaya centering on Antonio Márez y Luna and his mentorship under his curandera and protector, Ultima. It has become the most widely read and critically acclaimed novel in the Chicano literary canon since its first publication in 1972. Teachers across disciplines in middle schools, high schools and universities have adopted it as a way to implement multicultural literature in their classes. The novel reflects Hispano culture of the 1940s in rural New Mexico. Anaya’s use of Spanish, mystical depiction of the New Mexican landscape, use of cultural motifs such as La Llorona, and recounting of curandera folkways such as the gathering of medicinal herbs, gives readers a sense of the influence of indigenous cultural ways that are both authentic and distinct from the mainstream.
The ways in which the novel provides insight into the religiosity of Chicano culture were first explored in 1982 in an essay titled “A Perspective for a Study of Religious Dimensions in Chicano Experience: Bless Me, Ultima as a Religious Text”, written by Mexican American historian of religion David Carrasco. This essay was the first scholarly text to explore how the novel alludes to the power of sacred landscapes and sacred humans.Bless Me, Ultima is Anaya’s best known work and was awarded the prestigious Premio Quinto Sol. In 2008, it was one of 12 classic American novels selected for The Big Read, a community-reading program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2009, it was the selected novel of the United States Academic Decathlon.
Bless Me, Ultima is the first in a trilogy that continued with the publication of Heart of Aztlan (1976) and Tortuga (1979). With the publication of his novel, Alburquerque (1992), Anaya was proclaimed a front-runner by Newsweek in “what is better called not the new multicultural writing, but the new American writing.”Owing to what some consider adult language, violent content, and sexual references, Bless Me, Ultima is often the target of attempts to restrict access to the book and was therefore placed on the list of most commonly challenged books in the U.S. in 2013. However, in the last third of the twentieth century, the novel has initiated respect for Chicano literature as an important and nonderivative type of American literature among academics.

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Bleak House

Bleak House is a novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a 20-episode serial between March 1852 and September 1853. The novel has many characters and several sub-plots, and is told partly by the novel’s heroine, Esther Summerson, and partly by an omniscient narrator. At the centre of Bleak House is a long-running legal case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, which comes about because a testator has written several conflicting wills. In a preface to the 1853 first edition, Dickens claimed there were many actual precedents for his fictional case. One such was probably the Thellusson v Woodford case in which a will read in 1797 was contested and not determined until 1859. Though many in the legal profession criticised Dickens’s satire as exaggerated, this novel helped support a judicial reform movement which culminated in the enactment of legal reform in the 1870s.There is some debate among scholars as to when Bleak House is set. The English legal historian Sir William Holdsworth sets the action in 1827; however, reference to preparation for the building of a railway in Chapter LV suggests the 1830s.

Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy’s fifth book, it was published by Random House.
In a loosely historical context the narrative follows a fictional teenager referred to as “the kid,” with the bulk of the text devoted to his experiences with the Glanton gang, a historical group of scalp hunters who massacred aboriginal Americans and others in the United States–Mexico borderlands from 1849 to 1850 for bounty, pleasure, and eventually out of nihilistic habit. The role of antagonist is gradually filled by Judge Holden, a physically massive, highly educated, preternaturally skilled member of the gang who is extremely pale and completely bald from head to toe.
Although the novel initially received lukewarm critical and commercial reception, it has since become highly acclaimed and is widely recognized as McCarthy’s magnum opus and one of the greatest American novels of all time. Some have labelled it the Great American Novel. There have been multiple attempts to adapt the novel into a film, but none have succeeded.

Breath, Eyes, Memory

Breath, Eyes, Memory is Edwidge Danticat’s acclaimed 1994 novel, and was chosen as an Oprah Book Club Selection in May 1998. The novel deals with questions of racial, linguistic and gender identity in interconnected ways.

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Buddenbrooks

Buddenbrooks (German: [ˈbʊdn̩ˌbʁoːks] (listen)) is a 1901 novel by Thomas Mann, chronicling the decline of a wealthy north German merchant family over the course of four generations, incidentally portraying the manner of life and mores of the Hanseatic bourgeoisie in the years from 1835 to 1877. Mann drew deeply from the history of his own family, the Mann family of Lübeck, and their milieu.
It was Mann’s first novel, published when he was twenty-six years old. With the publication of the second edition in 1903, Buddenbrooks became a major literary success. Its English translation by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter was published in 1924. The work led to a Nobel Prize in Literature for Mann in 1929; although the Nobel award generally recognises an author’s body of work, the Swedish Academy’s citation for Mann identified “his great novel Buddenbrooks” as the principal reason for his prize.Mann began writing the book in October 1897, when he was twenty-two years old. The novel was completed three years later, in July 1900, and published in October 1901. His objective was to write a novel on the conflicts between businessman and artist’s worlds, presented as a family saga, continuing in the realist tradition of such 19th-century works as Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir (1830; The Red and the Black). Buddenbrooks is his most enduringly popular novel, especially in Germany, where it has been cherished for its intimate portrait of 19th-century German bourgeois life.
Before Buddenbrooks Mann had written only short stories, which had been collected under the title Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898, Little Herr Friedemann). They portrayed spiritually challenged figures who struggle to find happiness in (or at the margins of) bourgeois society. Similar themes appear in the Buddenbrooks, but in a fully developed style that already reflects the mastery of narrative, subtle irony of tone, and rich character descriptions of Mann’s mature fiction.
The exploration of decadence in the novel reflects the influence of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818, 1844) on the young Mann. The Buddenbrooks of successive generations experience a gradual decline of their finances and family ideals, finding happiness increasingly elusive as values change and old hierarchies are challenged by Germany’s rapid industrialisation. The characters who subordinate their personal happiness to the welfare of the family firm encounter reverses, as do those who do not.
The city where the Buddenbrooks live shares so many street names and other details with Mann’s native town of Lübeck that the identification is unmistakable, although the novel makes no mention of the name. The young author was condemned for writing a scandalous, defamatory roman à clef about (supposedly) recognisable personages. Mann defended the right of a writer to use material from his own experience.
The years covered in the novel were marked by major political and military developments that reshaped Germany, such as the Revolutions of 1848, the Austro-Prussian War, and the establishment of the German Empire. Historic events nevertheless generally remain in the background, having no direct bearing on the lives of the characters.

Call It Sleep

Call It Sleep is a 1934 novel by Henry Roth. The book is about a young boy growing up in the Jewish immigrant ghetto of New York’s Lower East Side in the early 20th century.
Alhough it earned acclaim, the book sold poorly and was out of print for close to 30 years. It received a second life when it was reviewed by literary critic Irving Howe on the front page of The New York Times Book Review on October 25, 1964. Its paperback edition, published by Avon, sold over 1 million copies. The novel was included on TIME magazine’s 2005 list of the 100 best English-language novels written since 1923.

Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas is the third novel by British author David Mitchell. It was published in 2004. It won the British Book Awards Literary Fiction award and the Richard & Judy “Book of the Year” award. The year it was published, it was short-listed for the Booker Prize, Nebula Award for Best Novel, and Arthur C. Clarke Award, among other accolades. Unusually, it received awards from both the general literary community and from the speculative fiction community. A film adaptation directed by the Wachowskis and Tom Tykwer, and featuring an ensemble cast, was released in 2012.
Cloud Atlas is a work combining metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction. Its text is interconnected nested stories that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawai’i in a distant post-apocalyptic future. The title was inspired by the piece of music of the same name by Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. The author has said that the book is about reincarnation and the universality of human nature, and the title references a changing landscape (a “cloud”) over manifestations of fixed human nature (the “atlas”). It is not a direct reference to a cloud atlas.

Cloudstreet

Cloudstreet is a novel by Australian writer Tim Winton published in 1991. It chronicles the lives of two working-class families, the Pickles and the Lambs, who come to live together in a large house called Cloudstreet in Perth over a period of twenty years, 1943 to 1963. The novel received several awards, including a Miles Franklin Award in 1992, and has been adapted into various forms, including a stage play and a television miniseries.

Cold Sassy Tree

Cold Sassy Tree is a 1984 historical novel by Olive Ann Burns. Set in the US state of Georgia in the fictional town of Cold Sassy (based on the real city of Harmony Grove, now Commerce) in 1906, it follows the life of a 14-year-old boy named Will Tweedy, and explores themes such as religion, death, and social taboos. An incomplete sequel to the novel, Leaving Cold Sassy, was published in 1992 after Burns’ death.

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Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, released simultaneously in the United States as Corelli’s Mandolin, is a 1994 novel by the British writer Louis de Bernières, set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Italian and German occupation of the Second World War.
The main characters are Antonio Corelli, an Italian army captain, and Pelagia, the daughter of the local physician, Dr Iannis. An important event in the novel is the massacre of Italian troops by the Germans in September 1943—the Italian Acqui Division had refused to surrender and had fought the Germans for nine days before running out of ammunition. Some 1,500 Italian soldiers died in the fighting; 5,000 were massacred after surrendering, and the rest were shipped to Germany, of whom 3,000 drowned when the ship carrying them hit a mine.
In 2003, the novel was listed at number 19 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read.

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Cousin Bette

La Cousine Bette (French pronunciation: [la kuzin bɛt], Cousin Bette) is an 1846 novel by French author Honoré de Balzac. Set in mid-19th-century Paris, it tells the story of an unmarried middle-aged woman who plots the destruction of her extended family. Bette works with Valérie Marneffe, an unhappily married young lady, to seduce and torment a series of men. One of these is Baron Hector Hulot, husband to Bette’s cousin Adeline. He sacrifices his family’s fortune and good name to please Valérie, who leaves him for a well-off merchant named Crevel. The book is part of the Scènes de la vie parisienne section of Balzac’s novel sequence La Comédie humaine (“The Human Comedy”).

Cranford

Cranford is an episodic novel by the English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. It first appeared in instalments in the magazine Household Words, then was published with minor revisions as a book with the title Cranford in 1853. The work slowly became popular and from the start of the 20th century it saw a number of dramatic treatments for the stage, the radio and TV.

Cutting for Stone

Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother’s death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices.
When first published, the novel was on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years and generally received well by critics. With its positive reception, Barack Obama put it on his summer reading list and the book was optioned for adaptations.

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Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac is a play written in 1897 by Edmond Rostand. There was a real Cyrano de Bergerac, and the play is a fictionalisation following the broad outlines of his life.
The entire play is written in verse, in rhyming couplets of twelve syllables per line, very close to the classical alexandrine form, but the verses sometimes lack a caesura. It is also meticulously researched, down to the names of the members of the Académie française and the dames précieuses glimpsed before the performance in the first scene.
The play has been translated and performed many times, and it is responsible for introducing the word “panache” into the English language. Cyrano (the character) is in fact famed for his panache, and he himself makes reference to “my panache” in the play. The two most famous English translations are those by Brian Hooker and Anthony Burgess.

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Les Liaisons dangereuses

Les Liaisons dangereuses (French: [le ljɛzɔ̃ dɑ̃ʒ(ə)ʁøz]; English: Dangerous Liaisons) is a French epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, first published in four volumes by Durand Neveu from March 23, 1782.
It is the story of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, two narcissistic rivals (and ex-lovers) who use seduction as a weapon to socially control and exploit others, all the while enjoying their cruel games and boasting about their talent for manipulation. It has been seen as depicting the corruption and depravity of the French nobility shortly before the French Revolution, and thereby attacking the Ancien Régime. The book has also been described as merely a story about two amoral people.
As an epistolary novel, the book is composed of letters written by the various characters to each other. In particular, the letters between Valmont and the Marquise drive the plot, with those of their victims and other characters serving as contrasting figures to give the story its depth.

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Days Without End

Days Without End is the seventh novel by Sebastian Barry and is set during the Indian Wars and American Civil War. The novel is narrated by Thomas McNulty, an Irish émigré who flees to Canada and then America to escape the Great Famine. In America he befriends John Cole and the two fall in love, working first, as young boys, as cross-dressing entertainers and then enlisting in the army and taking part in both the Indian Wars and the American Civil War.

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Dead Souls

Dead Souls is a novel by Nikolai Gogol, first published in 1842, and widely regarded as an exemplar of 19th-century Russian literature. The novel chronicles the travels and adventures of Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov and the people whom he encounters. These people typify the Russian middle-class of the time. Gogol himself saw his work as an “epic poem in prose”, and within the book characterised it as a “novel in verse”. Despite supposedly completing the trilogy’s second part, Gogol destroyed it shortly before his death. Although the novel ends in mid-sentence (like Sterne’s Sentimental Journey), it is regarded by some as complete in the extant form.

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop is a 1927 novel by American author Willa Cather. It concerns the attempts of a Catholic bishop and a priest to establish a diocese in New Mexico Territory.

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The Death of Virgil

The Death of Virgil (German: Der Tod des Vergil) is a 1945 novel by the Austrian author Hermann Broch. The narrative reenacts the last hours of life of the Roman poet Virgil, in the port of Brundisium (Brindisi), whence he had accompanied the emperor Augustus, his decision – frustrated by the emperor – to burn his Aeneid, and his final reconciliation with his destiny. Virgil’s heightened perceptions as he dies recall his life and the age in which he lives. The poet is in the interval between life and death, just as his culture hangs between the pagan and Christian eras. As he reflects, Virgil recognises that history is at a cusp and that he may have falsified reality in his attempt to create beauty.

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Dissolution

Dissolution (2003) is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom’s first published novel, and the first in the Matthew Shardlake Series. It was dramatised by BBC Radio 4 in 2012.

Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (“Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend”).

Dream of the Red Chamber

Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, or Hongloumeng, composed by Cao Xueqin, is one of China’s Four Great Classical Novels. It was written some time in the middle of the 18th century during the Qing dynasty. Long considered a masterpiece of Chinese literature, the novel is generally acknowledged to be one of the pinnacles of Chinese fiction. “Redology” is the field of study devoted exclusively to this work.The title has also been translated as Red Chamber Dream and A Dream of Red Mansions.

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Dreaming in Cuban

Dreaming in Cuban is the first novel written by author Cristina García, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. This novel moves between Cuba and the United States featuring three generations of a single family. The novel focuses particularly on the women—Celia del Pino, her daughters Lourdes and Felicia, and her granddaughter Pilar. While most of the novel is written in the third person, some sections are written in the first person and other sections are epistolary. The novel is not told in linear fashion; it moves between characters, places and times.
The novel’s central themes include family relationships, exile, the divisiveness of politics, and memory. Cuban history and culture are important in the novel, including important historical events and the elements of Santería that appear throughout the novel.

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East of Eden

East of Eden is a novel by American author and Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Published in September 1952, the work is regarded by many to be Steinbeck’s most ambitious novel and by Steinbeck himself to be his magnum opus. Steinbeck stated about East of Eden: “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years,” and later said: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.” The novel was originally addressed to Steinbeck’s young sons, Thom and John (then 6½ and 4½ years old, respectively). Steinbeck wanted to describe the Salinas Valley for them in detail: the sights, sounds, smells and colors.
East of Eden brings to life the intricate details of two families, the Trasks and the Hamiltons, and their interwoven stories. The Hamilton family in the novel is said to be based on the real-life family of Samuel Hamilton, Steinbeck’s maternal grandfather. A young John Steinbeck also appears briefly in the novel as a minor character.

