Book clubs
Books with reading guides
Every book in our catalogue that has a full reading guide — with key themes, five original discussion questions and context notes. 629 titles, ideal for book clubs.
629 books · ranked
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1
Pride and Prejudice
Wit, manners and misjudged first impressions in Regency England — the template for the modern romantic comedy and still the most quoted of Austen's novels.
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2
Dracula
Letters and diaries trace a creeping invasion by an ancient predator; the novel that fixed the vampire in our imagination.
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3
Rebecca
A new bride is haunted by her husband's glamorous dead wife in a brooding country house; gothic suspense at its finest.
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4
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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5
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Seven generations of one family in a town where the magical is everyday; the defining novel of magical realism.
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6
Dune
Politics, religion and ecology on a desert planet that holds the key to the galaxy; the towering epic of the genre.
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7
1984
Total surveillance, rewritten history and a man who dares to think for himself; the defining dystopia.
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8
The Hobbit
A comfortable hobbit is swept into an adventure with dwarves and a dragon; the cosy doorway into Middle-earth.
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9
Wolf Hall
Thomas Cromwell's rise in the court of Henry VIII; political intrigue rendered in extraordinary close-up prose.
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10
Interpreter of Maladies
Stories of Indian and Indian-American lives between cultures; a Pulitzer-winning debut of great delicacy.
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11
Watchmen
Flawed, ageing superheroes in an alternate Cold War; the graphic novel that proved comics could be literature.
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12
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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13
The Hunger Games
A girl volunteers for a televised fight to the death to save her sister; a propulsive, sharp dystopian thriller.
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14
Charlotte's Web
A pig, a clever spider and a barnyard friendship that beats death; the gentle classic about loyalty.
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15
Sapiens
A sweeping history of humanity from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the present, arguing that what made humans uniquely powerful was the ability to create and believe in shared fictions — nations, religions, money — that allowed large-scale social cooperation impossible for other species. One of the bestselling non-fiction books of the 21st century.
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16
A Brief History of Time
Black holes, the Big Bang and the shape of the cosmos for the general reader; the bestseller that made physics fashionable.
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17
Thinking, Fast and Slow
How the mind's two systems lead us into predictable errors; the definitive popular book on cognitive bias.
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18
Atomic Habits
A practical, evidence-based system for tiny changes that compound; the modern standard on habits.
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19
In Cold Blood
A Kansas farm-family murder reconstructed in novelistic detail; the book that created the true-crime genre.
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20
A Walk in the Woods
Two unfit friends attempt the Appalachian Trail; very funny, with real love for wild places.
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21
Silent Spring
The book that exposed the cost of pesticides and helped launch the environmental movement; calm and devastating.
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22
The New Jim Crow
How mass incarceration recreates racial caste in America; a powerful, much-cited argument.
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23
Ways of Seeing
How we look at images, and who benefits; a short, radical book that changed art criticism.
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24
The Omnivore's Dilemma
Where our food really comes from, traced through four meals; the book that changed how many people eat.
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25
Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Sharp, cool essays on 1960s America; the book that set the standard for the personal essay.
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26
Open
A tennis champion's startlingly honest memoir, including how much he hated the game; one of the best sports books ever written.
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27
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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28
The Stranger
A man feels nothing at his mother's funeral and drifts toward catastrophe; the cornerstone of existential fiction.
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29
Foundation
A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows; grand-scale ideas SF.
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30
Brave New World
A future engineered for comfort and conformity; the other great dystopia, warning against pleasure rather than fear.
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31
The Shining
A family caretakes an empty winter hotel that wants the father for itself; King's masterclass in dread.
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32
Murder on the Orient Express
Hercule Poirot boards the Orient Express snowbound in Yugoslavia and wakes to find a fellow passenger has been murdered. Everyone on the train is a suspect. Christie's most famous novel turns the conventions of the whodunit inside out with a solution that raises genuine moral questions about justice and collective vengeance.
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33
The Pillars of the Earth
The building of a cathedral across decades of medieval turmoil; a vast, addictive saga.
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34
Exhalation
Beautifully reasoned science-fiction stories about time, free will and meaning; cerebral and humane.
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35
Persepolis
A girl grows up during and after the Iranian revolution; a witty, moving graphic memoir.
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36
The Fault in Our Stars
Two teenagers with cancer fall in love; funny and heartbreaking without ever being saccharine.
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37
Educated
A woman raised off-grid by survivalist parents finds her way to a PhD; an astonishing memoir of self-invention.
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38
Man's Search for Meaning
A psychiatrist's survival of the camps and the meaning he drew from it; brief, profound and enduring.
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39
Moneyball
How a cash-strapped baseball team used data to beat richer rivals; a gripping story about questioning everything.
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40
Killers of the Flower Moon
The murders of wealthy Osage people and the birth of the FBI; a riveting, important investigation.
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41
Between the World and Me
A letter to a son about being Black in America; urgent, lyrical and unflinching.
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42
The Fire Next Time
Two searing essays on race, faith and America; as urgent now as when they were written.
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43
The Republic
Socrates argues with Athenian citizens about the nature of justice, the ideal city-state, the philosopher-king, the allegory of the cave, and the forms. Plato's dialogue is the foundational text of Western political philosophy and one of the most influential works of thought ever written.
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44
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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45
The Remains of the Day
An English butler looks back on a life of duty and the love he never let himself feel; restrained and quietly shattering.
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46
The Left Hand of Darkness
Genly Ai, an envoy from a galactic confederation, is sent to the planet Gethen — where all humans are ambisexual, able to be either male or female — to persuade the planet to join the confederation. Le Guin's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel is a sustained thought experiment about gender, society and what we assume to be natural that remains one of the most important works in speculative fiction.
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47
Fahrenheit 451
A fireman whose job is burning books begins to question why; a passionate defence of reading.
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48
A Game of Thrones
Noble houses scheme for an iron throne while an ancient threat stirs in the north; ruthless, intricate epic fantasy.
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49
It
A group of friends face a shape-shifting evil in their home town, then again as adults; a doorstop of fear and friendship.
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50
And Then There Were None
Ten strangers are lured to an isolated island off the Devon coast — each convicted in a recording of a crime they are believed to have escaped justice for. One by one they are murdered. Christie's bestselling detective novel is the best-selling crime novel of all time and the foundational locked-room mystery.
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51
The Book Thief
A girl in Nazi Germany who steals books, narrated by Death itself; original, tender and devastating.
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52
The Hate U Give
A teenager witnesses a police shooting and finds her voice; urgent, powerful and humane.
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53
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
An orphan learns he is a wizard and finds a home at a school of magic; the book that made a generation read.
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54
The Warmth of Other Suns
The Great Migration of Black Americans told through three unforgettable lives; monumental narrative history.
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55
Born a Crime
Growing up mixed-race under and after apartheid; funny, sharp and genuinely moving.
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56
The Body Keeps the Score
How trauma lives in the body and how people heal; a landmark that reached far beyond therapists.
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57
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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58
Atonement
A child's misunderstanding wrecks two lives; a novel about guilt, storytelling and the limits of saying sorry.
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59
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
A bounty hunter chases androids in a decayed future and starts to wonder what makes anyone human; the basis for Blade Runner.
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60
The Handmaid's Tale
Women reduced to their fertility in a theocratic America; chillingly plausible and fiercely written.
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61
The Haunting of Hill House
Four people spend a summer in a house that may be alive; the gold standard for the literary ghost story.
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62
All the Light We Cannot See
A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross in occupied France; luminous, intricate storytelling.
