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Aug 17, 2015 · 1. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1678) A story of a man in search of truth told with the simple clarity and beauty of Bunyan’s prose make this the ultimate English classic. 2. Robinson...
May 26, 2022 · A list of essential books from various genres and periods, recommended by Penguin readers. From To Kill a Mockingbird to The Iliad, these are the novels that broke boundaries and challenged conceptions.
Dec 7, 2015 · The 100 greatest British novels. 7 December 2015. By Jane Ciabattari,Features correspondent. Getty Images. BBC Culture polled book critics outside the UK, to give an outsider’s perspective on...
- Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
- Middlemarch, by George Eliot
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
- The Lord of The Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Diary of A Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith
- His Dark Materials, Trilogy by Philip Pullman
- Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë
- Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
- Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier
- Any Jane Austen Novel
This tumultuous tale of life in a bleak farmhouse on the Yorkshire moors is a popular set text for GCSE and A-level English study, but away from the demands of the classroom it’s easier to enjoy its drama and intensity. Populated largely by characters whose inability to control their own emotions leads to violence and revenge, it’s a tale that span...
Middlemarch, subtitled “A Study of Provincial Life”, is the story of the inhabitants of a Midlands village in the 1830s. Masterfully weaving together several plotlines, the novel charts the fortunes of an interesting cast of characters, exploring their motivations, delusions and preoccupations. The remarkable thing about Middlemarch is the detail a...
Nineteen Eighty-Four makes depressing but essential reading. Published in 1949, it’s the author’s vision of a dystopian future dominated by totalitarian state surveillance, mind control and perpetual war. At the centre of the novel is Winston, whose job is to rewrite old news stories so that they toe the party line, whom we follow in his quest for ...
If you haven’t read the book, you’ll almost certainly have seen Peter Jackson’s epic three-part movie adaptation of it. Incredible though the films are, there’s inevitably a lot missing from them and it’s well worth persevering with the book’s slowish start to follow the journey of Frodo and friends more closely. If you’re not familiar with the sto...
If you’ve ever in need of a little gentle comic relief, you can’t do much better than the delightful Diary of a Nobody. It’s the (made-up) diary of a self-important Victorian lower-middle class gentleman, Charles Pooter, in which he details the day-to-day household quandaries and social embarrassments we can all relate to. It was serialised in Punc...
Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is comprised of three novels: Northern Lights (known in the US as The Golden Compass), The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass. The story is set in a fantasy world that contains numerous parallel universes, some of which bear some resemblance to real-life Oxford. Lyra, the protagonist, inhabits the fictional Jord...
This novel by Emily Brontë’s elder sister Charlotte has inspired numerous film adaptations, and tells the tale of a young governess, Jane Eyre, who goes to live and work in a foreboding country house with an eccentric master, Edward Rochester, who hides a dark secret in a remote wing of his sprawling home. The story focuses on Jane’s transition to ...
Here is another coming-of-age story, and arguably one of the greatest ever told. If you think Charles Dickens is boring, or you’ve been put off him by studying him at school, please give him another chance. Like all his novels, Great Expectations is full of humour and populated by an entertaining cast of brilliantly-named characters. It tells the t...
Even if you’re not normally into the Gothic, Rebecca is sure to have you gripped. Its nameless narrator tells the chilling tale of her experiences at Manderley, the house at the centre of the story, after marrying Maxim de Winter, its owner. Manderley proves to be haunted by memories of Maxim’s previous wife, Rebecca, who drowned the previous year;...
It was impossible to choose just one Jane Austen novel for this list, as they’re all absolutely brilliant and packed full of interesting and sometimes amusing characters – and heroines you can’t fail to love. As well as being entertaining stories in themselves, Jane Austen’s novels are recognised for their historical importance thanks to their soci...
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May 11, 2024 · Explore the best fiction books from the Western canon, from Chaucer to Orwell, with insights from scholars and authors. Find reading lists, interviews, reviews and more on Five Books, a website that helps you discover great books.
Classic English Literature Books. Meet your next favorite book. Join Goodreads. Shelves > Classic English Literature > Classic English Literature Books. Showing 1-50 of 470. Jane Eyre (Paperback) by. Charlotte Brontë. (shelved 14 times as classic-english-literature) avg rating 4.15 — 2,102,393 ratings — published 1847. Want to Read.
English Literature Books. Meet your next favorite book. Join Goodreads. Shelves > English Literature > English Literature Books. Showing 1-50 of 17,194. Pride and Prejudice (Paperback) by. Jane Austen. (shelved 658 times as english-literature) avg rating 4.29 — 4,293,622 ratings — published 1813. Want to Read. Rate this book.