Emily of New Moon

Emily of New Moon is the first in a series of novels by Lucy Maud Montgomery about an orphan girl growing up on Prince Edward Island. It is similar to the author’s Anne of Green Gables series.
It was first published in 1923.

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Everything Is Illuminated

Everything Is Illuminated is the first novel by the American writer Jonathan Safran Foer, published in 2002. It was adapted into a film of the same name starring Elijah Wood and Eugene Hütz in 2005.
The book’s writing and structure received critical acclaim for the manner in which it switches between two stories, both of which are autobiographical. One of them is the fictionalized history of the eradicated town of Trochenbrod (Trachimbrod), a real exclusively Jewish shtetl in Poland before the Holocaust where the author’s grandfather was born; while the second narrative encompasses Foer’s trip to Ukraine in search of the remnants and memories of Trachimbrod as well as the author’s writing-in-progress.

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Eye of the Needle

Eye of the Needle is a spy thriller novel written by Welsh author Ken Follett. It was originally published in 1978 by the Penguin Group under the title Storm Island. This novel was Follett’s first successful, best-selling effort as a novelist, and it earned him the 1979 Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. The revised title is an allusion to the “eye of a needle” aphorism.
The book was made into a motion picture of the same title in 1981, starring Donald Sutherland, with a screenplay adapted by Stanley Mann and directed by Richard Marquand.

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Fathers and Sons

Fathers and Sons (Russian: «Отцы и дети»; Otcy i deti, IPA: [ɐˈtsɨ i ˈdʲetʲi]; archaic spelling Отцы и дѣти), also translated more literally as Fathers and Children, is an 1862 novel by Ivan Turgenev, published in Moscow by Grachev & Co. It is one of the most acclaimed Russian novels of the 19th century.

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For Whom the Bell Tolls

For Whom the Bell Tolls is a novel by Ernest Hemingway published in 1940. It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American volunteer attached to a Republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As a dynamiter, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.
It was published just after the end of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), whose general lines were well known at the time. It assumes the reader knows that the war was between the government of the Second Spanish Republic, which many foreigners went to Spain to help and which was supported by the Soviet Union, and the Nationalist faction, which was supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. It was commonly viewed as the dress rehearsal for the Second World War. In 1940, the year the book was published, the United States had not yet entered the war, which had begun on Sept. 1, 1939, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland.The novel is regarded as one of Hemingway’s best works, along with The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and The Old Man and the Sea.

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Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces is a novel by Canadian poet and novelist Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor while the second involves a man named Ben, the son of two Holocaust survivors. It was first published in Canada in 1996 and was published in the United Kingdom the following year. Since the publication, the novel has won awards such as Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, Orange Prize for Fiction, Guardian Fiction Prize and the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize. For over two years the novel was on Canada’s bestseller list, and it was translated into over 20 different languages.

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Germinal

Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Émile Zola’s twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart. Often considered Zola’s masterpiece and one of the most significant novels in the French tradition, the novel – an uncompromisingly harsh and realistic story of a coalminers’ strike in northern France in the 1860s – has been published and translated in over one hundred countries and has additionally inspired five film adaptations and two television productions.
Germinal was written between April 1884 and January 1885. It was first serialized between November 1884 and February 1885 in the periodical Gil Blas, then in March 1885 published as a book.

Girl in Hyacinth Blue

Girl in Hyacinth Blue is a powerful historical novel by Professor Susan Vreeland. In which he invites a colleague from the art department to his house to see a painting kept secret for decades. The Professor swears it’s a Vermeer – but why has he kept it hidden for so long?

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Go Tell It on the Mountain

Go Tell It on the Mountain is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin. It tells the story of John Grimes, an intelligent teenager in 1930s Harlem, and his relationship with his family and his church. The novel also reveals the back stories of John’s mother, his biological father, and his violent, fanatically religious stepfather, Gabriel Grimes. The novel focuses on the role of the Pentecostal Church in the lives of African Americans, both as a negative source of repression and moral hypocrisy and a positive source of inspiration and community. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Go Tell It on the Mountain 39th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time Magazine included the novel on its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

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God's Bits of Wood

God’s Bits of Wood is a 1960 novel by the Senegalese author Ousmane Sembène that concerns a railroad strike in colonial Senegal of the 1940s. It was written in French under the title Les bouts de bois de Dieu. The book deals with several ways that the Senegalese and Malians responded to colonialism. The book casts a critical regard towards accommodation, collaboration, and overall idealization of the French colonials. At the same time the story details the strikers who work against the mistreatment of the Senegalese people. The novel was translated into English in 1962 and published by William Heinemann as God’s Bits of Wood as part of their influential African Writers Series.

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Golden Child

Golden Child is a 2019 novel by Claire Adam.
Set in rural Trinidad, it won the Desmond Elliott Prize and was selected on a 2019 BBC list of 100 ‘most inspiring’ novels.

Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind is a novel by American writer Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following Sherman’s destructive “March to the Sea”. This historical novel features a coming-of-age story, with the title taken from the poem “Non Sum Qualis eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae”, written by Ernest Dowson.Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in 1936 and 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide.
Gone with the Wind is a controversial reference point for subsequent writers of the South, both black and white. Scholars at American universities refer to, interpret, and study it in their writings. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture.
Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into the 1939 film of the same name, which has been considered to be one of the greatest movies ever made and also received the Academy Award for Best Picture during the 12th annual Academy Awards ceremony. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime.

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Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye to Berlin is a 1939 novel by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood set during the waning days of the Weimar Republic. The work has been cited by literary critics as deftly capturing the bleak nihilism of the Weimar period. It was adapted into the 1951 Broadway play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten and, later, the 1966 Cabaret musical and the 1972 film.
The novel recounts Isherwood’s 1929-1932 sojourn as a pleasure-seeking British expatriate in poverty-stricken Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. Much of the novel’s plot details actual events, and most of the novel’s characters were based upon actual persons. The insouciant character of Sally Bowles was based on teenage cabaret singer Jean Ross. The novel was later republished together with Isherwood’s earlier novel, Mr Norris Changes Trains, in a 1945 collection entitled The Berlin Stories.

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Gravity's Rainbow

Gravity’s Rainbow is a 1973 novel first published by Viking Press by the American writer Thomas Pynchon. The narrative is set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II and centers on the design, production and dispatch of V-2 rockets by the German military. In particular, it features the quest undertaken by several characters to uncover the secret of a mysterious device, the Schwarzgerät (“black device”), which is slated to be installed in a rocket with the serial number “00000.”
Traversing a wide range of knowledge, Gravity’s Rainbow transgresses boundaries between high and low culture, between literary propriety and profanity, and between science and speculative metaphysics. It shared the 1974 US National Book Award for Fiction with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Although selected by the Pulitzer Prize jury on fiction for the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Pulitzer Advisory Board was offended by its content, some of which was described as “‘unreadable,’ ‘turgid,’ ‘overwritten’ and in parts ‘obscene'”. No Pulitzer Prize was awarded for fiction that year. The novel was nominated for the 1973 Nebula Award for Best Novel.Time named Gravity’s Rainbow one of its “All-Time 100 Greatest Novels”, a list of the best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005 and it is considered by many critics to be one of the greatest American novels ever written.

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Habibi (graphic novel)

Habibi is a black-and-white graphic novel by Craig Thompson published by Pantheon in September 2011. The 672-page book is set in a fictional Islamic fairy tale landscape and depicts the relationship between Dodola and Zam, two escaped child slaves, who are torn apart and undergo many transformations as they grow into new names and new bodies, which prove to be obstacles to their love when they later reunite. The book’s website describes its concept as a love story and a parable about humanity’s relationship to the natural world that explores themes such as the cultural divide between first world countries and third world countries, and the commonality between Christianity and Islam.While it has been lauded by publications such as Time, Elle, Salon, NPR and reviewers for the beauty of its visual design and epic setting, it has also been criticized for misrepresenting various elements such as sexuality and its depiction of Arabic culture.

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Half of a Yellow Sun

Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Published in 2006 by Fourth Estate, the novel tells the story of the Biafran War through the perspective of the characters Olanna, Ugwu, and Richard.

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Hawaii (novel)

Hawaii is a novel by James Michener published in 1959, the year that Hawaii became the 50th U.S. state. It has been translated into 32 languages.The historical correctness of the novel is high, although the narrative about the early Polynesian inhabitants is based more on folklore than anthropological and archaeological sources. It is written in episodic format, like many of Michener’s works, and narrates the stories of the original Hawaiians who sailed to the islands from Bora Bora, the early American missionaries and merchants, and the Chinese and Japanese immigrants who traveled to work and seek their fortunes in Hawaii. The story begins with the formation of the islands themselves millions of years ago and ends in the mid-1950s. Each section explores the experiences of different groups of arrivals.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the Heart of Africa. Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. This setting provides the frame for Marlow’s story of his obsession with the successful ivory trader Kurtz. Conrad offers parallels between London (“the greatest town on earth”) and Africa as places of darkness.Central to Conrad’s work is the idea that there is little difference between “civilised people” and “savages.” Heart of Darkness implicitly comments on imperialism and racism.Originally issued as a three-part serial story in Blackwood’s Magazine to celebrate the thousandth edition of the magazine, Heart of Darkness has been widely re-published and translated into many languages. It provided the inspiration for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Heart of Darkness 67th on their list of the 100 best novels in English of the twentieth century.

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Heat and Dust

Heat and Dust (1975) is a novel by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala which won the Booker Prize in 1975. The book was also ranked by The Telegraph in 2014 as one of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels.

Heidi

Heidi (; German: [ˈhaɪdi]) is a work of children’s fiction published in 1881 by Swiss author Johanna Spyri, originally published in two parts as Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning (German: Heidis Lehr- und Wanderjahre) and Heidi: How She Used What She Learned (German: Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat).
It is a novel about the events in the life of a 5-year-old girl in her paternal grandfather’s care in the Swiss Alps. It was written as a book “for children and those who love children” (as quoted from its subtitle).
Heidi is one of the best-selling books ever written and is among the best-known works of Swiss literature.

The Home and the World

The Home and the World (in the original Bengali, ঘরে বাইরে Ghôre Baire or Ghare Baire, lit. “At home and outside”) is a 1916 novel by Rabindranath Tagore. The book illustrates the battle Tagore had with himself, between the ideas of Western culture and revolution against the Western culture. These two ideas are portrayed in two of the main characters, Nikhilesh, who is rational and opposes violence, and Sandip, who will let nothing stand in his way from reaching his goals. These two opposing ideals are very important in understanding the history of the Bengal region and its contemporary problems.
There is much controversy over whether or not Tagore was attempting to represent Gandhi with Sandip. This is owing to Gyorgy Lukacs’s 1922 review of the novel in the Berlin periodical, Die rote Fahne (that is typically translated into English as “Tagore’s Gandhi Novel”) where he makes this mistaken suggestion. The novel could not have been based on Gandhi as it was published in 1916 (and written before) when Gandhi had just moved to India from South Africa (1915) and was not a known political figure. Gandhi gained political prominence in India in the context of the Khilafat movement of 1919, which was long after the novel’s publication, and took over the leadership of the Indian National Congress in 1920.
The novel was translated into English by the author’s nephew, Surendranath Tagore, with input from the author, in 1919. The Home and the World was among the contenders in a 2014 list by The Telegraph of the 10 all-time greatest Asian novels.

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Homegoing (Gyasi novel)

Homegoing is the debut historical fiction novel by Ghanaian-American author Yaa Gyasi, published in 2016. Each chapter in the novel follows a different descendant of an Asante woman named Maame, starting with her two daughters, who are half-sisters, separated by circumstance: Effia marries James Collins, the British governor in charge of Cape Coast Castle, while her half-sister Esi is held captive in the dungeons below. Subsequent chapters follow their children and following generations.
The novel was selected in 2016 for the National Book Foundation’s “5 under 35” award, the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Award for best first book, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2017. It received the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for 2017, an American Book Award, and the Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature.

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Horseman, Pass By

Horseman, Pass By is a Western novel by American writer Larry McMurtry. His first novel, it was
published when he was 25. This 1961 Western portrays life on a cattle ranch from the perspective of young narrator Lonnie Bannon. Set in post-World War II Texas (1954), the Bannon ranch is owned by Lonnie’s grandfather, Homer Bannon. Homer’s ruthless stepson, Hud, stands as the primary antagonist of the novel. The novel inspired the film Hud, starring Paul Newman as the title character.
The title of the novel derives from the last three lines of the poem “Under Ben Bulben” by William Butler Yeats, which are carved on Yeats’s tombstone:

Cast a cold eyeOn life, on death.
Horseman, pass by.

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House Made of Dawn

House Made of Dawn is a 1968 novel by N. Scott Momaday, widely credited as leading the way for the breakthrough of Native American literature into the mainstream. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969, and has also been noted for its significance in Native American anthropology.

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House with the Blind Glass Windows

This novel chronicles a year in the life of 11-year-old Tora. She consoles herself with lonely fantasies about her real father, with books, and with the friendship and support of a few village women. This proletarian feminist novel is about the oppression of women. Awarded a coveted Nordic Award, it is the first volume of a trilogy.

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Howards End

Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster, first published in 1910, about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. Howards End is considered by many to be Forster’s masterpiece. The book was conceived in June 1908 and worked on throughout the following year; it was completed in July 1910.

I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle is the first novel by the English author Dodie Smith, written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley (also English and a conscientious objector) had relocated to California. She longed for home and wrote of a happier time, unspecified in the novel apart from a reference to living in the 1930s. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children’s classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians.
The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty in a decaying castle during the 1930s. The first person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story through her journal. It is a coming-of-age story in which Cassandra passes from being a girl at the beginning to being a young woman at the end.
In 2003 the novel was listed at number 82 in the BBC’s survey The Big Read.

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I, Claudius

I, Claudius is a historical novel by English writer Robert Graves, published in 1934. Written in the form of an autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, it tells the history of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the early years of the Roman Empire, from Julius Caesar’s assassination in 44 BC to Caligula’s assassination in AD 41. Though the narrative is largely fictionalized, most of the events depicted are drawn from historical accounts of the same time period by the Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus.
The “autobiography” continues in a sequel, Claudius the God (1935), which covers the period from Claudius’ accession to his death in AD 54. The sequel also includes a section written as a biography of Herod Agrippa, a contemporary of Claudius and a King of the Jews. The two books were adapted by the BBC into the award-winning television serial I, Claudius in 1976.
Graves stated in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1965, that he wrote I, Claudius mainly because he needed the money to pay off a debt, having been let down in a land deal. He needed to raise £4000, but with the success of the books he brought in £8000 in six months, thus extricating himself from his precarious financial position. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked I, Claudius fourteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. In 2005, the novel was chosen by Time as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to present.

Ice-Candy-Man

Cracking India, (1991, U.S., 1992, India; originally published as Ice Candy Man, 1988, England) is a novel by author Bapsi Sidhwa.