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63
Becoming
Michelle Obama's memoir traces her journey from the South Side of Chicago through Princeton, Harvard Law School, a career in public service and eight years in the White House. Intimate, politically engaged and carefully crafted, it is one of the bestselling memoirs ever published.
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64
Braiding Sweetgrass
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves together Indigenous plant knowledge, scientific botany and memoir to argue that plants are not passive objects but beings with gifts to offer, and that reciprocity — not extraction — is the proper relationship between humans and the living world. One of the most-read works of nature writing in recent years.
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65
Flow
The psychologist who coined the concept of 'flow' — the state of complete immersion in a challenging activity — presents his research on optimal experience and argues that happiness comes not from leisure but from deep engagement with work and activity that stretches our abilities.
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66
Great Expectations
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
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67
The Secret History
A clique of classics students at an elite college slides into murder; an intoxicating, intelligent thriller of atmosphere.
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68
Neuromancer
A washed-up hacker pulled into one last job in cyberspace; the book that named and shaped cyberpunk.
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69
The Road
A father and son walk through a dead, ash-grey world; stripped-bare, unbearably tender post-apocalyptic fiction.
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70
The Name of the Wind
A legendary figure tells the story of his own rise from orphan to arcanist; lyrical, immersive and beloved.
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71
Gone Girl
A wife vanishes and her husband becomes the prime suspect; the twisty thriller that redefined the genre.
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72
The Diary of a Young Girl
A teenage girl's diary while hiding from the Nazis; one of the most important and human documents of the century.
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73
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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74
The Goldfinch
When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.
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75
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Earth is demolished for a bypass and an ordinary man hitchhikes the cosmos; the funniest book in science fiction.
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76
Never Let Me Go
Three friends at a strange English boarding school slowly learn what they were made for; restrained and heartbreaking.
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77
Guards! Guards!
A drunken night watch must stop a dragon and a conspiracy; warm, funny and secretly wise Discworld.
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78
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Journalist Mikael Blomkvist teams up with the brilliant, damaged hacker Lisbeth Salander to investigate a 40-year-old disappearance from a wealthy Swedish family — and uncovers something far darker. Larsson's novel launched the Millennium series and introduced one of the most compelling anti-heroines in crime fiction.
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79
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
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80
On the Origin of Species
Darwin presents his evidence for natural selection — the mechanism by which species evolve through variation and survival of the fittest — drawn from his voyage on the Beagle and years of observation. The most consequential scientific book of the 19th century, it permanently changed how humans understand their place in nature.
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81
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.
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82
The Corrections
The three grown children of Alfred and Enid Lambert return home for a final Christmas as Alfred's Parkinson's progresses and Enid refuses to accept what is happening to her marriage and family. Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel moves between the Lambert children's separate American lives and their parents' Midwestern home in a portrait of family, decline and the late-20th-century United States.
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83
Slaughterhouse-Five
A man comes 'unstuck in time' after surviving the firebombing of Dresden; an anti-war novel like no other.
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84
Piranesi
A man lives alone in an endless house of statues and tides; a short, strange, haunting puzzle of a novel.
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85
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
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86
Anna Karenina
A passionate affair against the grain of high society, threaded with one of fiction's most honest portraits of an ordinary good life.
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87
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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88
A Wizard of Earthsea
A gifted boy at a school of wizardry must face the darkness he unleashed; spare, wise coming-of-age fantasy.
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89
The Big Sleep
Private detective Philip Marlowe is hired by an elderly General to handle a blackmailer — and finds himself in a Los Angeles of corruption, murder and double-crossing that extends far beyond the original case. Chandler's first novel introduced one of fiction's iconic protagonists and established the hardboiled detective as an American archetype.
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90
Just Mercy
Bryan Stevenson, a young lawyer who founded the Equal Justice Initiative, recounts his early career defending death row prisoners in Alabama — including Walter McMillian, a Black man sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit. Stevenson's memoir is one of the most important accounts of the American criminal justice system's treatment of the poor, the mentally ill and people of colour.
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91
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student talks himself into murder, then has to live inside his own conscience — the original psychological thriller.
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92
Americanah
Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman, moves to the United States for university and spends fifteen years discovering what it means to be Black in America — a category she did not inhabit in Nigeria. Meanwhile Obinze, her first love, tries and fails to build a life in England and returns to Lagos. Adichie's richly observed novel is about race, class and the specific discovery of race-consciousness that comes from leaving home.
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93
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
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94
Northern Lights
A girl and her animal soul-companion journey north into a war over the nature of the soul; thrilling and profound.
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95
The Argonauts
Part memoir, part theory, part love story — Nelson writes about her relationship with the artist Harry Dodge and her pregnancy, while drawing on feminist philosophy, queer theory and literary criticism. The Argonauts is a book about how language both creates and fails the experiences it tries to hold.
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96
The Silent Patient
Alicia Berenson, a famous painter, shoots her husband five times and never speaks another word. Theo Faber, a psychotherapist, becomes obsessed with treating her and uncovering why. Michaelides's debut psychological thriller — with one of the most discussed twists in recent crime fiction — became one of the bestselling thrillers of its decade.
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97
Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and abandons it, with consequences for both — the founding myth of science fiction, written when the author was barely twenty.
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98
The God of Small Things
Twins, forbidden love and a single terrible day in Kerala; lush, fractured and unforgettable.
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99
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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100
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Four children step through a wardrobe into a frozen magic kingdom; the gateway to Narnia.
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101
Black Boy
Richard Wright's autobiographical account of his childhood and youth in the Jim Crow South — the hunger, the violence, the white employer who takes him to a library, the reading that opens a world while making life in Mississippi impossible. One of the great American memoirs and one of the founding texts of the 20th-century Black literary tradition.
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102
The Housemaid
Millie, broke and with a past she's hiding, takes a live-in housekeeping job with the wealthy Winchester family — and discovers that the perfect family she works for conceals something far darker than her own secrets. McFadden's twist-driven domestic thriller became a BookTok phenomenon and one of the bestselling thrillers of the decade.
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103
The Great Gatsby
Wealth, longing and a green light across the bay in the Jazz Age — short, perfect and quietly devastating.
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104
The Kite Runner
Friendship, betrayal and the long road to redemption against the backdrop of Afghanistan's upheavals.
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105
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.
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106
A Small Place
A long, fierce essay addressed directly to the European tourist arriving in Antigua, Kincaid's essay is one of the most powerful pieces of postcolonial writing in English — about the relationship between tourism and colonialism, about the corruption that replaced British colonial rule, and about what it means to live in a place that others only visit.
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107
The Name of the Rose
In a 14th-century Italian monastery, the English friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders whose resolution turns on a forbidden book. Eco's debut novel is simultaneously a medieval detective story, a meditation on heresy and textual interpretation, and a literary novel about the relationship between truth, authority and the books that preserve or destroy both.
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108
The Grapes of Wrath
A family driven west by the Dust Bowl in search of dignity and work; angry, tender and unforgettable.
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109
The Underground Railroad
A reimagining of the escape from slavery as a literal railway; inventive, brutal and morally clear.
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110
This Boy's Life
Tobias Wolff's memoir of his adolescence in 1950s America — moving with his mother from town to town, enduring a cruel stepfather named Dwight, petty criminality and an elaborate scheme to escape to a school he has no right to attend. A foundational American memoir and a study in the complicated relationship between the person you were and the writer you became.
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111
Still Life
In the Quebec village of Three Pines, a woman is found dead in the woods on the morning after Thanksgiving. Inspector Armand Gamache of the Sûreté du Québec arrives to investigate — and finds a village of artists, eccentrics and buried secrets. Penny's debut introduced one of crime fiction's most beloved series and established Three Pines as a genuinely compelling literary setting.
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112
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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113
To Kill a Mockingbird
A child's-eye view of race, courage and conscience in the American South, anchored by one of fiction's great fathers.
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114
Stoner
The quiet life of an ordinary university teacher, rediscovered decades later as a near-perfect novel about an unremarkable life lived fully.
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115
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass's account of his life in slavery — learning to read despite prohibition, the brutal violence of the system, and his eventual escape. Written to prove that he had indeed been enslaved (some doubted his account given his eloquence), the Narrative is one of the foundational texts of American literature and abolitionism.
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116
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Alec Leamas, a burned-out British intelligence officer, is sent on one final mission into East Germany — supposedly to destroy an East German spymaster. Le Carré's breakthrough novel dismantled the romantic myth of the Cold War spy and replaced it with a portrait of moral compromise, institutional cynicism and the expendability of individuals to state interests.
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117
The Stone Sky
The concluding volume of the Broken Earth trilogy brings Essun and her daughter Nassun toward an inevitable confrontation over the fate of a world wracked by recurring apocalypses — and reveals the deep history of the Stillness and the Obelisk Gate. Jemisin's trilogy made history as the only series to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel three years running, with this final volume completing one of the most acclaimed achievements in contemporary fantasy.
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118
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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119
Pachinko
Beginning in early 20th-century Korea, Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family through their migration to Japan and the systematic discrimination they face as zainichi Koreans — banned from most professions, denied citizenship in the only country their children have ever known. Lee's saga of survival, sacrifice and the pachinko parlours that became one of the few open routes to prosperity was a National Book Award finalist.
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120
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
As told to Alex Haley, The Autobiography follows Malcolm's journey from a troubled childhood in Michigan through criminal activity, prison, conversion to Islam and transformation into one of America's most electrifying and controversial political figures — ending with his shift toward a more universal view of human rights before his assassination in 1965.
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121
The Sign of Four
Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are engaged by Mary Morstan to investigate the mysterious death of her father and a series of pearls left for her by an unknown benefactor. The case leads to a stolen Indian treasure, a pact of vengeance and one of Holmes's most elaborate investigations. The novel also introduces Watson's courtship of Mary, who becomes his wife.
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122
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.
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123
The House of the Spirits
Four generations of the Trueba family in an unnamed Latin American country — from the clairvoyant Clara to her granddaughter Alba, who survives the military coup — are traced through love, violence, magic and political catastrophe. Allende's debut draws on García Márquez's magical realism while making it entirely her own, and is one of the foundational texts of Latin American feminist fiction.
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124
Hamlet
The prince of Denmark is commanded by his father's ghost to avenge his murder by his uncle Claudius, who has married Hamlet's mother and taken the throne. Shakespeare's most analysed play circles the question of why Hamlet delays, producing a meditation on consciousness, action, mortality and the impossibility of certainty.
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125
Schindler's Ark
The documented story of Oskar Schindler — a German industrialist, bon vivant and opportunist who used his Kraków factory to save over 1,200 Polish Jews from extermination, spending his entire wartime fortune bribing SS officers. Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel-as-biography draws on interviews with Schindler's Jews and presents an unlikely hero who was also flawed, unfaithful and self-serving.
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126
Network Effect
Murderbot — the anxious, TV-obsessed security AI who would rather be left alone — returns in the first full-length Murderbot novel, drawn into a crisis involving a kidnapped friend, a hijacked ship and a conspiracy that forces Murderbot to confront its feelings about the humans it protects. Wells's Hugo and Nebula-winning novel combines thriller pacing with one of science fiction's most beloved unconventional narrators.
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127
We Begin at the End
Walk, a small-town California police chief, releases his childhood best friend Vincent from prison thirty years after Vincent killed Walk's sister — and the return sets off a chain of events involving Vincent's niece Duchess, a self-declared outlaw raising her younger brother. Whitaker's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel is both a literary character study and a propulsive thriller about guilt, loyalty and the children paying for adults' worst days.
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128
American Gods
Shadow Moon, recently released from prison, takes a job with the mysterious Mr Wednesday and finds himself at the centre of a war between the old gods brought to America by immigrants — Anansi, Odin, Anansi, Czernobog — and the new gods of media, technology and globalisation. Gaiman's novel is a myth of America as a land that forgets its gods.
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129
Macbeth
A brave general returns from battle to hear a prophecy that he will be king. Driven by his own ambition and his wife's darker will, he murders his way to the throne — and discovers that the crown brings terror, not peace. Shakespeare's shortest and most concentrated tragedy is a study in guilt, tyranny and the corrosion of the self.
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130
Hunger
Gay writes about her body — its size, its history, the assault that changed her relationship to it and what her body has meant to her and to others across her life. Her memoir is one of the most formally and emotionally direct accounts of living in a body that culture treats as wrong, and of eating as a way of managing what cannot otherwise be managed.
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131
Good Girl, Bad Girl
Forensic psychologist Cyrus Haven is asked to assess Evie Cormac, a teenage girl found hiding in a house with a murdered man years earlier, whose true identity has never been established — while investigating the murder of a teenage figure skater. Robotham's CWA Gold Dagger-winning novel launched a series built around Cyrus and Evie's relationship and the mystery of who Evie really is.
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132
The City We Became
New York City is about to be born as a living entity — and each of its boroughs manifests as a human avatar who must fight an ancient enemy trying to prevent the city's birth. Jemisin's Locus Award-winning novel is urban fantasy as both celebration of New York's diversity and confrontation with the forces — including a very particular kind of cosmic racism — that resist cities becoming what they could be.
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133
The Nightingale
Two sisters in German-occupied France take different paths through the war: Vianne shelters Jewish children in her home while her husband is a prisoner of war; Isabelle joins the Resistance and guides downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah's novel about women's wartime experience became one of the most-read historical novels of the decade.
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134
Romeo and Juliet
Two young people from feuding families fall instantly in love and secretly marry, only to be destroyed by the conflict they cannot escape. Shakespeare's tragedy of speed and fate asks what separates love from obsession and whether the world ever had room for what Romeo and Juliet were.
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135
Know My Name
Emily Doe — the anonymous victim in the Brock Turner sexual assault case that became an international cause célèbre — reveals herself as Chanel Miller and recounts her experience of the assault, the trial, and the years of recovery. Miller's memoir redefines what victim impact statements can be and reclaims her story from the case that had reduced her to a role.
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136
The Tainted Cup
In an empire defended from monstrous leviathans by genetically and magically altered humans, investigator Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol are called to solve the murder of an imperial officer killed by a tree that grew through his body overnight. Bennett's Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning novel combines fantasy worldbuilding with a genuine Holmes-and-Watson detective dynamic and a richly imagined bureaucratic empire.
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137
The Last Cuentista
Petra Peña, one of the children chosen to journey to a new world after Earth's destruction, wakes from cryosleep to find her memories have been erased by the ship's new ruling order — except for the stories her grandmother told her, which become the only thing she has left of where she came from. Higuera's Newbery Medal-winning novel uses science fiction to explore cultural erasure, memory and the power of storytelling to preserve identity.
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138
Birdsong
In 1910, Stephen Wraysford falls in love with the wife of his host in Amiens; six years later he is in the trenches of the Somme, and the tunnellers who dig beneath the battlefield carry a barely suppressed world of feeling. Faulks's novel interweaves the love story of 1910 with the war of 1914-18 and a 1978 frame narrative, creating one of the most beloved British war novels.
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139
King Lear
An ageing king divides his kingdom between his daughters in exchange for declarations of love, disinheriting the one who refuses to perform. What follows is one of literature's most devastating explorations of power, age, loyalty, ingratitude and the cruelty that families inflict on each other.