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem is a novel by the American author William Faulkner published in 1939. The novel was originally published under the title The Wild Palms, which is the title of one of the two interwoven stories. This title was chosen by the publishers, Random House, over the objections of Faulkner’s choice of a title. Subsequent editions have since been printed under the title If I Forget Thee Jerusalem (1990, following the “corrected text” and format of Noel Polk), and since 2003 it is now usually referred to by both names, with the newer title following the historically first published title and in brackets, to avoid confusion: The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem].
Like four other Faulkner novels (Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon and A Fable), the novel is not set in Yoknapatawpha County.

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In the Castle of My Skin

In the Castle of My Skin is the first and much acclaimed novel by Barbadian writer George Lamming, originally published in 1953 by Michael Joseph in London, and subsequently published in New York City by McGraw-Hill. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award and was championed by eminent figures Jean-Paul Sartre and Richard Wright, the latter writing an introduction to the book’s US edition. An autobiographical coming-of-age novel, set in the 1930s–’40s in Carrington Village, Barbados, where the author was born and raised, In the Castle of My Skin follows the events in the life of a young boy named G, taking place against the background of dramatic changes in the society in which he lives. The book’s title comes from a couplet in Derek Walcott’s early work Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949): “You in the castle of your skin / I the swineherd.”

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In the Time of the Butterflies

In the Time of the Butterflies is a historical fiction novel by Julia Alvarez, relating a fictionalized account of the Mirabal sisters during the time of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. The book is written in the first and third person, by and about the Mirabal sisters. First published in 1994, the story was adapted into a feature film in 2001.

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Independent People

Independent People (Icelandic: Sjálfstætt fólk) is an epic novel by Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness, originally published in two volumes in 1934 and 1935; literally the title means “Self-standing [i.e. self-reliant] folk”. It deals with the struggle of poor Icelandic farmers in the early 20th century, only freed from debt bondage in the last generation, and surviving on isolated crofts in an inhospitable landscape.
The novel is considered among the foremost examples of social realism in Icelandic fiction in the 1930s. It is an indictment of materialism, the cost of the self-reliant spirit to relationships, and capitalism itself. This book, along with several other major novels, helped Laxness win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955.

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Interview with the Vampire

Interview with the Vampire is a gothic horror and vampire novel by American author Anne Rice, published in 1976. It was her debut novel. Based on a short story Rice wrote around 1968, the novel centers on vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, who tells the story of his life to a reporter. Rice composed the novel shortly after the death of her young daughter Michelle, who served as an inspiration for the child-vampire character Claudia. Though initially the subject of mixed critical reception, the book was followed by many widely popular sequels, collectively known as The Vampire Chronicles. A film adaptation was released in 1994, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, and the novel has been adapted as a comic three times.

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It (novel)

It is a 1986 horror novel by American author Stephen King. It was his 22nd book and his 17th novel written under his own name. The story follows the experiences of seven children as they are terrorized by an evil entity that exploits the fears of its victims to disguise itself while hunting its prey. “It” primarily appears in the form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown to attract its preferred prey of young children.

Ivanhoe

Ivanhoe: A Romance by Walter Scott is a historical novel published in three volumes, in 1819, as one of the Waverley novels. At the time it was written, the novel represented a shift by Scott away from writing novels set in Scotland in the fairly recent past to a more fanciful depiction of England in the Middle Ages. Ivanhoe proved to be one of the best-known and most influential of Scott’s novels.

Jude the Obscure

Jude the Obscure is a novel by Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1896. It is Hardy’s last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man; he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.

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Kaputt

Kaputt is a book written by Curzio Malaparte between 1941 and 1943 . It is difficult to call it a novel in the common sense of the term: it does not have a predictable plot development. It is rather a set of episodes, partly autobiographical , held together by the reference to the war frame in which the story unfolds.

Kidnapped

Kidnapped is a historical fiction adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, written as a boys’ novel and first published in the magazine Young Folks from May to July 1886. The novel has attracted the praise and admiration of writers as diverse as Henry James, Jorge Luis Borges, and Hilary Mantel. A sequel, Catriona, was published in 1893.
The narrative is written in English with some dialogue in Lowland Scots, a Germanic language that evolved from an earlier incarnation of English.
Kidnapped is set around real 18th-century Scottish events, notably the “Appin murder”, which occurred in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Many of the characters are real people, including one of the principals, Alan Breck Stewart. The political situation of the time is portrayed from multiple viewpoints, and the Scottish Highlanders are treated sympathetically.
The full title of the book is Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751: How he was Kidnapped and Cast away; his Sufferings in a Desert Isle; His Journey in the Wild Highlands; his acquaintance with Alan Breck Stewart and other notorious Highland Jacobites; with all that he suffered at the hands of his Uncle, Ebenezer Balfour of Shaws, falsely so-called: Written by Himself and now set forth by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Kristin Lavransdatter

Kristin Lavransdatter is a trilogy of historical novels written by Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset. The individual novels are Kransen (The Wreath), first published in 1920, Husfrue (The Wife), published in 1921, and Korset (The Cross), published in 1922. Kransen and Husfrue were translated from the original Norwegian as The Bridal Wreath and The Mistress of Husaby, respectively, in the first English translation by Charles Archer and J. S. Scott.
This work formed the basis of Undset receiving the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, which was awarded to her “principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages”. Her work is much admired for its historical and ethnological accuracy.

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Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories

This collection features a brilliant new translation of the Japanese master’s stories, from the source for the movie Rashōmon to his later, more autobiographical writings. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) is one of Japan’s foremost stylists – a modernist master whose short stories are marked by highly original imagery, cynicism, beauty and wild humour.

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Bring Up the Bodies

Bring Up the Bodies is a historical novel by Hilary Mantel; sequel to the award-winning Wolf Hall; and part of a trilogy charting the rise and fall of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. It won the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. The final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, was published in March 2020.

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The People of Hemso

The People of Hemsö (Swedish: Hemsöborna) is an 1887 novel by August Strindberg about the life of people of the island Hemsö in the Stockholm archipelago. Hemsö is a fictional island, but it is based on Kymmendö where Strindberg had spent time in his youth. Strindberg wrote the book to combat his homesickness while living abroad in Germany and France.
Written during a difficult period in exile from Sweden, the novel paradoxically has a strong sense of place, and is a feat of straightforward folksy storytelling. Mrs. Flod, a widow of some means, hires Carlsson to run the farm on the island. As a newcomer and a landlubber among sailors and fishermen, Carlsson is implicitly distrusted by the locals as they try to discern whether Carlsson is a slippery confidence trickster preying on the lonely widow, or an honest, hard-working man revitalizing the neglected farm.
In 1955 a movie based on the novel was shown; it marked the first film appearance of the actress Daliah Lavi.
In 1966 a TV series based on the novel was produced.

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Bring Up the Bodies

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The People of Hemso

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Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by English author D. H. Lawrence that was first published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France. An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books, which won the case and quickly sold three million copies. The book was also banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan.

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Lark Rise to Candleford

Lark Rise to Candleford is a trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels by Flora Thompson (1876 – 1947) about the countryside of north-east Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, England, at the end of the 19th century. The stories were previously published separately as Lark Rise in 1939, Over to Candleford in 1941 and Candleford Green in 1943. They were first published together in 1945.

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Le Morte d'Arthur

Le Morte d’Arthur (originally spelled Le Morte Darthur, ungrammatical Middle French for “The Death of Arthur”) is a 15th-century Middle English prose reworking by Sir Thomas Malory of tales about the legendary King Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Merlin and the Knights of the Round Table—along with their respective folklore. In order to tell a “complete” story of Arthur from his conception to his death, Malory compiled, rearranged, interpreted and modified material from various French and English sources. Today, this is one of the best-known works of Arthurian literature. Many authors since the 19th-century revival of the legend have used Malory as their principal source.
Written in prison, Le Morte d’Arthur was first published in 1485 at the end of the medieval English era by William Caxton, who changed its title from the original The Whole Book of King Arthur and of His Noble Knights of the Round Table (The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table). Until the discovery of the Winchester Manuscript in 1934, the 1485 edition was considered the earliest known text of Le Morte d’Arthur and that closest to Malory’s original version. Modern editions under various titles are inevitably variable, changing spelling, grammar and pronouns for the convenience of readers of modern English, as well as sometimes abridging or revising the material.

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Les Misérables

Les Misérables (, French: [le mizeʁabl(ə)]) is a French historical novel by Victor Hugo, first published in 1862, that is considered one of the greatest novels of the 19th century.
In the English-speaking world, the novel is usually referred to by its original French title. However, several alternatives have been used, including The Miserables, The Wretched, The Miserable Ones, The Poor Ones, The Wretched Poor, The Victims and The Dispossessed. Beginning in 1815 and culminating in the 1832 June Rebellion in Paris, the novel follows the lives and interactions of several characters, particularly the struggles of ex-convict Jean Valjean and his experience of redemption.Examining the nature of law and grace, the novel elaborates upon the history of France, the architecture and urban design of Paris, politics, moral philosophy, antimonarchism, justice, religion, and the types and nature of romantic and familial love. Les Misérables has been popularized through numerous adaptations for film, television and the stage, including a musical.

Read More About Les Misérables / Source

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Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin is a novel by Colum McCann set mainly in New York City in the United States. The book won the 2009 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the 2011 International Dublin Literary Award, one of the most lucrative literary prizes in the world. Its title comes from the poem “Locksley Hall” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

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Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate (Spanish: Como agua para chocolate) is a novel by Mexican novelist and screenwriter Laura Esquivel.The novel follows the story of a young girl named Tita, who longs for her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her mother’s upholding of the family tradition: the youngest daughter cannot marry, but instead must take care of her mother until she dies. Tita is only able to express herself when she cooks.
Esquivel employs magical realism to combine the supernatural with the ordinary throughout the novel.The novel won the American Booksellers Book of the Year Award for Adult Trade in 1994.

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Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo is a 2017 experimental novel by American writer George Saunders. It is Saunders’s first full-length novel and was the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller for the week of March 5, 2017. Saunders is better known for his short stories, reporting and occasional essays.The novel takes place during and after the death of Abraham Lincoln’s son William “Willie” Wallace Lincoln and deals with the president’s grief at his loss. The bulk of the novel, which takes place over the course of a single evening, is set in the bardo—an intermediate space between life and rebirth.
Lincoln in the Bardo received critical acclaim, and won the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Many publications later ranked it one of the best novels of its decade.

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Lonesome Dove

Lonesome Dove is a 1985 Western novel by American writer Larry McMurtry. It is the first published book of the Lonesome Dove series but the third installment in the series chronologically.
The story focuses on the relationship among several retired Texas Rangers and their adventures driving a cattle herd from Texas to Montana. Set in the closing years of the Old West, the novel explores themes of old age, death, unrequited love, and friendship.
The novel was a bestseller and won the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1989, it was adapted as a TV miniseries starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall, which won both critical and popular acclaim. McMurtry went on to write a sequel, Streets of Laredo (1993), and two prequels, Dead Man’s Walk (1995) and Comanche Moon (1997), all of which were also adapted as TV series.

Lord Jim

Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad originally published as a serial in Blackwood’s Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900. An early and primary event in the story is the abandonment of a passenger ship in distress by its crew, including a young British seaman named Jim. He is publicly censured for this action and the novel follows his later attempts at coming to terms with himself and his past.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Lord Jim 85th on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Love in a Cold Climate

Love in a Cold Climate is a novel by Nancy Mitford, first published in 1949. The title is a phrase from George Orwell’s novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936).
Love in a Cold Climate is a companion volume to The Pursuit of Love. The time frame of Love in a Cold Climate is the same as The Pursuit of Love, but the focus is on a different set of characters. Fanny remains the fictional narrator. In The Pursuit of Love, Fanny narrates the story of her cousin Linda Radlett. In Love in a Cold Climate, Fanny narrates the story of Polly, to whom Fanny is distantly related through her father’s family.

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Love Medicine

Love Medicine is Louise Erdrich’s debut novel, first published in 1984. Erdrich revised and expanded the novel in subsequent 1993 and 2009 editions. The book follows the lives of five interconnected Ojibwe families living on fictional reservations in Minnesota and North Dakota. The collection of stories in the book spans six decades from the 1930s to the 1980s. Love Medicine garnered critical praise and won numerous awards, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Loving (novel)

Loving is a 1945 novel by British writer Henry Green. Time included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe; invading one another’s provinces of authority to create an anarchic environment of self-seeking behaviour, pilfering, gossip and love.
In a 1958 interview in The Paris Review, Terry Southern asked Green about his inspiration for Loving. Green replied “I got the idea of Loving from a manservant in the Fire Service during the war. He was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world. The reply was ‘Lying in bed on a summer morning, with the window open, listening to the church bells, eating buttered toast with cunty fingers.’ I saw the book in a flash.”

Lust for Life

Lust for Life (1934) is a biographical novel written by Irving Stone about the life of the famous Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and his hardships. It was Stone’s first major publication, and is largely based on the collection of letters between Vincent van Gogh and his younger brother, art dealer Theo van Gogh. This correspondence lays the foundation for most of what is known about the thoughts and beliefs of the artist. Stone conducted a large amount of “on-field” research for the novel, as is mentioned in the afterword.

Main Street (novel)

Main Street is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920.
Satirizing small town life, Main Street is perhaps Sinclair Lewis’s most famous book, and led in part to his eventual 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature. It relates the life and struggles of Carol Milford Kennicott in the small town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, as she comes into conflict with the small-town mentality of its residents. Highly acclaimed upon publication, Main Street remains a recognized American classic.

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Martin Eden

Martin Eden is a 1909 novel by American author Jack London about a young proletarian autodidact struggling to become a writer. It was first serialized in The Pacific Monthly magazine from September 1908 to September 1909 and then published in book form by Macmillan in September 1909.
Eden represents writers’ frustration with publishers by speculating that when he mails off a manuscript, a “cunning arrangement of cogs” immediately puts it in a new envelope and returns it automatically with a rejection slip. The central theme of Eden’s developing artistic sensibilities places the novel in the tradition of the Künstlerroman, which narrates an artist’s formation and development.Eden differs from London in rejecting socialism, attacking it as “slave morality” and relying on Nietzschean individualism. Nevertheless, in the copy of the novel which he inscribed for Upton Sinclair, London wrote, “One of my motifs, in this book, was an attack on individualism (in the person of the hero). I must have bungled it, for not a single reviewer has discovered it.”

Mason & Dixon

Mason & Dixon is a postmodernist novel by U.S. author Thomas Pynchon published in 1997. It presents a fictionalized account of the collaboration between Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon in their astronomical and surveying exploits in the Dutch Cape Colony, Saint Helena, Great Britain and along the Mason-Dixon line in British North America on the eve of the Revolutionary War in the United States.

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man

Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man is a novel by Siegfried Sassoon, first published in 1928 by Faber and Faber. It won both the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, being immediately recognised as a classic of English literature. In the years since its first appearance, it has regularly been a set text for British schoolchildren.

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Memoirs of a Geisha

Memoirs of a Geisha is a historical fiction novel by American author Arthur Golden, published in 1997. The novel, told in first person perspective, tells the story of a fictional geisha working in Kyoto, Japan, before, during and after World War II, and ends with her being relocated to New York City.
In 2005, a film version was released.