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140
Down the River unto the Sea
Joe King Oliver, a former NYPD detective framed and imprisoned years earlier on charges that destroyed his career and marriage, is approached by the woman who set him up — now wanting his help — while he investigates the case of a journalist accused of killing two police officers. Mosley's Edgar Award-winning novel is a hardboiled meditation on corruption, race and the New York City justice system from one of crime fiction's most distinctive voices.
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141
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.
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142
The Volunteer
Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance officer, volunteered to be captured and sent to Auschwitz in 1940 specifically to gather intelligence and build a resistance network from inside the camp. Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year-winning biography tells one of the most extraordinary and least-known stories of WWII resistance — a man who chose to enter the camp the rest of the world was trying to escape.
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143
Me Before You
Louisa Clark, an awkward young woman in a small English town, takes a job as caregiver for Will Traynor, a former adventurer now paralysed following a road accident. Their relationship develops into love — but Will has already made a decision about his future that love cannot change. Moyes's novel raised passionate debates about disability, autonomy and what it means to support someone you love in a choice you find devastating.
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144
Othello
A Moorish general in Venice is destroyed by the malice of his ensign Iago, who poisons his mind against his wife Desdemona with fabricated evidence of infidelity. Shakespeare's study of jealousy, race, manipulation and self-destruction is among the most psychologically disturbing of his plays.
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145
Five Decembers
In November 1941, a Honolulu police detective investigates a brutal double murder that leads him to Hong Kong just as the Pacific war begins — and the case, and the war, will consume the next five years of his life. Kestrel's Edgar Award-winning novel is an epic crime story that becomes a war novel, following one detective across the entire Pacific theatre in pursuit of a case he cannot let go.
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146
A Master of Djinn
In an alternate 1912 Cairo transformed by the return of magic and djinn forty years earlier, Agent Fatma el-Sha'arawi of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities investigates the murder of a secret brotherhood by a man claiming to be al-Jahiz, the mystic whose actions unleashed magic on the world. Clark's Nebula Award-winning novel combines steampunk Cairo, Egyptian mythology and a confident, glamorous detective heroine.
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147
The World of Yesterday
Written in Brazilian exile weeks before his suicide in 1942, Zweig's memoir reconstructs the cosmopolitan, culturally rich Vienna of his youth and the Europe he loved — before two world wars dismantled it completely. One of the great elegies for a lost world, and one of the most clear-eyed accounts of how civilisation can be destroyed by forces that seemed, until they weren't, impossible.
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148
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Sixteen compact, stripped-down stories about ordinary Americans in crisis — marriages failing, drinks being poured, the things people cannot say to each other. Carver's most celebrated collection established minimalism as a mode in American short fiction and showed how much could be conveyed through what is left unsaid.
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149
The Tempest
The magician Prospero, exiled on an island with his daughter Miranda and two servants, orchestrates the arrival of the enemies who usurped his Milanese dukedom. Shakespeare's last solo play meditates on power, art, forgiveness and the ambiguous freedom of the imagination.
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150
Notes on an Execution
On the night of his execution, a serial killer's life is reconstructed not through his own perspective but through the women connected to him — his mother, his sister-in-law, the detective who caught him. Kukafka's Edgar Award-winning novel deliberately withholds the killer's voice, redirecting the true-crime genre's usual fascination with the perpetrator toward the women whose lives intersected with his.
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151
The City in the Middle of the Night
On a tidally locked planet where one side burns and the other freezes, two cities cling to survival in the narrow habitable zone — and a young woman exiled from one of them encounters the planet's indigenous, possibly sentient inhabitants. Anders's Locus Award-finalist novel is about colonialism, communication across genuinely alien difference, and what survival costs a society over generations.
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152
Tenth of December
Ten stories in Saunders's distinctive voice — comic, tender, formally inventive, morally serious — about ordinary Americans in extraordinary situations: a man contemplating suicide, a test subject for experimental mood drugs, a child imagining a rescue fantasy. One of the most celebrated short story collections of recent decades.
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153
Julius Caesar
The Roman senator Cassius persuades the noble Brutus to join a conspiracy against Julius Caesar, whose growing power seems to threaten the Republic. The assassination and its turbulent political aftermath — particularly Mark Antony's speech to the crowd — test whether honourable motives can survive the realities of power.
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154
The Saint of Bright Doors
Fetter was raised by his mother to kill his father — a cult leader and living saint — but instead moves to a city full of doors that lead nowhere, where he discovers an underground of the unseen and the discarded. Chandrasekera's Nebula Award-winning debut is a richly strange fantasy about prophecy, chosen ones who refuse their roles, and the parts of cities that official narratives erase.
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155
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Charlie Bucket, the poorest child in a town, finds the last Golden Ticket and enters Willy Wonka's extraordinary chocolate factory alongside four deeply unpleasant children who are each eliminated by their own vices. Dahl's morality tale is disguised as a fantasy: a story about greed, humility and the rewards of being genuinely good.
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156
A Midsummer Night's Dream
In an enchanted forest outside Athens, four young lovers pursue and confuse each other under the influence of fairy magic while a troupe of artisans rehearse an absurd play. Shakespeare's most purely comic work is also a meditation on the unreliability of desire, the nature of dreams, and the relationship between art and illusion.
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157
The Kaiju Preservation Society
Jamie Gray, laid off at the start of the pandemic, takes an unusual job that turns out to involve travelling to an alternate dimension where enormous kaiju — Godzilla-scale creatures — live in a vast wilderness that needs protecting from both the kaiju and the humans who'd exploit them. Scalzi's Locus Award-winning novel is fast, funny science fiction adventure, written partly as what he's called 'a pop song' after a difficult creative period.
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158
Matilda
Matilda Wormwood is a precocious five-year-old with parents who ignore her brilliance. She teaches herself to read, devours the local library, and eventually discovers she has telekinetic powers — which she uses to bring justice to her terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull. Dahl's most beloved novel for children is about the power of intelligence, reading and kindness in a world that prefers children to be seen and not heard.
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159
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Janie Crawford, a Black woman in early 20th-century Florida, tells the story of her three marriages and her search for love, self-determination and voice. Hurston's novel was rediscovered by Alice Walker in the 1970s and is now central to both the Black literary tradition and the feminist canon.
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160
System Collapse
Murderbot and its allies must prevent a corporate hostile takeover of a newly contacted human colony — while Murderbot deals with the psychological aftermath of trauma from the previous book, in ways its companions notice before it's willing to admit. Wells's Locus Award-winning novel continues the series' blend of action, humour and one of science fiction's most quietly moving explorations of mental health and recovery.
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161
The Color Purple
Celie writes letters to God and to her sister Nettie from the American South of the early 20th century, charting her journey from abuse and silence through love, friendship and creative voice to a hard-won selfhood. Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is one of the defining works of American feminist literature.
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162
Death of a Salesman
Willy Loman, an ageing travelling salesman, faces the collapse of all his illusions about himself, his sons and the American Dream he has pursued his whole life. Miller's landmark drama is a devastating critique of success mythology and the damage that false dreams inflict on the men who believe in them and the families who inherit their wreckage.
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163
The Mercy of Gods
Humanity, having spread to a distant world, is conquered by the Carryx — an ancient, incomprehensible alien empire that absorbs species into its vast collection of subject civilisations. The Mercy of Gods, by the writing team behind The Expanse, begins a new space opera series about survival under genuinely alien, indifferent conquest — won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
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164
Invisible Man
An unnamed Black narrator, living underground in a basement lit by stolen electricity, recounts his journey through Southern education, the Communist Party and the depths of Harlem, always unseen by a society that refuses to acknowledge his full humanity. Ellison's sole novel is one of the great works of American literature.