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Memoirs of Hadrian

Memoirs of Hadrian is a novel by the Belgian-born French writer Marguerite Yourcenar about the life and death of Roman Emperor Hadrian. First published in France in French in 1951 as Mémoires d’Hadrien, the book was an immediate success, meeting with enormous critical acclaim. Although the historical Hadrian wrote an autobiography, it has been lost.
The book takes the form of a letter to Hadrian’s adoptive grandson and eventual successor “Mark” (Marcus Aurelius). The emperor meditates on military triumphs, love of poetry and music, philosophy, and his passion for his lover Antinous, all in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert’s “melancholy of the antique world.”

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Middlemarch

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life is a novel by the English author Mary Anne Evans, who wrote as George Eliot. It first appeared in eight instalments (volumes) in 1871 and 1872. Set in Middlemarch, a fictional English Midland town, in 1829 to 1832, it follows distinct, intersecting stories with many characters. Issues include the status of women, the nature of marriage, idealism, self-interest, religion, hypocrisy, political reform, and education. Despite comic elements, Middlemarch uses realism to encompass historical events: the 1832 Reform Act, early railways, and the accession of King William IV. It looks at medicine of the time and reactionary views in a settled community facing unwelcome change. Eliot began writing the two pieces that formed the novel in 1869–1870 and completed it in 1871. Initial reviews were mixed, but it is now seen widely as her best work and one of the great English novels.

Middlesex (novel)

Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides’ life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and was dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.

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Midnight's Children

Midnight’s Children is a 1981 novel by author Salman Rushdie. It portrays India’s transition from British colonial rule to independence and the partition of India. It is considered an example of postcolonial, postmodern, and magical realist literature. The story is told by its chief protagonist, Saleem Sinai, and is set in the context of actual historical events. The style of preserving history with fictional accounts is self-reflexive.

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Milkman (novel)

Milkman is a historical psychological fiction novel written by the Irish author Anna Burns. Set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the story follows an 18-year-old girl who is harassed by an older married man known as the “milkman”. It is Burns’s first novel to be published after Little Constructions in 2007, and is her third overall.
Milkman received strongly positive reviews, with critics mostly praising the book’s narration, atmosphere, humor, and its complex portrayal of Northern Irish sociopolitics. Milkman won several awards, including the 2018 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, marking the first time a Northern Irish writer has been awarded the prize. The novel also won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, as well as the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. As of 2019, the novel has sold in excess of 540,000 copies.

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Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale is an 1851 novel by American writer Herman Melville. The book is the sailor Ishmael’s narrative of the obsessive quest of Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod, for revenge on Moby Dick, the giant white sperm whale that on the ship’s previous voyage bit off Ahab’s leg at the knee. A contribution to the literature of the American Renaissance, Moby-Dick was published to mixed reviews, was a commercial failure, and was out of print at the time of the author’s death in 1891. Its reputation as a “Great American Novel” was established only in the 20th century, after the centennial of its author’s birth. William Faulkner said he wished he had written the book himself, and D. H. Lawrence called it “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written”. Its opening sentence, “Call me Ishmael”, is among world literature’s most famous.Melville began writing Moby-Dick in February 1850, and finished 18 months later, a year longer than he had anticipated. Melville drew on his experience as a common sailor from 1841 to 1844, including several years on whalers, and on wide reading in whaling literature. The white whale is modeled on the notoriously hard-to-catch albino whale Mocha Dick, and the book’s ending is based on the sinking of the whaleship Essex in 1820. His literary influences include Shakespeare and the Bible. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and of extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God. In addition to narrative prose, Melville uses styles and literary devices ranging from songs, poetry, and catalogs to Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides. In August 1850, with the manuscript perhaps half finished, he met Nathaniel Hawthorne and was deeply moved by his Mosses from an Old Manse, which he compared to Shakespeare in its cosmic ambitions. This encounter may have inspired him to revise and expand Moby-Dick, which is dedicated to Hawthorne, “in token of my admiration for his genius”.
The book was first published (in three volumes) as The Whale in London in October 1851, and under its definitive title in a single-volume edition in New York in November. The London publisher, Richard Bentley, censored or changed sensitive passages; Melville made revisions as well, including a last-minute change to the title for the New York edition. The whale, however, appears in the text of both editions as “Moby Dick”, without the hyphen. Reviewers in Britain were largely favorable, though some objected that the tale seemed to be told by a narrator who perished with the ship, as the British edition lacked the Epilogue recounting Ishmael’s survival. American reviewers were more hostile.

The Color Purple

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into a film and musical of the same name. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence.

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The Da Vinci Code

The Da Vinci Code is a 2006 American mystery thriller film directed by Ron Howard, written by Akiva Goldsman, and based on Dan Brown’s 2003 best-selling novel of the same name. The first in the Robert Langdon film series, the film stars Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, Sir Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Jürgen Prochnow, Jean Reno and Paul Bettany

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The Secret Garden

The Secret Garden is a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in book form in 1911, after serialisation in The American Magazine (November 1910 – August 1911). Set in England, it is one of Burnett’s most popular novels and seen as a classic of English children’s literature. Several stage and film adaptations have been made. The American edition was published by the Frederick A.

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A Christmas Carol

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A Dance to The Music of Time

A Dance to the Music of Time is a 12-volume roman-fleuve by Anthony Powell, published between 1951 and 1975 to critical acclaim. The story is an often comic examination of movements and manners, power and passivity in English political, cultural and military life in the mid-20th century. The books were inspired by the painting of the same name by Nicolas Poussin.

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A Rising Man

Captain Sam Wyndham, former Scotland Yard detective, is a new arrival to Calcutta. Desperately seeking a fresh start after his experiences during the Great War, Wyndham has been recruited to head up a new post in the police force.

A Thousand Ships

A Thousand Ships is a 2019 novel by Natalie Haynes which retells the mythology of the Trojan war from the perspective of the women involved. As a framing device, the muse Calliope narrates several stories from Greek mythology to an unidentified male poet.

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Alex And Eliza

As battle cries of the American Revolution echo in the distance, servants flutter about preparing for one of New York society’s biggest events: the Schuylers’ grand ball.

Love & War: An Alex & Eliza Story

As the war for American Independence carries on, two newlyweds are settling into their new adventure: marriage. But the honeymoon’s over, and Alexander Hamilton and Eliza Schuyler are learning firsthand just how tricky wedded life can be.

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Alias Grace

Alias Grace is a novel of historical fiction by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. First published in 1996 by McClelland & Stewart, it won the Canadian Giller Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The story fictionalizes the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in Canada West.

All The Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot See is a war novel written by American author Anthony Doerr, published by Scribner on May 6, 2014. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the 2015 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Set in occupied France during World War II, the novel centers on a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths eventually cross.

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And I Darken

Ever since she and her gentle younger brother, Radu, were wrenched from their homeland of Wallachia and abandoned by their father to be raised in the Ottoman courts, Lada has known that being ruthless is the key to survival.

Arthur & George

Arthur & George (2005) is the tenth novel by English author Julian Barnes which takes as its basis the true story of the “Great Wyrley Outrages”. Set at the turn of the 20th century, the story follows the separate but intersecting lives of two very different British men: a half-Indian solicitor and son of a Vicar, George Edalji, and the world-famous author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

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As Meat Loves Salt

As Meat Loves Salt is a gripping portrait of England beset by war. It is also a moving portrait of a man on the brink of madness. Hailed as a masterpiece, this is a novel by a most original new voice in fiction.

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August 1914

August 1914 is a Russian novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the defeat of the Imperial Russian Army at the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia. The novel was completed in 1970, first published in 1971, with an English translation the following year.

Aurélien

Aurélien is a novel by Louis Aragon, the fourth of the Le Monde réel cycle. It was ranked 51st in Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century. Aurélien (1978), TV film directed by Michel Favart, screenplay adapted by Michel Favart and Françoise Verny, starring Philippe Nahoun as Aurélien and Françoise Lebrun as Bérénice.

Ballad of the Salt Sea

The Ballad of the Salty Sea is a graphic novel, the first episode of the adventures of Corto Maltese, a Maltese sailor. This story was written and drawn by the Italian comic book creator Hugo Pratt. It was published for the first time between 1967 and 1969, in the magazine Sergente Kirk.

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Barchester Towers

Barchester Towers is a novel by English author Anthony Trollope published by Longmans in 1857. It is the second book in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, preceded by The Warden and followed by Doctor Thorne. Among other things it satirises the antipathy in the Church of England between High Church and Evangelical adherents.

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Burial Rites

Burial Rites tells the story of Agnes Magnúsdóttir, a servant in northern Iceland who was condemned to death after the murder of two men, one of whom was her employer, and became the last woman put to death in Iceland.

Caleb's Crossing

The narrator of Caleb’s Crossing is Bethia Mayfield, growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans. Restless and curious, she yearns after an education that is closed to her by her sex.

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Circus Of Wonders

1866. In a coastal village in southern England, Nell picks violets for a living. Set apart by her community because of the birthmarks that speckle her skin, Nell’s world is her beloved brother and devotion to the sea.

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City Of Vengeance

A prominent Jewish moneylender is murdered in his home, a death with wide implications in a city powered by immense wealth. Cesare Aldo, a former soldier and now an officer of the Renaissance city’s most feared criminal court, is given four days to solve the murder: catch the killer before the feast of Epiphany – or suffer the consequences.

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City Of Women

It is 1943 – the height of the Second World War – and Berlin has essentially become a city of women. In this page-turning novel, David Gillham explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times, and how the choices they make can be the difference between life and death.

Cloudsplitter

Cloudsplitter is a 1998 historical novel by Russell Banks relating the story of abolitionist John Brown. The novel is narrated as a retrospective by John Brown’s son, Owen Brown, from his hermitage in the San Gabriel Mountains of California.

Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical novel by Charles Frazier which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares several similarities with Homer’s Odyssey.

Kololo Hill

A devastating decree is issued: all Ugandan Asians must leave the country in ninety days. They must take only what they can carry, give up their money and never return.

The Sun Also Rises

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, his first, that portrays American and British expatriates who travel from Paris to the Festival of San Fermín in Pamplona to watch the running of the bulls and the bullfights. An early and enduring modernist novel, it received mixed reviews upon publication.

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The Sympathizer

The Sympathizer is the 2015 debut novel by Vietnamese American professor Viet Thanh Nguyen. It is a best-selling novel and recipient of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its reviews have generally recognized its excellence, and it was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice.

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The Tea Rose

The Tea Rose is a historical fiction novel by Jennifer Donnelly. It is the first book of a trilogy about London’s East End at the turn of the 19th century. It was first published October 1, 2002 by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried (1990) is a collection of linked short stories by American novelist Tim O’Brien, about a platoon of American soldiers fighting on the ground in the Vietnam War. His third book about the war, it is based upon his experiences as a soldier in the 23rd Infantry Division.

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160

The Thorn Birds

The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Australian author Colleen McCullough. Set primarily on Drogheda – a fictional sheep station in the Australian Outback named after Drogheda, Ireland – the story focuses on the Cleary family and spans the years 1915 to 1969.

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161

The Thousand Autumns Of Jacob De Zoet

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is a historical fiction novel by British author David Mitchell published by Sceptre in 2010. It is set during the Dutch trading concession with Japan in the late 18th-century, during the period of Japanese history known as Sakoku.

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162

The Three Muskateers

The Three Musketeers (French: Les Trois Mousquetaires, is a French historical adventure novel written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is in the swashbuckler genre, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.

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163

The Tin Drum

The Tin Drum is a 1959 novel by Günter Grass. The novel is the first book of Grass’s Danziger Trilogie (Danzig Trilogy). It was adapted into a 1979 film, which won both the 1979 Palme d’Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980.

The Transit of Venus

A transit of Venus across the Sun takes place when the planet Venus passes directly between the Sun and a superior planet, becoming visible against the solar disk. During a transit, Venus can be seen from Earth as a small black dot moving across the face of the Sun.

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The Tutor

When Scott and Linda Gardner hire Julian Sawyer to tutor their troubled teenage son Brandon, he seems like the answer to a prayer. Capable and brilliant, Julian connects with Brandon in a way neither of his parents can.

The Twelve Rooms Of The Nile

ury’s heroine, before he had written a word of Madame Bovary, Florence Nightingale and Gustave Flaubert traveled up the Nile at the same time. In reality, they never met. But in award-winning author Enid Shomer’s The Twelve Rooms of the Nile, they ignite a friendship marked by intelligence, humor, and a ravishing tenderness that will alter both their destinies.

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167

The Twentieth Wife

As the daughter of starving refugees fleeing violent persecution in Persia, her fateful birth in a roadside tent sparked a miraculous reversal of family fortune, culminating in her father’s introduction to the court of Emperor Akbar. She is called Mehrunnisa, the Sun of Women. This is her story.

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The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad is a historical fiction novel by American author Colson Whitehead, published by Doubleday in 2016. The alternate history novel tells the story of Cora and Caesar, two slaves in the antebellum South during the 19th century, who make a bid for freedom from their Georgia plantation by following the Underground Railroad.

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169

The Unknown Soldier

The Unknown Soldier or Unknown Soldiers is a war novel by Finnish author Väinö Linna, considered his magnum opus. Published in 1954, The Unknown Soldier chronicles the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union during 1941–1944 from the viewpoint of ordinary Finnish soldiers.

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170

The Way We Live Now

The Way We Live Now is a satirical novel by Anthony Trollope, published in London in 1875 after first appearing in serialised form. It is one of the last significant Victorian novels to have been published in monthly parts.

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171

The White Queen

The White Queen is a 2009 historical novel by Philippa Gregory, the first of her series The Cousins’ War. It tells the story of Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort of King Edward IV of England. The 2013 BBC One television series The White Queen is a 10-part adaptation of Gregory’s novels The White Queen, The Red Queen (2010) and The Kingmaker’s Daughter (2012), and features Rebecca Ferguson as Elizabeth Woodville.

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The Widows of Malabar Hill

Bombay, 1921: Perveen Mistry, the daughter of a respected Zoroastrian family, has just joined her father’s law firm, becoming one of the first female lawyers in India. Armed with a legal education from Oxford, Perveen also has a tragic personal history that makes her especially devoted to championing and protecting women’s rights

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173

The Wine of Astonishment

The Wine of Astonishment is a 1982 novel written by Trinidadian author Earl Lovelace. The story depicts the struggles of a Spiritual Baptist community from the passing of the Prohibition Ordinance to repealing of the ban, portraying a 20-year struggle from 1932 to 1951.

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174

The Winter King

The Winter King: A Novel of Arthur is the first novel of the Warlord Chronicles trilogy by Bernard Cornwell, originally published in the UK in 1995 by Penguin Group. The book is based on characters and plot elements from Arthurian myth, but considerably changed and re-worked.

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175

The Woman in White

The Woman in White is Wilkie Collins’s fifth published novel, written in 1859. It is a mystery novel and falls under the genre of “sensation novels”. The story is an early example of detective fiction with protagonist Walter Hartright employing many of the sleuthing techniques of later private detectives.

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176

The Wreath

Originally published in Norwegian in 1920 and set in fourteenth-century Norway, The Wreath chronicles the courtship of a headstrong and passionate young woman and a dangerously charming and impetuous man.

The Years Of Rice And Salt

The Years of Rice and Salt is an alternate history novel by American science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson, published in 2002. The novel explores how world history might have been different if the Black Death plague had killed 99 percent of Europe’s population, instead of a third as it did in reality.

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The Yellow Bird Sings

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her 5-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons.

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179

They Burn the Thistles

They Burn the Thistles – Ince Memed II is a 1969 novel by Yaşar Kemal. It was Kemal’s second novel in his İnce Memed tetralogy. The first Ince Memed novel won the Varlik prize for that year (Turkey’s highest literary prize) and earned Kemal a national reputation.

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180

Things Fall Apart

Things Fall Apart is the debut novel by Nigerian author Chinua Achebe, first published in 1958. It depicts pre-colonial life in the southeastern part of Nigeria and the arrival of Europeans during the late 19th century. It is seen as the archetypal modern African novel in English, and one of the first to receive global critical acclaim.

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181

Three Day Road

Three Day Road is the first novel from Canadian writer Joseph Boyden. Joseph’s maternal grandfather, as well as an uncle on his father’s side, served as soldiers during the First World War, and Boyden draws upon a wealth of family narratives.

Thérèse Raquin

Thérèse Raquin is an 1868 novel by French writer Émile Zola, first published in serial form in the literary magazine L’Artiste in 1867. It was Zola’s third novel, though the first to earn wide fame. The novel’s adultery and murder were considered scandalous and famously described as “putrid” in a review in the newspaper Le Figaro.

Read More About Thérèse Raquin / Source

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Ties That Bind, Ties That Break

Ties That Bind, Ties That Break is a young adult novel by Lensey Namioka, published in 1999. The novel tells the story of a girl who defied tradition in China in the early 1900s and later moved to the United States. It received the Washington State Book Award in 2000. A sequel, An Ocean Apart, A World Away, follows the story of Ailin’s friend, Xueyan.

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Time and Again

Time and Again is a 1970 illustrated novel by American writer Jack Finney. The many illustrations in the book are real, though, as explained in an endnote, not all are from 1882, the year in which the main action of the book takes place. A sequel, From Time to Time (1995), was published during the final year of the author’s life.

Time's Arrow

Time’s Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991. It is notable partly because the events occur in a reverse chronology, with time passing in reverse and the main character becoming younger and younger during the novel.

To Calais, In Ordinary Time

A gentlewoman is fleeing an odious arranged marriage, a Scottish proctor is returning home to Avignon and a handsome young ploughman in search of adventure is on his way to volunteer with a company of archers. All come together on the road to Calais.

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187

Tombland

Tombland is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is the seventh entry in the Matthew Shardlake Series, following 2014’s Lamentation. Set in the summer of 1549, the story deals with the investigation of a murder in Norfolk.

Traitor Angels

The daughter of notorious poet John Milton, Elizabeth has never known her place in this shifting world—except by her father’s side. By day she helps transcribe his latest masterpiece, the epic poem Paradise Lost, and by night she learns languages and sword fighting.

Treasure Island

Treasure Island is an adventure novel by Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, narrating a tale of “buccaneers and buried gold”, serialized 1881–82. Its influence is enormous on popular perceptions of pirates, making popular such elements as treasure maps marked with an “X”, schooners, the Black Spot, tropical islands, and one-legged seamen bearing parrots on their shoulders.

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True History of the Kelly Gang

True History of the Kelly Gang is a novel by Australian writer Peter Carey, based loosely on the history of the Kelly Gang. It was first published in Brisbane by the University of Queensland Press in 2000. It won the 2001 Booker Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize in the same year.

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U.S.A. Trilogy

The U.S.A. trilogy is a series of three novels by American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936). The books were first published together in a volume titled U.S.A. by Modern Library in 1937.

Under the Volcano

Under the Volcano is a novel by English writer Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957) published in 1947. The novel tells the story of Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic British consul in the small Mexican town of Quauhnahuac, on the Day of the Dead, 1 November 1938.

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Under the Volcano

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Vile Bodies

Vile Bodies is the second novel by Evelyn Waugh, published in 1930. It satirises the bright young things, the rich young people partying in London after World War I, and the press which fed on their doings. The original title Bright Young Things, which Waugh changed because he thought the phrase had become too clichéd, was used in Stephen Fry’s 2003 film adaptation.

Waiting for the Barbarians

Waiting for the Barbarians is a novel by the South African writer J. M. Coetzee. First published in 1980, it was chosen by Penguin for its series Great Books of the 20th Century and won both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for fiction.

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Waiting for the Mahatma

Waiting for the Mahatma is written in Narayan’s gentle comic style. An unusual feature of this novel is the participation of Gandhi as a character. His revolutionary ideas and practices are contrasted with the views of traditionalists such as the town’s notables and Sriram’s grandmother.

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War And Peace

War and Peace is a literary work mixed with chapters on history and philosophy by the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, first published serially, then published in its entirety in 1869. It is regarded as one of Tolstoy’s finest literary achievements and remains an internationally praised classic of world literature.

War and Remembrance

War and Remembrance is a novel by Herman Wouk, published in October 1978 as the sequel to Wouk’s The Winds of War (1971). The Winds of War covers the period 1939 to 1941, and War and Remembrance continues the story of the extended Henry and Jastrow families from 15 December 1941 through 6 August 1945.

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Washington Black

Washington Black is the third novel by Canadian author Esi Edugyan. The novel was published in 2018 by HarperCollins in Canada and by Knopf Publishers internationally. A bildungsroman, the story follows the early life of George Washington “Wash” Black, chronicling his escape from slavery and his subsequent adventures.

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Water for Elephants

Water for Elephants is the third novel by the Canadian-American author Sara Gruen. The book was published in 2006 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. The historical fiction novel is a 20th century circus drama. Gruen wrote the book as part of the National Novel Writing Month.

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When Christ And His Saints Slept

When Christ and His Saints Slept is a historical novel written by Sharon Kay Penman, published in 1994. It is the first of Penman’s Plantagenet trilogy, (ultimately five books) followed by Time and Chance, Devil’s Brood, Lionheart and A King’s Ransom.

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Where The Crawdads Sing

Where the Crawdads Sing is a 2018 novel by American author Delia Owens. It has topped The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2019 and The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2020 for a combined 32 non-consecutive weeks. As of late January 2021, the book has spent 124 weeks on the best seller list.

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White Teeth

White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel is centred around Britain’s relationship with immigrants from the British Commonwealth.

Wide Sargasso Sea

Wide Sargasso Sea is a 1966 novel by Dominican-British author Jean Rhys. The novel serves as a postcolonial and feminist prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847), describing the background to Mr. Rochester’s marriage from the point-of-view of his wife Antoinette Cosway, a Creole heiress.

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Winter's Tale

Winter’s Tale is a 1983 fantasy novel by Mark Helprin. It takes place in a mythic New York City, markedly different from reality, and in an industrial Edwardian era near the turn of the 20th century. The novel was adapted into a feature film by Akiva Goldsman.

Wolf By Wolf

The year is 1956, and the Axis powers of the Third Reich and Imperial Japan rule. To commemorate their Great Victory, Hitler and Emperor Hirohito host the Axis Tour: an annual motorcycle race across their conjoined continents.

Wolf Hall

Wolf Hall is a 2009 historical novel by English author Hilary Mantel, published by Fourth Estate, named after the Seymour family’s seat of Wolfhall, or Wulfhall, in Wiltshire. Set in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a sympathetic fictionalised biography documenting the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII through to the death of Sir Thomas More.

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent relationships with Earnshaw’s adopted son, Heathcliff.

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Zorba the Greek

Zorba the Greek is a novel written by the Cretan author Nikos Kazantzakis, first published in 1946. It is the tale of a young Greek intellectual who ventures to escape his bookish life with the aid of the boisterous and mysterious Alexis Zorba.

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The Muse

On a hot July day in 1967, Odelle Bastien climbs the stone steps of the Skelton gallery in London, knowing that her life is about to change forever. Having struggled to find her place in the city since she arrived from Trinidad five years ago, she has been offered a job as a typist under the tutelage of the glamorous and enigmatic Marjorie Quick.

The Painted Girls

1878 Paris. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent.

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The Naked and the Dead

The Naked and the Dead is a novel by Norman Mailer. Published by Rinehart & Company in 1948, when he was 25, it was his debut novel. It depicts the experiences of a platoon during World War II, based partially on Mailer’s experiences as a cook with the 112th Cavalry Regiment during the Philippines Campaign in World War II.

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The Name Of The Rose

The Name of the Rose is the 1980 debut novel by Italian author Umberto Eco. It is a historical murder mystery set in an Italian monastery in the year 1327, and an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory.

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The Night Watch

The Night Watch is a dark, 2006 historical fiction novel by Sarah Waters. It was shortlisted for both the 2006 Man Booker Prize and the 2006 Orange Prize. The novel, which is told backward through third-person narrative, takes place in 1940s London during and after World War II.

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215

The Night Watchman

Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new “emancipation” bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress.

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The Nightingale

The Nightingale is a historical fiction novel by American author Kristin Hannah published by St. Martin’s Press in 2015. The book tells the story of two sisters in France during World War II and their struggle to survive and resist the German occupation of France.

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The Notebook: The Proof ; The Third Lie

These three internationally acclaimed novels have confirmed Agota Kristof’s reputation as one of the most provocative exponents of new-wave European fiction. With all the stark simplicity of a fractured fairy tale, the trilogy tells the story of twin brothers, Claus and Lucas, locked in an agonizing bond that becomes a gripping allegory of the forces that have divided “brothers” in much of Europe since World War II.

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The Old Curiosity Shop

The Old Curiosity Shop is one of two novels (the other being Barnaby Rudge) which Charles Dickens published along with short stories in his weekly serial Master Humphrey’s Clock, from 1840 to 1841. It was so popular that New York readers stormed the wharf when the ship bearing the final instalment arrived in 1841.

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The Old Wives' Tale

The Old Wives’ Tale is a novel by Arnold Bennett, first published in 1908. It deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother’s draper’s shop, into old age. It covers a period of about 70 years from roughly 1840 to 1905, and is set in Burslem and Paris.

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The Once and Future King

The Once and Future King is a work by T. H. White based upon the 1485 book Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. It was first published in 1958. It collects and revises shorter novels published from 1938 to 1940, with much new material.

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221

The Orenda

The Orenda is a historical novel by Canadian author Joseph Boyden. It was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2013. The novel takes place in what was to become Canada in the early 17th century and is narrated by a Huron warrior named Bird, a young Iroquois girl named Snow Falls, and a French Jesuit missionary named Christophe.

The Orphan Master's Son: A Novel

The Orphan Master’s Son is a 2012 novel by American author Adam Johnson. It deals with intertwined themes of propaganda, identity, and state power in North Korea. The novel was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

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223

The Other Boleyn Girl

The Other Boleyn Girl (2001) is a historical novel written by British author Philippa Gregory, loosely based on the life of 16th-century aristocrat Mary Boleyn of whom little is known. Inspired by Mary’s life story, Gregory depicts the annulment of one of the most significant royal marriages in English history and conveys the urgency of the need for a male heir to the throne.

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224

The Outsiders

The Outsiders is a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967 by Viking Press. Hinton was 15 when she started writing the novel but did most of the work when she was 16 and a junior in high school. Hinton was 18 when the book was published.

The Painted Bird

The Painted Bird is a 1965 novel by Jerzy Kosiński that describes World War II as seen by a boy, considered a “Gypsy or Jewish stray,” wandering about small villages scattered around an unspecified country in Central and Eastern Europe.

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226

The Phantom of the Opera

The Phantom of the Opera is a novel by French author Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serial in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909 to 8 January 1910, and was released in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte.

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The Piano Tuner

The Piano Tuner is a historical novel by Daniel Mason, set in British India and Burma. It was first published in 2002 when Mason was 26 and was his first novel. The Piano Tuner was the basis for a 2004 opera of the same name and is also due to be released as a film directed by Charlie Stratton.

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The Pickwick Papers

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club was Charles Dickens’ first novel. Because of his success with Sketches by Boz published in 1836 Dickens was asked by the publisher Chapman & Hall to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic “cockney sporting plates” by illustrator Robert Seymour, and to connect them into a novel.

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The Pillars Of Earth

The Pillars of the Earth is a historical novel by Welsh author Ken Follett published in 1989 about the building of a cathedral in the fictional town of Kingsbridge, England. Set in the 12th century, the novel covers the time between the sinking of the White Ship and the murder of Thomas Becket, but focuses primarily on the Anarchy.

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The Plum in the Golden Vase

The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus—is a Chinese novel of manners composed in vernacular Chinese during the latter half of the sixteenth century during the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The author took the pseudonym Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng “The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling,” and his identity is otherwise unknown.

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231

The Poisonwood Bible

The Poisonwood Bible (1998), by Barbara Kingsolver, is a best-selling novel about a missionary family, the Prices, who in 1959 move from the U.S. state of Georgia to the village of Kilanga in the Belgian Congo, close to the Kwilu River.

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The Portrait of a Lady

The Portrait of a Lady is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly and Macmillan’s Magazine in 1880–81 and then as a book in 1881. It is one of James’s most popular novels and is regarded by critics as one of his finest.

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The Power and the Glory

The Power and the Glory is a 1940 novel by British author Graham Greene. The title is an allusion to the doxology often recited at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” It was initially published in the United States under the title The Labyrinthine Ways.

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The Power of One

The Power of One is a novel by Australian author Bryce Courtenay, first published in 1989. Set in South Africa during the 1930s and 1940s, it tells the story of an English boy who, through the course of the story, acquires the name of Peekay.

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235

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a novel by Muriel Spark, the best known of her works. It first saw publication in The New Yorker magazine and was published as a book by Macmillan in 1961. The character of Miss Jean Brodie brought Spark international fame and brought her into the first rank of contemporary Scottish literature.

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The Pull Of The Stars

In an Ireland doubly ravaged by war and disease, Nurse Julia Power works at an understaffed hospital in the city center, where expectant mothers who have come down with the terrible new Flu are quarantined together.

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The Queen Of The Night

Lilliet Berne is a sensation of the Paris Opera, a legendary soprano with every accolade except an original role, every singer’s chance at immortality. When one is finally offered to her, she realizes with alarm that the libretto is based on a hidden piece of her past.

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238

The Quincunx

The Quincunx (The Inheritance of John Huffam) is the epic first novel of Charles Palliser. It takes the form of a Dickensian mystery set in early 19th century England, but Palliser has added the modern attributes of an ambiguous plot and unreliable narrators.

The Razor's Edge

The Razor’s Edge is a 1944 novel by W. Somerset Maugham. It tells the story of Larry Darrell, an American pilot traumatized by his experiences in World War I, who sets off in search of some transcendent meaning in his life. The story begins through the eyes of Larry’s friends and acquaintances as they witness his personality change after the war.

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The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend’s struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America.