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165
A Streetcar Named Desire
Blanche DuBois arrives at her sister Stella's apartment in New Orleans, retreating from a life of loss and delusion into the rough, sensual world of her brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski. Williams's play is a study of the violent collision between illusion and reality, desire and destruction, and what it means to depend on the kindness of strangers.
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166
On the Road
Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty make a series of cross-country journeys through postwar America, seeking experience, jazz and a freedom that keeps receding over the horizon. Kerouac's autobiographical novel defined the Beat Generation and became the template for the American road narrative.
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167
The Crucible
In 1692 Salem, accusations of witchcraft sweep a Puritan community, and John Proctor must choose between false confession and death. Written during the McCarthy era as an allegory of political persecution, the play asks what it costs to maintain integrity when a society has surrendered to mass hysteria and fear.
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168
The Bluest Eye
In 1941 Ohio, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, a Black girl surrounded by poverty and violence, prays for blue eyes — believing that beauty will make her lovable and save her. Morrison's debut novel is an unflinching examination of internalised racism, self-hatred and the damage of impossible beauty standards imposed from outside.
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169
Waiting for Godot
Vladimir and Estragon wait beside a barren tree for someone called Godot who never arrives. Beckett's theatre of the absurd has no plot, no backstory and no resolution — only the endlessly repeated condition of waiting, which turns out to be a precise image of human existence and the stories we tell to fill it.
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170
Antigone
After her brothers kill each other in civil war, Antigone defies the king's decree to bury the brother deemed a traitor, choosing divine law over human authority. Sophocles's tragedy raises questions about conscience versus the state, individual duty versus political power, that remain as urgent as they were in ancient Athens.
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171
White Noise
Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies at a small American college, lives with his family in a consumer-saturated suburban world — until an 'Airborne Toxic Event' forces an evacuation and makes death suddenly tangible. DeLillo's National Book Award-winning novel is one of the central texts of postmodern American fiction, satirising media, consumerism and the American terror of mortality.
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172
Heart of Darkness
Marlow, a riverboat captain, travels deep into the Belgian Congo to find the ivory trader Kurtz, whose methods have become legendary for their horror. One of the most debated texts in English literature — a study of colonialism and the human capacity for evil that has itself been accused of reproducing the racism it critiques.
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173
The Nickel Boys
At the Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school in the 1960s, two Black teenagers — the idealistic Elwood and the pragmatic Turner — face systematic abuse and find different ways to survive. Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a devastating account of institutional racism and the long shadow that violence casts over an entire life.
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174
The Awakening
Edna Pontellier, a married woman summering on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, awakens to her own desires and autonomy, refusing the roles of wife and mother that her society demands. Condemned on publication in 1899 and largely forgotten, the novel is now central to feminist literary history and to discussions of women's freedom and selfhood.
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175
The Overstory
Nine Americans whose lives are changed by trees — a chestnut tree photographed for generations, a couple bonded by a sentinel banyan, a scientist who discovers trees communicate — are drawn together in a defence of old-growth forests. Powers's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel makes trees the protagonist of American history and asks whether human consciousness will arrive before or after the damage is done.
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176
Persuasion
Anne Elliot, persuaded against her better judgment to break off her engagement to the naval officer Frederick Wentworth, encounters him again years later — now successful and still unmarried. Austen's last completed novel is her most melancholy and most quietly feminist, written as she was dying and published posthumously.
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177
Wide Sargasso Sea
Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s, Bertha Mason — the mad wife in the attic of Jane Eyre — tells her own story before she is silenced and imprisoned by Rochester. Rhys's novel is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial fiction, a fierce rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's portrait of Creole womanhood from the inside.
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178
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who in a drunken auction sells his wife and daughter to a sailor, rises to become the Mayor of Casterbridge — only to see his reputation, business and relationships destroyed by the return of the man he sold her to, now his business partner. Hardy's study of self-destruction and the remorselessness of consequence is among the most dramatically compelling of his novels.
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179
The Bloody Chamber
Carter's collection of ten dark, sensuous fairy tale retellings — including reimaginings of Bluebeard, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots — transforms the source material through a feminist and psychoanalytic lens. The title story in particular is one of the most analysed texts in A-level English Literature, a dazzling study of desire, power and the violence concealed in romantic convention.
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180
A Christmas Carol
Ebenezer Scrooge, a miserly old businessman who despises Christmas and the poor, is visited on Christmas Eve by the ghost of his former partner Marley and by three spirits who show him his past, his present and the grim future that awaits him if he does not change. Dickens's most enduring short novel is a plea for social compassion written during a period of acute Victorian inequality.
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181
Brooklyn
Eilis Lacey, a young Irish woman, leaves County Wexford for Brooklyn in the early 1950s, finding work, education and an unexpected romance — only to be pulled back to Ireland by a family tragedy. Tóibín's quietly devastating novel is about the particular sorrow of the immigrant: the impossible choice between the life you have built and the world you left behind.
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182
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that releases his darker nature as the violent Mr Hyde — smaller, freed from conscience, and capable of acts Jekyll himself cannot commit. As Hyde's crimes grow worse, Jekyll loses control of the transformation. Stevenson's Gothic novella is a founding text of the double-identity story and a study of Victorian repression and the darkness it conceals beneath respectability.
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183
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, a writer and communist living in 1950s London, keeps four notebooks — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for her novel, blue for her ordinary life — and attempts to synthesise them into a golden notebook. Lessing's formally radical novel about female consciousness, creative block and political disillusionment was one of the most important feminist novels of the 20th century.
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184
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn escapes his abusive father and floats down the Mississippi River with Jim, an enslaved man seeking freedom. Through a series of adventures and moral tests, Huck must choose between following the conventions of a society built on slavery and following his own conscience. Both the great American adventure story and one of the most debated texts in the country's literary history.
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185
Women in Love
Two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, form intense relationships with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich respectively in a Midlands mining community. Lawrence's most ambitious and controversial novel probes the nature of love, power and modern alienation — and asks whether genuine human connection is possible in an industrialised, dying world.
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186
Brideshead Revisited
Charles Ryder, a poor Oxford student, is drawn into the wealthy Catholic Flyte family through his friendship with the charming Sebastian, and into their sumptuous country house. Waugh's elegiac novel — told in retrospect by an ageing Ryder — traces the Flyte family's decline and Charles's reluctant confrontation with religious faith, loss and the vanished world of the English Catholic aristocracy.
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187
Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel, a sensitive young man in a Nottinghamshire mining town, is bound to his mother by an attachment that makes it almost impossible for him to love any other woman. Lawrence's semi-autobiographical novel charts Paul's struggle toward independence and is one of the foundational texts of psychological realism in English fiction.
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188
A Raisin in the Sun
The Younger family — three generations of Black Americans living in a cramped Chicago apartment — await a life-insurance payout that each member hopes to use differently: a house in a white neighbourhood, a business, a medical education. Hansberry's landmark play takes its title from Langston Hughes and asks what happens to a dream deferred.
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189
Brighton Rock
Pinkie Brown, a vicious teenage gang leader in Brighton's criminal underworld, murders a rival and then marries a naive girl who witnessed the killing. Greene's novel is both a thriller and a deeply Catholic meditation on sin, damnation and the question of whether grace can reach even the most corrupt soul.
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190
The Merchant of Venice
A Venetian merchant borrows money from the Jewish moneylender Shylock to help a friend, pledging a pound of his own flesh as forfeit. When the bond falls due, it is Portia — disguised as a lawyer — who finds a legal means to outwit Shylock. Shakespeare's most contested play sits at the intersection of comedy, tragedy and sustained examination of mercy, justice and prejudice.