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241

The Real Story of Ah-Q

The True Story of Ah Q is an episodic novella written by Lu Xun, first published as a serial between December 4, 1921 and February 12, 1922. It was later placed in his first short story collection Call to Arms in 1923 and is the longest story in the collection.

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242

The Red Badge of Courage

The Red Badge of Courage is a war novel by American author Stephen Crane (1871–1900). Taking place during the American Civil War, the story is about a young private of the Union Army, Henry Fleming, who flees from the field of battle.

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The Red Queen

Red Queen is a young adult fantasy novel written by American writer Victoria Aveyard. Published in February 2015, it was her first novel and first series. Aveyard followed up with three sequels: Glass Sword, King’s Cage and War Storm.

The Red and the Black

The Red and the Black is a historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in 1830. It chronicles the attempts of a provincial young man to rise socially beyond his modest upbringing through a combination of talent, hard work, deception, and hypocrisy.

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The Remains Of The Day

The Remains of the Day is a 1989 novel by the Nobel Prize-winning British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The protagonist, Stevens, is a butler with a long record of service at Darlington Hall, a stately home near Oxford, England. In 1956, he takes a road trip to visit a former colleague, and reminisces about events at Darlington Hall in the 1920s and 1930s.

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The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui subtitled “A parable play”, is a 1941 play by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. It chronicles the rise of Arturo Ui, a fictional 1930s Chicago mobster, and his attempts to control the cauliflower racket by ruthlessly disposing of the opposition.

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The Return of the Native

The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy’s sixth published novel. It first appeared in the magazine Belgravia, a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly installments from January to December 1878.

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The Return of the Native

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The Samurai’s Garden

The Samurai’s Garden is a 1994 novel by American author Gail Tsukiyama. Many consider it to be Tsukiyama’s finest work, and an influential piece in Asian-American literature. The Samurai’s Garden is often included in required reading lists for high school students, and is considered to be a prime example of using effective figurative language.

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The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter: A Romance is a work of historical fiction by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne, published in 1850. Set in Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony during the years 1642 to 1649, the novel tells the story of Hester Prynne, who conceives a daughter through an affair and then struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.

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The Shell Seekers

The Shell Seekers is a 1987 novel by Rosamunde Pilcher. It became one of her most famous best-sellers. It was nominated by the British public in 2003 as one of the top 100 novels in the BBC’s Big Read. In Germany the novel is called Die Muschelsucher and was also in the top 100 novels.

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The Sheltering Sky

The Sheltering Sky is a 1949 novel of alienation and existential despair by American writer and composer Paul Bowles. The story centers on Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by their friend Tunner.

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The Siege of Krishnapur

The Siege of Krishnapur is a novel by J. G. Farrell, first published in 1973. Inspired by events such as the sieges of Cawnapore (Kanpur) and Lucknow, the book details the siege of a fictional Indian town, Krishnapur, during the Indian Rebellion of 1857 from the perspective of the British residents.

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254

The Signature Of All Things

The Signature of All Things is a novel by Elizabeth Gilbert. It was originally published in 2013 and longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The story follows Alma Whittaker, daughter of a botanical explorer, as she comes into her own within the world of plants and science.

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The Silence Of The Girls

The Silence of the Girls is a 2018 novel by English novelist Pat Barker. It recounts the events of the Iliad, chiefly from the point of view of Briseis. The plot begins when Greeks led Achilles sack Lyrnessus, describing the looting and burning of the city, the massacre of its men and the abduction of its women including Briseis, the childless wife of its king Mynes.

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The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers is a 2011 Western novel by Canadian-born author Patrick deWitt. The darkly comic story takes place in Oregon and California in 1851. The narrator, Eli Sisters, and his brother Charlie are assassins tasked with killing Hermann Kermit Warm, an ingenious prospector who has been accused of stealing from the Sisters’ fearsome boss, the Commodore.

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The Slaves of Solitude

The Slaves of Solitude is a novel by Patrick Hamilton. It was published in 1947 and reissued by New York Review Books Classics in 2007. In the United States it was originally published under the title Riverside.

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The Song of Hiawatha

The Song of Hiawatha is an 1855 epic poem in trochaic tetrameter by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow which features Native American characters. The epic relates the fictional adventures of an Ojibwe warrior named Hiawatha and the tragedy of his love for Minnehaha, a Dakota woman.

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The Song of Roland

The Song of Roland is an 11th-century epic poem based on Roland and the Battle of Roncevaux Pass in 778, during the reign of Charlemagne. It is the oldest surviving major work of French literature and exists in various manuscript versions, which testify to its enormous and enduring popularity from the 12th to 16th centuries.

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The Sot-Weed Factor

The Sot-Weed Factor is a 1960 novel by the American writer John Barth. The novel marks the beginning of Barth’s literary postmodernism. The Sot-Weed Factor takes its title from the poem The Sot-Weed Factor: Or, a Voyage to Maryland. A Satyr (1708) by the English-born poet Ebenezer Cooke (c. 1665 – c. 1732), about whom few biographical details are known.

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The Most Precious Of Cargoes

Once upon a time in an enormous forest lived a woodcutter and his wife. The woodcutter is very poor and a war rages around them, making it difficult for them to put food on the table. Yet every night, his wife prays for a child.

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The Lamplighters

The Lamplighters is a heart-stopping mystery rich with the salty air of the Cornish coast, and an unforgettable story of love and grief that explores the way our fears blur the line between the real and the imagined.

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263

The Land Beyond The Sea

The Kingdom of Jerusalem, also known as Outremer, is the land far beyond the sea. Baptized in blood when the men of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Saracens in 1099, the kingdom defined an utterly new world, a place where enemies were neighbors and neighbors became enemies.

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264

The Last Of The Wine

The Last of the Wine is Mary Renault’s first novel set in ancient Greece, the setting that would become her most important arena. The novel was published in 1956 and is the second of her works to feature male homosexuality as a major theme. It was a bestseller within the gay community.

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The Light Between Oceans

The Light Between Oceans is a 2012 Australian historical fiction novel by M. L. Stedman, her debut novel, published by Random House Australia on 20 March 2012. A film adaptation of the same name starring Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender was released on 2 September 2016.

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266

The Little Stranger

The Little Stranger is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. Departing from her earlier themes of lesbian and gay fiction, Waters’ fifth novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with an old gentry family of declining fortunes who own a very old estate that is crumbling around them.

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267

The Long Ships

The Long Ships or Red Orm is an adventure novel by the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson. The narrative is set in the late 10th century and follows the adventures of the Viking Röde Orm – called “Red” for his hair and his temper, a native of Scania.

The Long Song

The Long Song is a historical novel by Andrea Levy published in 2010 that was the recipient of the Walter Scott Prize. It was Levy’s fifth and final novel, following the 2004 publication of Small Island. In December 2018, a three-part television adaptation of the same name was broadcast on BBC One; The Long Song was aired on PBS in February 2021.

The Lost Steps

The Lost Steps describes a composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization-the upper reaches of a great South American river.

The Luminaries

The Luminaries is a 2013 novel by Eleanor Catton. Set in New Zealand’s South Island in 1866, the novel follows Walter Moody, a prospector who travels to the West Coast settlement of Hokitika to make his fortune on the goldfields.

The Lusiad

The Lusiads, is a Portuguese epic poem written by Luís Vaz de Camões and first published in 1572. It is widely regarded as the most important work of Portuguese literature and is frequently compared to Virgil’s Aeneid (1st c. BC). The work celebrates the discovery of a sea route to India by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama (1469–1524).

The Makioka Sisters

The Makioka Sisters is a novel by Japanese writer Jun’ichirō Tanizaki that was serialized from 1943 to 1948. It follows the lives of the wealthy Makioka family of Osaka from the autumn of 1936 to April 1941, focusing on the family’s attempts to find a husband for the third sister, Yukiko.

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273

The Man In The High Castle

The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick. Published and set in 1962, the novel takes place fifteen years after a different end to World War II, and depicts intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers—primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany—as they rule over the Southern and Western United States.

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274

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa

The Manuscript Found in Saragossa is a frame-tale novel written in French at the turn of 18th and 19th centuries by the Polish author Count Jan Potocki (1761–1815).

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275

The Marriage Of Cadmus And Harmony

Presenting the stories of Zeus and Europa, Theseus and Ariadne, the birth of Athens and the fall of Troy, in all their variants, Calasso also uncovers the distant origins of secrets and tragedy, virginity, and rape. “A perfect work like no other. (Calasso) has re-created . . . the morning of our world.”–Gore Vidal.

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276

The Marriage of Opposites

The Dovekeepers and The Museum of Extraordinary Things: a forbidden love story set on the tropical island of St. Thomas about the extraordinary woman who gave birth to painter Camille Pissarro; the Father of Impressionism.

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277

The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita is a novel by Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940 during Stalin’s regime. A censored version was published in Moscow magazine in 1966–1967, after the writer’s death.

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278

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood of Great Renown in Nottinghamshire is an 1883 novel by the American illustrator and writer Howard Pyle. Consisting of a series of episodes in the story of the English outlaw Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men.

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279

The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss is a novel by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot), first published in three volumes in 1860 by William Blackwood. The first American edition was published by Harper & Brothers, Publishers, New York.

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280

The Mists Of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon is a 1983 historical fantasy novel by American writer Marion Zimmer Bradley, in which the author relates the Arthurian legends from the perspective of the female characters.

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281

The Moonstone

The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins is a 19th-century British epistolary novel. It is an early example of the modern detective novel, and established many of the ground rules of the modern genre. The story was serialised in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round.

The Moor's Last Sigh

The Moor’s Last Sigh traces four generations of the narrator’s family and the ultimate effects upon the narrator. The narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, traces his family’s beginnings down through time to his own lifetime. Moraes, who is called “Moor” throughout the book, is an exceptional character, whose physical body ages twice as fast as a normal person’s does and also has a deformed hand.

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283

The Moor’s Account

The Moor’s Account is a fictional memoir of Estebanico, the Moroccan slave who survived the Narvaez expedition and accompanied Cabeza de Vaca. He is widely considered to be the first black explorer of America, but little is known about his early life except for one line in Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle: “The fourth [survivor] is Estebanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor.”

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284

The City Of Tears

The City of Tears is the second thrilling historical epic in The Burning Chambers series, for fans of Ken Follett and Dan Brown. August 1572: Minou Joubert and her family are in Paris for a Royal Wedding, an alliance between the Catholic Crown and the Huguenot King of Navarre intended to bring peace to France after a decade of religious wars.

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285

The Cloister and the Hearth

The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) is a historical novel by the English author Charles Reade. Set in the 15th century, it relates the travels of a young scribe and illuminator, Gerard Eliassoen, through several European countries. The Cloister and the Hearth often describes the events, people and their practices in minute detail.

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286

The Code of the Woosters

The Code of the Woosters is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published on 7 October 1938, in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, and in the United States by Doubleday, Doran, New York. It was serialised in The Saturday Evening Post (US) from 16 July to 3 September 1938 and in the London Daily Mail from 14 September to 6 October 1938.

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287

The Colony Of Unrequited Dreams

The Colony of Unrequited Dreams is a novel by Wayne Johnston, published on September 30, 1998 by Knopf Canada. Johnston’s breakthrough work, the novel was a Canadian bestseller, and was shortlisted for the 1998 Giller Prize and the 1998 Governor General’s Award for English fiction.

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288

The Confessions of Nat Turner

The Confessions of Nat Turner is a 1967 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by American writer William Styron. Presented as a first-person narrative by historical figure Nat Turner, the novel concerns the slave revolt in Virginia in 1831.

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289

The Crucible

The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.

The Custom of the Country

The Custom of the Country is a 1913 tragicomedy of manners novel by American Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to ascend in New York City society.

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291

The Czar's Madman

The Czar’s Madman is a 1978 novel by Estonian writer Jaan Kross. This historical novel is about a Livonian nobleman, Timotheus Eberhard von Bock etc. who has married a peasant girl named Eeva to prove everyone that good men are equal before nature, God and ideals.

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292

The Day of the Locust

The Day of the Locust is a 1939 novel by American author Nathanael West set in Hollywood, California. The novel follows a young artist from the Yale School of Fine Arts named Tod Hackett, who has been hired by a Hollywood studio to do scene design and painting.

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293

The Days of His Grace

The Days of His Grace is a 1960 novel by Swedish writer Eyvind Johnson. Set mostly in northern Italy, close to Aquileia, it tells the story of the fate of a Langobard family as their homeland falls under the domination of Charlemagne.

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294

The Death of the Heart

The Death of the Heart is a 1938 novel by Elizabeth Bowen set in the interwar period. It is about a sixteen-year-old orphan, Portia Quayne, who moves to London to live with her half-brother Thomas and falls in love with Eddie, a friend of her sister-in-law.

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295

The Devil's Arithmetic

The Devil’s Arithmetic is a historical fiction time slip novel written by American author Jane Yolen and published in 1988. The book is about Hannah Stern, a Jewish girl who lives in New Rochelle, New York and is sent back in time to experience the Holocaust.

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296

The Diary of a Nobody

The Diary of a Nobody is an English comic novel written by the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith, with illustrations by the latter. It originated as an intermittent serial in Punch magazine in 1888–89 and first appeared in book form, with extended text and added illustrations, in 1892.

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297

The Dig

The Dig is a historical novel by John Preston, published in May 2007, set in the context of the 1939 Anglo-Saxon ship burial excavation at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, England. The dust jacket describes it as “a brilliantly realized account of the most famous archaeological dig in Britain in modern times”.

The Doll Factory

The Doll Factory, the debut novel by Elizabeth Macneal, is an intoxicating story of art, obsession and possession. London. 1850. The Great Exhibition is being erected in Hyde Park and among the crowd watching the spectacle two people meet.

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299

The Dovekeepers

The Dovekeepers is a 2011 historical novel by American writer Alice Hoffman. The novel dramatizes the Siege of Masada (73–74 CE) by troops of the Roman Empire towards the end of the First Jewish–Roman War (66–73 CE).

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300

The Eagle Has Landed

The Eagle Has Landed is a book by British writer Jack Higgins, set during World War II and first published in 1975. It was quickly adapted into a British film of the same name, directed by John Sturges and released in 1976. It starred Michael Caine, Donald Sutherland, Jenny Agutter, and Robert Duvall.

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301

The Education of Little Tree

The Education of Little Tree is a memoir-style novel written by Asa Earl Carter under the pseudonym Forrest Carter. First published in 1976 by Delacorte Press, it was initially promoted as an authentic autobiography recounting Forrest Carter’s youth experiences with his Cherokee grandparents in the Appalachian mountains.

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302

The Electric Michelangelo

The Electric Michelangelo is a book written in 2004 by Sarah Hall. The main character, Cy Parks, is a tattoo artist and the book follows his life and dreams. It was longlisted for the Orange prize. The book was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2004.

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303

The Emigrants

The Emigrants is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996.

The General of the Dead Army

The General of the Dead Army is a 1963 novel by the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare. It is the author’s most critically acclaimed novel. Kadare was encouraged to write the book by Drago Siliqi, literary critic and director of the state-owned publishing house Naim Frashëri.