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191
The English Patient
In a ruined Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a Canadian nurse tends to a severely burned man — the English patient — whose identity remains mysterious. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel interweaves four characters' stories and histories in a meditation on memory, identity, love and the violence of nations.
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192
Twelfth Night
Viola, shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria, disguises herself as a boy and enters the service of the melancholy Duke Orsino, falling in love with him while carrying his messages to the Countess Olivia, who falls in love with Viola instead. Shakespeare's most exuberant comedy of disguise and desire ends with multiple weddings and one character left out in the cold.
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193
A House for Mr Biswas
Mohun Biswas, a Trinidadian Hindu who has spent his life at the mercy of his wife's large, overbearing family, spends forty-six years trying to own a house — and with it, a self. Naipaul's vast, ironic novel is both a portrait of colonial life in Trinidad and an epic of one man's stubborn desire for dignity and autonomy.
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194
An Inspector Calls
In 1912, the wealthy Birling family is celebrating when a police inspector arrives with news that a young working-class woman has died. As the evening unfolds, each family member is shown to bear some responsibility for her death. Priestley's compact morality play — written in 1945, set in 1912 — is a searing examination of class, responsibility and the complacency of the prosperous.
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195
The Power and the Glory
In a Mexican state where Catholicism has been outlawed, a whisky priest — the last in the region — is hunted by a pursuing lieutenant as he moves from village to village. Greene's novel is a profound examination of guilt, faith and human fallibility: the priest knows he is a bad man, but continues to administer the sacraments anyway.
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196
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield, a peasant girl whose father discovers a dubious claim to noble descent, is sent to seek kinship with the d'Urbervilles and meets with catastrophe. Hardy's most devastating novel follows Tess through betrayal, hardship, murder and execution, asking whether any person can be truly 'pure' in a world that will not let her simply be herself.
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197
The Plague
A bubonic plague descends on the Algerian port city of Oran, and the citizens find themselves quarantined in an absurd situation of suffering, solidarity and moral reckoning. Camus's most widely read novel is both a realistic chronicle of epidemic and an allegory of occupied France — and of any human community confronting an indifferent catastrophe that demands a collective response.
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198
North and South
When Margaret Hale moves from the rural south of England to the industrial northern mill town of Milton, she is confronted with a world of poverty, labour disputes and a mill owner she initially despises. Gaskell's social novel is both a love story and an examination of the human cost of industrialisation — and of the prejudices that class and geography create between people who need to understand each other.
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199
No Country for Old Men
A hunter finds a suitcase of drug money in the Texan desert and takes it, setting in motion a pursuit by the unstoppable killer Anton Chigurh. McCarthy's lean, violent novel is a meditation on fate, violence and the sense that the world has become too brutal for the old codes of honour to survive in.
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200
Howards End
Three families — the intellectual Schlegels, the business-minded Wilcoxes and the lower-middle-class Basts — become entangled through property, love and tragedy. Forster's novel, anchored by its epigraph 'Only connect', asks what England is and who belongs to it — and whether connection across class and sensibility is even possible.
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201
American Pastoral
The Swede — Newark's golden boy, a successful glove manufacturer — watches his perfect American life shatter when his daughter becomes a political bomber. Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel uses one man's ruination to examine the violence at the heart of the American Dream and the 1960s generation that detonated it.
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202
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer has secretly borrowed money to save her husband's life and has been repaying it for years without his knowledge. When the truth threatens to emerge, the marriage — and Nora's entire constructed identity — begins to crack. Ibsen's play is one of the founding texts of modern drama and a landmark of feminist literature.
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203
The Buried Giant
In post-Arthurian Britain, an elderly couple undertake a journey through a land where memory has been mysteriously erased. Ishiguro's most fable-like novel asks whether a love built on forgotten pain can survive the return of what was buried — and whether communities can coexist peacefully if they remember the atrocities they committed against each other.
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204
How to Be Both
Two stories are bound together in a single novel: a grieving English teenager in the present and a 15th-century Italian fresco painter in the past. Smith's Booker Prize-winning novel exists in two editions with the stories in different orders — asking what changes about the meaning of a life story depending on where you begin.
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205
Passing
Two light-skinned Black women meet by chance in Chicago in the 1920s: Irene is secure in her Black identity, while Clare is 'passing' as white in a marriage to a man who doesn't know. Larsen's compressed, devastating novella explores race, class, desire and the specific psychological violence of a world that forces people to choose.
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206
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Australian surgeon Dorrigo Evans survives as a prisoner of war building the Burma Death Railway, haunted by a love affair that began just before his capture. Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning novel is a meditation on love, memory, survival and the particular moral difficulty of having lived through something that others did not.
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207
My Ántonia
Jim Burden narrates the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who came to the Nebraska prairies in the 1880s. Cather's novel is a celebration of pioneer life and of a woman of extraordinary vitality and resilience — and also an elegy for a world that has passed.
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208
The Luminaries
In 1866, on the goldfields of New Zealand's West Coast, a young man stumbles into a meeting of twelve men who have gathered secretly to discuss four unsolved mysteries. Catton's Booker Prize-winning novel is structured around astrological charts and is one of the most formally elaborate works in contemporary fiction — a Victorian detective novel that turns its genre inside out.
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209
The Bookshop
Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in a small Suffolk town in 1959. The town resists. Fitzgerald's very short novel is a study in quiet, devastating cruelty — how institutions, minor power and social habit conspire against someone who simply wants to do something good. One of the bleakest comedies in English fiction.
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210
The Sympathizer
A communist spy serves as a captain in the South Vietnamese army and escapes to America after the fall of Saigon, all while writing a confession to an unnamed commandant. Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning debut is a dazzling, angry novel about colonialism, complicity and the double consciousness of the man who belongs to every side and none.
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211
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is beautiful, witty and socially brilliant — and she is slowly sliding toward ruin. Wharton's first major novel traces Lily's downfall with the precision of a social scientist and the sympathy of someone who understood exactly how the gilded cage of New York society worked.
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212
Hamnet
In 1580s Stratford-upon-Avon, Agnes — wife of a young Latin tutor who will become William Shakespeare — struggles to save their son Hamnet from an illness moving through the household. O'Farrell's novel imagines the loss of a child that may have given rise to the greatest play ever written, exploring grief, love and the way a mother's devotion can outlast death. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020.
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213
The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmond Dantès, a young sailor falsely imprisoned for years in the Château d'If, escapes to find a vast hidden treasure and uses it to engineer a meticulous revenge on the three men who destroyed his life. Dumas's adventure novel is one of the most popular works of fiction ever written — a study in patience, justice, revenge and whether vengeance can ever truly satisfy.
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214
Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie Bain worships his beautiful, deeply troubled mother Agnes — an alcoholic in a community where alcoholism is everywhere and escape almost impossible. Stuart's Booker Prize-winning debut is an unsparing portrait of poverty, addiction, love and the specific cruelty of a society that offers no way out.
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215
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son of brilliant intelligence and fierce ambition, rises through Napoleonic society using his abilities and his lovers — first a provincial mayor's wife, then an aristocratic Parisian — to advance beyond his station. Stendhal's novel is a study in the psychology of ambition, hypocrisy and the impossibility of authentic selfhood under social constraint.
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216
The Mirror & the Light
The final volume of Mantel's Cromwell trilogy follows Thomas Cromwell through the executions, marriages and political manoeuvres of the final years before his own fall. Mantel writes with the same extraordinary inhabited immediacy as Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, completing one of the greatest historical novel sequences in English. Winner of the Walter Scott Prize 2021.