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305

The Ghost Road

The Ghost Road is a war novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1995 and winner of the Booker Prize. It is the third volume of a trilogy that follows the fortunes of shell-shocked British army officers towards the end of the First World War. The other books in the trilogy are Regeneration and The Eye in the Door.

The Go-Between

The Go-Between is a novel by L. P. Hartley published in 1953. His best-known work, it has been adapted several times for stage and screen. The book gives a critical view of society at the end of the Victorian era through the eyes of a naïve schoolboy outsider.

The God Of Small Things

The God of Small Things is the debut novel of Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives are destroyed by the “Love Laws” that lay down “who should be loved, and how. And how much.”

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308

The Godfather

The Godfather is a crime novel by American author Mario Puzo. Originally published in 1969 by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, the novel details the story of a fictional Mafia family in New York City (and Long Beach, New York), headed by Vito Corleone. Puzo’s dedication for The Godfather is “For Anthony Cleri”.

The Gods Of Tango

February 1913: seventeen-year-old Leda, carrying only a small trunk and her father’s cherished violin, leaves her Italian village for a new home, and a new husband, in Argentina. Arriving in Buenos Aires, she discovers that he has been killed, but she remains: living in a tenement, without friends or family, on the brink of destitution.

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310

The Golden Bowl

The Golden Bowl is a 1904 novel by Henry James. Set in England, this complex, intense study of marriage and adultery completes what some critics have called the “major phase” of James’s career. The Golden Bowl explores the tangle of interrelationships between a father and daughter and their respective spouses.

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311

The Golem And The Jinni

The Golem and the Jinni is a debut novel written by Helene Wecker, published by Harper in April 2013. It combines the genre of historical fiction with elements of fantasy, telling the story of two displaced magical creatures in 19th century New York City.

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312

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962.

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313

The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Pie Society

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a historical novel by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows that was published in 2008. It was turned into a movie in 2018 featuring Lily James as Juliet Ashton.

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314

The Headmaster's Wager

Percival Chen is the headmaster of the most respected English academy in 1960s Saigon, and he is well accustomed to bribing a forever-changing list of government officials in order to maintain the elite status of his school.

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315

The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter (1948) is a novel by English author Graham Greene. The book details a life-changing moral crisis for Henry Scobie. Greene, a former British intelligence officer in Freetown, British Sierra Leone, drew on his experience there.

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316

The Hiding Game

As political tensions escalate in Germany, the Bauhaus finds itself under threat, and the group begins to disintegrate under the pressure of its own betrayals and love affairs. Decades later, in the wake of an unthinkable tragedy, Paul is haunted by a secret.

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317

The Historian

The Historian is the 2005 debut novel of American author Elizabeth Kostova. The plot blends the history and folklore of Vlad Țepeș and his fictional equivalent Count Dracula. Kostova’s father told her stories about Dracula when she was a child, and later in life she was inspired to turn the experience into a novel.

The Horseman on the Roof

The Horseman on the Roof is a 1951 adventure novel written by Jean Giono. It tells the story of Angelo Pardi, a young Italian carbonaro colonel of hussars, caught up in the 1832 cholera epidemic in Provence.

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319

The House Of The Spirits

The House of the Spirits is the debut novel of Isabel Allende. The novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers before being published in Buenos Aires in 1982. It became an instant best-seller, was critically acclaimed, and catapulted Allende to literary stardom.

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320

The House of Mirth

The House of Mirth is a 1905 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It tells the story of Lily Bart, a well-born but impoverished woman belonging to New York City’s high society around the end of the 19th century.

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321

The Idiot

The Idiot is a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published serially in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1868–69.

The Iliad

The Iliad is an ancient Greek epic poem in dactylic hexameter, traditionally attributed to Homer. Usually considered to have been written down circa the 8th century BC, the Iliad is among the oldest extant works of Western literature, along with the Odyssey, another epic poem attributed to Homer which tells of Odysseus’s experiences after the events of the Iliad.

The Illustrious House of Ramires

The Illustrious House of Ramires was the final novel written by the Portuguese writer José Maria de Eça de Queirós (1845-1900) and was published posthumously. A new English translation, by Margaret Jull Costa, was published in 2017, together with an Afterword by the translator.

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The Inheritance Of Solomon Farthing

Solomon knew that he had one advantage. A pawn ticket belonging to a dead man tucked into his top pocket – the only clue to the truth . An old soldier dies alone in his Edinburgh nursing home.

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325

The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss is the second novel by Indian author Kiran Desai. It was first published in 2006. It won a number of awards, including the Man Booker Prize for that year, the National Book Critics Circle Fiction Award in 2007, and the 2006 Vodafone Crossword Book Award.

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326

The Joy Luck Club

The Joy Luck Club is a 1989 novel written by Amy Tan. It focuses on four Chinese American immigrant families in San Francisco who start a club known as The Joy Luck Club, playing the Chinese game of mahjong for money while feasting on a variety of foods.

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327

The Jungle

The Jungle is a 1906 novel by the American journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair (1878–1968). The novel portrays the harsh conditions and exploited lives of immigrants in the United States in Chicago and similar industrialized cities. Sinclair’s primary purpose in describing the meat industry and its working conditions was to advance socialism in the United States.

The Killer Angels

The Killer Angels is a 1974 historical novel by Michael Shaara that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1975. The book depicts the three days of the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, and the days leading up to it: June 29, 1863, as the troops of both the Union and the Confederacy move into battle around the town of Gettysburg.

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329

The King Must Die

The King Must Die is a 1958 bildungsroman and historical novel by Mary Renault that traces the early life and adventures of Theseus, a hero in Greek mythology. Naturally, it is set in Ancient Greece: Troizen, Corinth, Eleusis, Athens, Knossos in Crete, and Naxos.

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330

The Chronicles of Barsetshire

The Chronicles of Barsetshire is a series of six novels by English author Anthony Trollope, published between 1855 and 1867. They are set in the fictional English county of Barsetshire and its cathedral town of Barchester.

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331

The Book Thief

The Book Thief is a historical novel by the Australian author Markus Zusak, and is one of his most popular works. Published in 2005, The Book Thief became an international bestseller and was translated into 63 languages and sold 16 million copies.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 Holocaust novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. Much like the process he undertakes when writing most of his novels, Boyne has said that he wrote the entire first draft in two and a half days, without sleeping much.

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333

Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. His seventh novel, it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio and focuses on two characters: Dwayne Hoover, a Midland resident, Pontiac dealer and affluent figure in the city and Kilgore Trout, a widely published but mostly unknown science fiction author.

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334

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

The Bridge of San Luis Rey is American author Thornton Wilder’s second novel. It was first published in 1927 to worldwide acclaim. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928, and was the best-selling work of fiction that year.

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335

The Bridges of Madison County

The Bridges of Madison County (also published as Love in Black and White) is a 1992 best-selling romance novella by American writer Robert James Waller that tells the story of a married Italian-American woman living on a Madison County, Iowa, farm in the 1960s.

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336

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a novel written by Dominican American author Junot Díaz, published in 2007. Although a work of fiction, the novel is set in New Jersey in the United States, where Díaz was raised, and it deals with the Dominican Republic experience under dictator Rafael Trujillo.

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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

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338

The Buddha In The Attic

The Buddha in the Attic is a 2011 novel written by American author Julie Otsuka about Japanese picture brides immigrating to America in the early 1900s. It is Otsuka’s second novel. The novel was published in the United States in August 2011 by the publishing house Knopf Publishing Group.

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339

The Burning Chambers

Nineteen-year-old Minou Joubert receives an anonymous letter at her father’s bookshop. Sealed with a distinctive family crest, it contains just five words: SHE KNOWS THAT YOU LIVE. But before Minou can decipher the mysterious message, a chance encounter with a young Huguenot convert, Piet Reydon, changes her destiny forever.

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340

The Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild is a short adventure novel by Jack London, published in 1903 and set in Yukon, Canada, during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush, when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The central character of the novel is a dog named Buck.

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341

Sula

Sula is a 1973 novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, her second to be published after The Bluest Eye (1970). The novel begins when the construction of a golf course is announced, the site being the destroyed remnants of what used to be the Bottom.

Tales of the South Pacific

Tales of the South Pacific is a Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of sequentially related short stories by James A. Michener about the Pacific campaign in World War II. The stories are based on observations and anecdotes he collected while stationed as a lieutenant commander in the US Navy at the Espiritu Santo Naval Base on the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides Islands.

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343

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891, then in book form in three volumes in 1891, and as a single volume in 1892.

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344

The Accidental Empress

New York Times bestselling author Allison Pataki follows up on her critically acclaimed debut novel, The Traitor’s Wife, with the little-known and tumultuous love story of “Sisi” the Austro-Hungarian Empress and captivating wife of Emperor Franz Joseph.

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345

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, as it is known in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United States in February 1885.

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346

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is an 1876 novel by Mark Twain about a boy growing up along the Mississippi River. It is set in the 1840s in the town of St. Petersburg, which is based on Hannibal, Missouri, where Twain lived as a boy.

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347

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is a 1920 novel by American author Edith Wharton. It was her twelfth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company.

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348

The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961) is a biographical novel of Michelangelo Buonarroti written by American author Irving Stone. Stone lived in Italy for years visiting many of the locations in Rome and Florence, worked in marble quarries, and apprenticed himself to a marble sculptor.

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349

The Alienist

The Alienist is a crime novel by Caleb Carr first published in 1994 and is the first book in the Kreizler series. It takes place in New York City in 1896, and includes appearances by many famous figures of New York society in that era, including Theodore Roosevelt and J. P. Morgan.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a 2000 novel by American author Michael Chabon that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. The novel follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Czech artist Joe Kavalier and Brooklyn-born writer Sammy Clay, before, during, and after World War II.

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351

The Beautiful and Damned

The Beautiful and Damned, first published by Scribner’s in 1922, is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s second novel. It explores and portrays New York café society and the American Eastern elite during the Jazz Age before and after the Great War in the early 1920s.

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352

The Berlin Stories

The Berlin Stories is a book consisting of two novellas by Christopher Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin and Mr Norris Changes Trains. It was published in 1945. The collection was chosen as one of the Time 100 Best English-language novels of the 20th century.

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353

The Betrothed

When King Jameson declares his love for Lady Hollis Brite, Hollis is shocked—and thrilled. After all, she’s grown up at Keresken Castle, vying for the king’s attention alongside other daughters of the nobility.

The Blind Assassin

The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. Set in Canada, it is narrated from the present day, referring to previous events that span the twentieth century.

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355

The Bone People

The Bone People draws parallels between the Māori people, who use bone extensively in art and tools, and the notion of the core or skeleton of a person: in the novel the characters are figuratively stripped to the bone.

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356

The Bone is Pointed

Jack Anderson was a big man with a foul temper, a sadist and a drunk. Five months after his horse appeared riderless, no trace of the man has surfaced and no one seems to care.

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357

The Bonesetter's Daughter

The Bonesetter’s Daughter, published in 2001, is Amy Tan’s fourth novel. Like much of Tan’s work, this book deals with the relationship between an American-born Chinese woman and her immigrant mother.

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358

The Book Of Longings

Raised in a wealthy family in Sepphoris with ties to the ruler of Galilee, Ana is rebellious and ambitious, a relentless seeker with a brilliant, curious mind and a daring spirit. She yearns for a pursuit worthy of her life, but finds no outlet for her considerable talents.

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359

The Book Of Negroes

The Book of Negroes is a 2007 award-winning novel from Canadian writer Lawrence Hill. In the United States, Australia and New Zealand, the novel was published under the title Someone Knows My Name.

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360

The Book Of Night Women

The Book of Night Women is a 2009 novel by Jamaican author Marlon James. The book was first published in hardback on February 19, 2009, by Riverhead Books. The story follows Lilith, a young woman born into slavery, who challenges the boundaries of what is expected of her.

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361

Smoky the Cowhorse

Smoky the Cowhorse is a novel by Will James that was the winner of the 1927 Newbery Medal. The story details the life of a horse in the western United States from his birth to his eventual decline.

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362

Snow Falling on Cedars

Snow Falling on Cedars is a 1994 novel by David Guterson. Guterson, a teacher, wrote the book in the early morning hours over ten years then quit his job to write full-time.

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363

Snow Flower And The Secret Fan

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is a 2005 novel by Lisa See set in nineteenth-century China. In her introduction to the novel, See writes that Lily, the narrator, was born on June 5, 1824—”the fifth day of the sixth month of the third year of the Daoguang Emperor’s reign”.

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364

So Long, See You Tomorrow

So Long, See You Tomorrow is a novel by American author William Maxwell. It was first published in The New Yorker magazine in October 1979 in two parts. It was published as a book the following year by Alfred A. Knopf.

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365

Something to Answer For

Something to Answer For is a 1968 novel by the English writer P. H. Newby. Its chief claim to fame is that in 1969 it won the inaugural Booker Prize, which would go on to become one of the major literary awards in the English-speaking world.

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366

Song Of Achilles

The Song of Achilles is a 2011 novel by American writer Madeline Miller. Set during the Greek Heroic Age, it is an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad as told from the perspective of Patroclus. The novel follows Patroclus’ relationship with Achilles, from their initial meeting to their exploits during the Trojan War, with particular focus on their romantic relationship.

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367

Song of Solomon

The Song of Songs, also Song of Solomon, Canticle of Canticles, or Canticles, is one of the megillot (scrolls) found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim (or “Writings”).

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Sophie's Choice

Sophie’s Choice is a 1979 novel by American author William Styron. It concerns the relationships between three people sharing a boarding-house in Brooklyn: Stingo, a young aspiring writer from the South, and the Jewish scientist Nathan Landau and his lover Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of the German Nazi concentration camps, whom he befriends.

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369

Sovereign

Sovereign, published in 2006, is a historical mystery novel by British author C. J. Sansom. It is Sansom’s fourth novel and the third in the Matthew Shardlake Series. Set in the 16th century during the reign of King Henry VIII, it follows hunchbacked lawyer Matthew Shardlake and his assistant

Spoon River Anthology

Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the Spoon River, which ran near Masters’ home town of Lewistown, Illinois.

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371

Staying On

Staying On focuses on Tusker and Lucy Smalley, who are briefly mentioned in the latter two books of the Raj Quartet, The Towers of Silence and A Division of the Spoils, and are the last British couple living in the small hill town of Pankot after Indian independence.

Strumpet City

Strumpet City is a 1969 historical novel by James Plunkett set in Dublin, Ireland, around the time of the 1913 Dublin Lock-out. In 1980, it was adapted into a successful TV drama by Hugh Leonard for RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster.

Suite Francaise

Suite française is the title of a planned sequence of five novels by Irène Némirovsky, a French writer of Ukrainian-Jewish origin. In July 1942, having just completed the first two of the series, Némirovsky was arrested as a Jew and detained at Pithiviers and then Auschwitz, where she was murdered, a victim of the Holocaust.

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374

Romance of the Three Kingdoms

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is a 14th-century historical novel attributed to Luo Guanzhong. It is set in the turbulent years towards the end of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period in Chinese history, starting in 169 AD and ending with the reunification of the land in 280 by Western Jin.