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217
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
George and Martha, a middle-aged academic couple, invite a younger couple — Nick and Honey — back after a party and spend the night performing a savage ritual of mutual destruction. Albee's play is one of the great American domestic dramas: a study in love as warfare, illusion as survival, and what couples do to each other in the name of intimacy.
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218
Everything I Never Told You
When sixteen-year-old Lydia Lee is found drowned in a lake in Ohio, the family that had built its hopes around her must confront the secrets they kept from each other and from her. Ng's debut novel is a precise study of the pressures families place on their most gifted members — and of what happens when the weight becomes too much.
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219
Fences
Troy Maxson, a former baseball player in 1950s Pittsburgh, has built a fence around his yard and his family as he navigates the limits placed on a Black man by the era he lives in. Wilson's play — one of ten in his Century Cycle covering Black American life across the 20th century — asks what a man is owed, what he takes from his children, and what he cannot admit about himself.
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220
There There
Twelve urban Native Americans converge on Oakland's Big Oakland Powwow — each with their own history of displacement, addiction, family loss and cultural reconnection. Orange's debut is told in overlapping voices that build toward an act of devastating violence, asking what it means to be Native American today in a city built on the erasure of Native existence.
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221
My Antonia
Jim Burden narrates his memory of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl who arrived in Nebraska when Jim did as a child, and who becomes a symbol for everything Jim associates with the pioneer past. Cather's novel is an elegy for the immigrant experience and the prairie landscape, told from a deliberately partial, nostalgic perspective.
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222
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store
In 1972, workers digging a water main in Pottstown, Pennsylvania uncover a skeleton that unravels the hidden history of a neighbourhood shared by Black and Jewish communities in the 1930s. McBride's warm, morally complex novel is about the unlikely alliances between the marginalised and what a community of outcasts can offer each other.
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223
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Two minor characters from Hamlet — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — find themselves caught in events they don't understand and cannot control, waiting for the summons that will seal their fate. Stoppard's play is both a comic meditation on identity and free will and a theatrical examination of what it means to be a supporting character in someone else's drama.
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224
Lessons in Chemistry
In 1960s California, Elizabeth Zott — a chemist who is not taken seriously in her field — becomes the unlikely host of a daytime cooking show, where she treats cooking as chemistry and accidentally inspires a generation of women to think differently about their intelligence and their lives. A witty, determined novel about how women change the world from the room they're allowed to occupy.
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225
Long Day's Journey Into Night
The Tyrone family spends a single August day in 1912 at their Connecticut home — the fog-bound patriarch, his morphine-addicted wife, the resentful elder son and the younger son (based on O'Neill himself) who has just been diagnosed with tuberculosis. O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece, written with instructions not to be published for 25 years after his death, is one of the great American tragedies.
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226
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A young Vietnamese-American man writes a letter to his illiterate mother — about the grandfather he never knew, the grandmother who survived the Vietnam War, his own adolescence in Hartford Connecticut, and a first love that ended in opioid overdose. Vuong's debut novel is prose as concentrated as poetry, a meditation on language, inheritance and what immigrants pass down without knowing it.
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227
Of Human Bondage
Philip Carey, orphaned and self-conscious about his club foot, grows up seeking freedom — from his religious guardian, from his art studies in Paris, from his obsessive and self-destructive love for a waitress named Mildred. Maugham's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the last great Victorian Bildungsromane and one of the most precise accounts of how the wrong person can own you.
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228
Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan, a young American, travels to Ukraine to find the woman who saved his grandfather from the Nazis, accompanied by an exuberant Ukrainian guide and his grandfather. Intercut with a reimagining of the history of the shtetl Trachimbrod, Foer's debut is formally playful, emotionally devastating and one of the defining American novels about the Holocaust's long reach.
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229
Kokoro
A young man forms an intense bond with a solitary older man he calls Sensei, sensing some hidden wound. In a long letter after his death, Sensei confesses the act of betrayal that has defined his life. Soseki's novel is about guilt, friendship and the specifically Meiji-era Japanese confrontation between the old world and the new.
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230
Outline
A novelist travels to Athens to teach a writing course and has a series of conversations — on the plane, on a boat, at dinner, in workshops — which slowly reveal the outline of her own character through what others choose to tell her. Cusk's novel invented a form: a narrator defined entirely by absence, and by the stories of others that pour into that absence.
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231
Pedro Paramo
Juan Preciado travels to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father Pedro Páramo, only to discover that Comala is inhabited entirely by the dead. Rulfo's short, radical novel — only 124 pages — dissolves the boundary between the living and the dead, between past and present, and between the personal and the mythological. García Márquez said it was the novel that taught him how to write.
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232
Beautiful World Where Are You
Alice, a novelist exhausted by fame, and Eileen, her childhood friend, correspond by email while navigating damaged relationships and questions about beauty, meaninglessness and what it means to care about art in a world heading toward catastrophe. Rooney's third novel is her most overtly intellectual — a correspondence novel asking what the novel is for.
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233
Maurice
Maurice Hall, a Cambridge student, falls in love with Clive Durham, a conservative aristocrat who eventually marries and rejects his homosexuality. Maurice then meets the gamekeeper Alec Scudder. Written in 1913-14, Forster's novel was published posthumously in 1971 because he could not publish it in his lifetime. The ending offers something genuine novels about homosexuality rarely offered before the Wolfenden Report.
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234
The Bee Sting
Four members of an Irish family — father, mother, teenage son, teenage daughter — each give their own account of the crisis tearing their world apart, in chapters that get progressively shorter as the disaster accelerates. Murray's novel is a formally daring, darkly funny account of family collapse, financial catastrophe and the things families never say to each other.
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235
War Horse
Joey, a horse, is sold to the British cavalry as war approaches and narrates his experiences through World War One — from the English countryside through the trenches of France, passing between English, German and French hands. Morpurgo's novel for young readers became a West End and Broadway phenomenon, raising questions about narrating animal experience and about the war's cost to all those caught in it.
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236
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Ageing Hollywood legend Evelyn Hugo grants her only interview to an unknown journalist — and spends it telling the real story of her life, her seven marriages and the love she kept hidden for fifty years. Reid's novel is about celebrity, the performance of identity, female friendship, bisexuality and the price of keeping secrets in a world that would have destroyed you for the truth.
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237
The Master and Margarita
The Devil visits Soviet Moscow with his entourage — a huge black cat, an assassin and others — and wreaks havoc through acts of magic and murder. Interwoven with the Devil's visit is a reimagining of Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece, written under Stalin and published twenty years after his death, is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
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238
Daisy Jones and The Six
Told entirely through oral history — interviews with the band members, roadies and record executives — the story of Daisy Jones and The Six reconstructs the rise and sudden implosion of one of the greatest rock bands of the 1970s. Reid's novel is about creative partnership, addiction, ambition and who gets to own a shared story.
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239
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley is a stonemason in rural Dorset who dreams of entering the university at Christminster — a city that will never accept him. His relationships with his cousin Sue Bridehead and his marriage to Arabella Donn are both wrong for different reasons, and the novel follows their combined tragedy with an unsparing honesty that scandalized its first readers. Hardy's last novel.
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240
Exit West
Saeed and Nadia fall in love in an unnamed city under threat of civil war. They escape through magical doors that appear across the world, leading to refugee camps in Greece, a mansion in London, a hillside in California. Hamid's formally elegant novel abstracts the refugee crisis to its essential emotional reality — what migration does to love, identity and where you call home.
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241
Invisible Cities
Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan a series of impossible cities — each one a meditation on memory, desire, time, death or trade. Each city is named after a woman. Calvino's novel is a thought experiment in literary form: a book of prose poems that together constitute a meditation on what cities are and what they contain that is also a meditation on fiction itself.