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375

Romola

Romola (1862–63) is a historical novel written by Mary Ann Evans under the pen name of George Eliot set in the fifteenth century. It is “a deep study of life in the city of Florence from an intellectual, artistic, religious, and social point of view”.

Roots: The Saga Of An American Family

Roots: The Saga of an American Family is a 1976 novel written by Alex Haley. It tells the story of Kunta Kinte, an 18th-century African, captured as an adolescent, sold into slavery in Africa, transported to North America; following his life and the lives of his descendants in the United States down to Haley.

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377

Ross Poldark

Ross Poldark is the first of twelve novels in Poldark, a series of historical novels by Winston Graham. It was published in 1945. The novel has twice been adapted for television, first in 1975 and then again in 2015. Sales of the novel increased by 205% after the premiere of the 2015 television adaptation.

Roughing It

Roughing It is a book of semi-autobiographical travel literature by Mark Twain. It was written in 1870–71 and published in 1872, as a prequel to his first travel book The Innocents Abroad (1869). Roughing It is dedicated to Twain’s mining companion Calvin H. Higbie, later a civil engineer who died in 1914.

Sacred Hunger

Sacred Hunger is a historical novel by Barry Unsworth first published in 1992. It shared the Booker Prize that year with Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. The story is set in the mid 18th century and centres on the Liverpool Merchant, a slave ship employed in the triangular trade, a central trade route in the Atlantic slave trade.

Sacred Hunger

Sacred Wilderness

A Clan Mother story for the twenty-first century, Sacred Wilderness explores the lives of four women of different eras and backgrounds who come together to restore foundation to a mixed-up, mixed-blood woman—a woman who had been living the American dream, and found it a great maw of emptiness.

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382

Sarah’s Key

Sarah’s Key is a historical fiction novel by Franco-British author Tatiana de Rosnay, first published in French as Elle s’appelait Sarah in September 2006. Two main parallel plots are followed through the book.

Saville

Saville is a Booker Prize-winning novel by English writer David Storey. The novel centres on Colin, a young boy growing up in the Yorkshire mining village of Saxton during the Second World War and the postwar years.

Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North is a classic postcolonial Arabic novel by the Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih, published in 1966; it is the novel for which he is best known. It was first published in the Beirut journal Hiwâr.

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385

Second-class Citizen

Second Class Citizen is a 1974 novel by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, first published in London by Allison and Busby. It was subsequently published in the US by George Braziller in 1975. A poignant story of a resourceful Nigerian woman who overcomes strict tribal domination of women and countless setbacks to achieve an independent life for herself and her children.

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386

Shanghai Girls

Shanghai Girls is a 2009 novel by Lisa See. It centers on the complex relationship between two sisters, Pearl and May, as they go through great pain and suffering in leaving war-torn Shanghai, and try to adjust to the difficult roles of wives in arranged marriages and of Chinese immigrants to the U.S.

She: A History of Adventure

She, subtitled A History of Adventure, is a novel by the English writer H. Rider Haggard, published in book form in 1887 following serialisation in The Graphic magazine between October 1886 and January 1887. She was extraordinarily popular upon its release and has never been out of print.

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388

Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of the three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother, Agnes, in the 1980s, in a post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.

Shōgun

Shōgun is a 1975 novel by James Clavell. It is the first novel (by internal chronology) of the author’s Asian Saga. A major best-seller, by 1990 the book had sold 15 million copies worldwide.

Siddhartha

Siddhartha is a 1922 novel by Hermann Hesse that deals with the spiritual journey of self-discovery of a man named Siddhartha during the time of the Gautam Buddha. The book, Hesse’s ninth novel, was written in German, in a simple, lyrical style. It was published in the U.S.

Silas Marner

Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe is the third novel by Mary Ann Evans (George Eliot). It was published in 1861. An outwardly simple tale of a linen weaver, the novel is notable for its strong realism and its sophisticated treatment of a variety of issues ranging from religion to industrialisation to community.

Le Silence de la mer

Le Silence de la mer is a French novel written during the summer of 1941 and published in early 1942 by Jean Bruller under the pseudonym “Vercors”. Published secretly in German-occupied Paris, the book quickly became a symbol of mental resistance against German occupiers.

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393

Simon and the Oaks

Simon and the Oaks is a 1985 novel by Marianne Fredriksson. The book is set predominantly during the 1940s and uses the persecution of Jewish people during World War II as a backdrop. The book was later adapted into a Guldbagge Award-winning feature film by the same name starring Bill Skarsgård.

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394

Moloka'i

This is the story of Rachel Kalama, a spirited seven-year-old Hawaiian girl, who dreams of visiting far-off lands like her father, a merchant seaman. Then one day a rose-colored mark appears on her skin, and those dreams are stolen from her.

Moon Tiger

Moon Tiger is a 1987 novel by Penelope Lively which spans the time before, during and after World War II. The novel won the 1987 Booker Prize. It is written from multiple points of view and moves backward and forward through time.

Mr Bridge

Mrs. Bridge is the debut novel of American author Evan S. Connell, published in 1959. In 117 brief episodes, it tells the story of an upper middle-class, bourgeois family in Kansas City in the period between the First and Second World War, mostly from the perspective of the mother, the Mrs. Bridge of the title.

Mr Bridge

In this novel Walter Bridge is an ambitious lawyer who redoubles his efforts and time at the office whenever he senses that his family needs something, even when what they need is more of him and less of his money.

My Antonia

My Ántonia is a novel published in 1918 by American writer Willa Cather, considered one of her best works. The novel tells the stories of an orphaned boy from Virginia, Jim Burden, and the elder daughter in a family of Bohemian immigrants, Ántonia Shimerda, who are each brought as children to be pioneers in Nebraska towards the end of the 19th century.

My Antonia

My Brilliant Friend

This novel is about the power of a modern masterpiece from one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense and generous hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila.

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401

My Lady Jane

In this story Jane (reads too many books) is Edward’s cousin, and far more interested in books than romance. Unfortunately for Jane, Edward has arranged to marry her off to secure the line of succession. And there’s something a little odd about her intended.

My Name is Red

My Name Is Red is a 1998 Turkish novel by writer Orhan Pamuk translated into English by Erdağ Göknar in 2001. Pamuk would later receive the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. The novel, concerning miniaturists in the Ottoman Empire of 1591, established Pamuk’s international reputation and contributed to his Nobel Prize.

Name Of The Rose

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404

Nectar in a Sieve

Nectar in a Sieve is a 1954 novel by Kamala Markandaya. The book is set in India during a period of intense urban development and is the chronicle of the marriage between Rukmani, youngest daughter of a village headman, and Nathan, a tenant farmer.

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405

Nefertiti

In this novel Nefertiti and her younger sister, Mutnodjmet, have been raised in a powerful family that has provided wives to the rulers of Egypt for centuries. Ambitious, charismatic, and beautiful, Nefertiti is destined to marry Amunhotep, an unstable young pharaoh.

Nights At The Circus

Nights at the Circus is a novel by British writer Angela Carter, first published in 1984 and the winner of the 1984 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The novel focuses on the life and exploits of Sophie Fevvers, a woman who is – or so she would have people believe – a Cockney virgin, hatched from an egg laid by unknown parents and ready to develop fully fledged wings.

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407

Njal's Saga

In this book Njáls saga is a thirteenth-century Icelandic saga that describes events between 960 and 1020. The saga deals with a process of blood feuds in the Icelandic Commonwealth, showing how the requirements of honor could lead to minor slights spiralling into destructive and prolonged bloodshed.

North and South

North and South is a social novel published in 1854 by English writer Elizabeth Gaskell. With Wives and Daughters (1865) and Cranford (1853), it is one of her best-known novels and was adapted for television three times (1966, 1975 and 2004). The 2004 version renewed interest in the novel and attracted a wider readership.

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409

Number The Stars

Number the Stars is a work of historical fiction by the American author Lois Lowry about the escape of a Jewish family, the Rosens, from Copenhagen, Denmark, during World War II. The story centers on 10-year-old Annemarie Johansen, who lives with her mother, father, and sister Kirsti in Copenhagen in 1943.

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410

Obasan

Obasan is a novel by the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. First published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in 1981, it chronicles Canada’s internment and persecution of its citizens of Japanese descent during the Second World War from the perspective of a young child. In 2005, it was the One Book, One Vancouver selection.

Of Love and Shadows

Of Love and Shadows is a novel written by Chilean novelist Isabel Allende in 1984. The plotline was inspired by journalistic accounts taken from magazines, newspapers, and interviews that Allende herself gathered both working as a journalist in Chile before her exile and during her later career as a writer in Venezuela.

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412

Of Time and the River

Of Time and the River is a 1935 novel by American author Thomas Wolfe. It is a fictionalized autobiography, using the name Eugene Gant for Wolfe’s, detailing the protagonist’s early and mid-twenties, during which time the character attends Harvard University, moves to New York City and teaches English at a university there, and travels overseas with the character Francis Starwick.

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413

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is a short novel by the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, first published in November 1962 in the Soviet literary magazine Novy Mir (New World).

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414

One Hundred Years Of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a landmark 1967 novel by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez that tells the multi-generational story of the Buendía family, whose patriarch, José Arcadio Buendía, founded the (fictitious) town of Macondo. The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in literature.

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415

One Thousand and One Nights

One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age. It is often known in English as the Arabian Nights, from the first English-language edition (c. 1706–1721), which rendered the title as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment.

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416

Orlando

Orlando: A Biography is a novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 11 October 1928. A high-spirited romp inspired by the tumultuous family history of the aristocratic poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form.

Oscar And Lucinda

Oscar and Lucinda is a novel by Australian author Peter Carey which won the 1988 Booker Prize and the 1989 Miles Franklin Award. It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Devonian son of a Plymouth Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory.

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418

Our Mutual Friend

Our Mutual Friend, written in 1864–1865, is the last novel completed by Charles Dickens and is one of his most sophisticated works, combining savage satire with social analysis. It centres on, in the words of critic J. Hillis Miller, quoting from the character Bella Wilfer in the book, “money, money, money, and what money can make of life”.

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419

Outlander

Outlander is a series of historical fantasy novels by American author Diana Gabaldon.a Gabaldon began the first volume of the series, Outlander, in the late 1980s, and it was published in 1991. She has published eight out of a planned ten volumes. The eighth and most recent volume of the series, Written in My Own Heart’s Blood, was published in 2014.

Pachinko

Pachinko is the second novel by Korean-American author Min Jin Lee. Published in 2017, Pachinko is an epic historical fiction novel following a Korean family that immigrates to Japan. The character-driven story features an ensemble of characters who encounter racism, stereotyping, and other aspects of the 20th-century Korean experience of Japan.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a novel by Irish writer Roddy Doyle, first published in 1993 by Secker and Warburg. It won the Booker Prize that year. The story is about a 10-year-old boy living in Barrytown, North Dublin, and the events that happen within his age group, school and home in around 1968.

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422

Palace of Desire

Palace of Desire is a novel by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz, and the second installment of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy. It was originally published in Arabic in 1957 with the title Qasr el-Shōq. The plot continues the story of al-Sayyid Ahmad’s family as the patriarch loosens his once strangling grip of control over his wife and children.

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423

Parade's End

Parade’s End (1924-1928) is a tetralogy of novels by the British novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939). The novels chronicle the life of a member of the English gentry before, during and after World War I. The setting is mainly England and the Western Front of the First World War, in which Ford had served as an officer in the Welch Regiment, a life he vividly depicts.

Parzival

Parzival is a medieval romance by the knight-poet Wolfram von Eschenbach in Middle High German. The poem, commonly dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, centers on the Arthurian hero Parzival (Percival in English) and his long quest for the Holy Grail following his initial failure to achieve it.

Pavane

Pavane is an alternative history science fiction fix-up novel by British writer Keith Roberts, first published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd in 1968. Most of the original stories were published in Science Fantasy. An additional story, “The White Boat”, was added in later editions.

Perfume

Perfume: The Story of a Murderer is a 1985 literary historical fantasy novel by German writer Patrick Süskind. The novel explores the sense of smell and its relationship with the emotional meanings that scents may have.

Persuasion

Persuasion is the last novel fully completed by Jane Austen. It was published at the end of 1817, six months after her death. The story concerns Anne Elliot, a young Englishwoman of twenty-seven years, whose family moves to lower their expenses and reduce their debt by renting their home to an Admiral and his wife.

Petals of blood

Petals of Blood is a novel written by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and first published in 1977. Set in Kenya just after independence, the story follows four characters – Munira, Abdulla, Wanja, and Karega – whose lives are intertwined due to the Mau Mau rebellion. In order to escape city life, each retreats to the small, pastoral village of Ilmorog.

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Picnic at Hanging Rock

Picnic at Hanging Rock is an Australian historical fiction novel by Joan Lindsay. The novel, set in 1900, is about a group of female students at an Australian girls’ boarding school who vanish at Hanging Rock while on a Valentine’s Day picnic, and the effects the disappearances have on the school and local community.

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430

Pippo And Clara

A story about family and fate – and how so much of our lives hinges on chance. A country torn apart by war. Two siblings divided by fate. Italy, 1938. Mussolini is in power and war is not far away .

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431

The Poem of the Cid

The Poem of the Cid, is the oldest preserved Castilian epic poem. Based on a true story, it tells of the deeds of the Castilian hero Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar known as El Cid and takes place during the eleventh century, an era of conflicts in the Iberian Peninsula between the Kingdom of Castile and various Taifa principalities of Al-Andalus.

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432

Pope Joan

Pope Joan is a 1996 novel by American writer Donna Woolfolk Cross. It is based on the medieval legend of Pope Joan. For the most part this novel is the story of a young woman, whose desire to gain more knowledge compels her to dress up as a man, who eventually rises to become the pope. The novel has been adapted into a film, Pope Joan, released in 2009.

Possession

Possession: A Romance is a 1990 best-selling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt that won the 1990 Booker Prize. The novel explores the postmodern concerns of similar novels, which are often categorised as historiographic metafiction, a genre that blends approaches from both historical fiction and metafiction.

Prisoner Of Night And Fog

According to the story of this book – In 1930s Munich, danger lurks behind dark corners, and secrets are buried deep within the city. But Gretchen Müller, who grew up in the National Socialist Party under the wing of her “uncle” Dolf, has been shielded from that side of society ever since her father traded his life for Dolf’s, and Gretchen is his favorite, his pet.

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435

Purple Hibiscus

Purple Hibiscus is a novel written by the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her debut novel, it was first published by Algonquin Books in 2003. Purple Hibiscus is set in postcolonial Nigeria, a country beset by political instability and economic difficulties.

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436

Ragtime

Ragtime is a novel by E. L. Doctorow, published in 1975. It is a work of historical fiction mainly set in the New York City area from 1902 until 1912. In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Ragtime number 86 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

Rebecca

Rebecca is a 1938 Gothic novel written by English author, Daphne du Maurier. The novel depicts an unnamed young woman who impetuously marries a wealthy widower, before discovering that both he and his household are haunted by the memory of his late first wife, the title character.

Regeneration

Regeneration is a historical and anti-war novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1991. The novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.

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