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242
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Changez, a Pakistani man who built a successful career in New York but left after 9/11, tells his story to an American stranger in a Lahore café. Hamid's short, charged novel is both a thriller and an examination of what America asks of those who arrive hoping to belong — and what that demand costs.
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243
As I Lay Dying
As Addie Bundren lies dying, fifteen members of her family and community narrate the subsequent chapter — their voices telling the story of carrying her body across Mississippi to bury her in Jefferson. Faulkner's formally radical novel uses stream-of-consciousness and multiple perspectives to create one of the most demanding and most studied works in the American canon.
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244
Ceremony
Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran traumatised by the Second World War, returns to New Mexico and seeks healing through ceremony — the traditional Pueblo healing ritual — while navigating the destruction that the modern world has visited on his community. Silko's novel interweaves myth, poetry and prose to show the relationship between individual healing and communal survival.
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245
Swann's Way
The first volume of In Search of Lost Time begins with the narrator's inability to sleep, the memories unlocked by a madeleine dipped in tea, a childhood in Combray, and the story of Charles Swann's obsessive love for Odette de Crécy. Proust's great opening volume introduces the novel's central argument: that involuntary memory is the only reliable medium for recovering the past.
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246
Jesus' Son
A series of linked stories following an unnamed narrator through drugs, violence and accidental encounters in the American Midwest of the 1970s. Johnson's prose is hallucinatory and precise, shot through with dark comedy and unexpected grace — a study of addiction and its specific distortions of time, memory and moral awareness.
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247
Our Town
The Stage Manager introduces the town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, and its inhabitants — particularly two neighbouring families — across three acts covering 1901 to 1913. Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play strips away theatrical illusion entirely, using a bare stage and narration to make visible what we take for granted in ordinary life until it is gone.
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248
The Four Winds
Elsa Wolcott, a Texas Panhandle farmer's wife during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, must choose between staying on the land that is killing her and her family, or heading to California with the tide of migrants seeking a better life. Hannah's novel is both a love letter to The Grapes of Wrath and a portrait of women's wartime and Depression-era resilience.
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249
The Call of the Wild
Buck, a large domesticated dog, is stolen from his California home and sold into service as a sled dog in the Klondike Gold Rush, where the brutal conditions and the atavistic pull of the wild gradually transform him. London's novella is both a survival adventure and a meditation on civilisation and wildness — and one of the most widely assigned books in American primary schools.
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250
A Man Called Ove
Ove is a 59-year-old curmudgeon who has lived his whole life according to strict principles and following his wife's death sees no reason to continue living. He is repeatedly interrupted in his attempts at suicide by the new neighbours who have moved in next door. Backman's novel is a study in how connection persists even when a person has decided to reject it.
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251
A Farewell to Arms
American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley during the First World War in Italy. Their love story plays out against the background of military defeat and retreat. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel is his most romantically devastating — a war novel in which the war is not the worst thing that happens.
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252
The Midnight Library
Nora Seed, at the worst moment of her life, finds herself in a library between life and death where every book is a different version of the life she could have lived. Each time she opens a book she lives that life and discovers what she gave up — and what she gained — in the one she chose. A novel about regret, possibility and the life you have.
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253
The Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound, and the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley move with their expatriate circle from Montmartre to the fiesta in Pamplona. Hemingway's debut novel defined the Lost Generation and introduced the iceberg theory of fiction — more powerful for what it doesn't say.
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254
The Secret Scripture
Roseanne McNulty, a hundred years old in a Roscommon mental hospital, writes her memoirs in secret. Her psychiatrist Dr Grene, compiling her case history, discovers that the truth of her life is nothing like her file says. Barry's Booker-shortlisted novel is a study in Irish institutional memory, the violence done to women, and the stories people tell themselves to survive.
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255
The Odyssey
Odysseus spends ten years trying to reach home after the fall of Troy, battling the Cyclops, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Circe and the Phaeacians, while his wife Penelope holds off suitors in Ithaca and his son Telemachus comes of age. The foundational Western epic of homecoming, adventure and the enduring pull of the domestic.
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256
The Wasp Factory
Sixteen-year-old Frank Cauldhame lives with his secretive father on a small Scottish island, tending a private empire of totemic rituals including the Wasp Factory — a device for predicting the future through the deaths of wasps. Banks's debut novel keeps its secrets until a final revelation that reframes everything that has preceded it.
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257
Don Quixote
An elderly Spanish gentleman, his mind disordered by too many chivalric romances, sets out as a knight errant with his pragmatic squire Sancho Panza to do good and restore justice to the world. Cervantes's novel — often called the first modern novel — plays the idealist and the pragmatist against each other in ways that have sustained 400 years of interpretation.
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258
Moth Smoke
Daru Shezad, a former banker in 1990s Lahore, loses his job, becomes addicted to heroin, falls in love with his best friend's wife and descends into a spiral of crime and self-destruction. Hamid's debut is a stylish, fractured narrative set against the backdrop of Pakistan's nuclear tests and the society of privilege and exclusion they exposed.
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259
Hard Times
In the fictional northern industrial town of Coketown, the philosophy of fact and utilitarianism — embodied by the schoolmaster Gradgrind — produces its human cost: children unable to imagine, workers brutalised by their labour, and a circus family that represents everything the Gradgrind world suppresses. Dickens's most polemical novel, and one of the shortest.
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260
High Fidelity
Rob Fleming, owner of a failing London record shop, is left by his girlfriend and spends the novel revisiting his five greatest romantic failures, making lists and wondering what is wrong with him. Hornby's comedy of male arrested development was one of the novels that helped define the 1990s confessional male voice.
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261
Bleak House
The case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce — a Chancery lawsuit that has consumed generations and may never be resolved — provides the frame for one of Dickens's richest novels, weaving together characters from every level of Victorian society. Bleak House uses a double narrative (third person and first person by the heroine Esther Summerson) and the mystery of Esther's parentage to create the closest thing to the great Victorian novel.
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262
Big Little Lies
Three women in a wealthy Sydney suburb are connected by a school-gate friendship and a secret that culminates in a death at a trivia night. Moriarty's novel investigates domestic violence concealed by privilege, the performance of perfect motherhood and the surprising loyalties of female friendship. The mystery structure is the delivery mechanism for the real subject.
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263
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman recovering from a 'nervous condition' in a summer rental house is prescribed rest and forbidden from writing — and begins to fixate on the yellow wallpaper of her room, eventually believing a woman is trapped behind it. Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story is the foundational text of feminist literary criticism and one of the most-assigned texts in women's literature courses.
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264
Nine Perfect Strangers
Nine strangers check into a luxury wellness resort run by the enigmatic Masha, each hoping to change their life. What they get is increasingly strange, invasive and ultimately dangerous. Moriarty's novel asks what we are willing to have done to us in the name of transformation — and who profits from our desire to be different.
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265
The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Ivan Ilyich, a respected judge, is dying slowly and painfully. The novella traces his gradual recognition that his respectable, successful life has been hollow — that he has lived for social approval rather than for anything genuine. Tolstoy's late masterwork is one of the most concentrated and devastating accounts of the relationship between how we live and how we die.
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266
The Great Alone
Ernt Allbright, a damaged Vietnam veteran, moves his family to a remote Alaskan homestead where he believes they can start over. What follows is a survival story — against the Alaskan wilderness but also against Ernt's increasingly volatile behaviour. Hannah's novel is about the terrible cost of loving a broken man, and about the daughter who must choose between staying and surviving.
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267
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. His family's response — practical, embarrassed, increasingly resentful — is the subject of Kafka's most celebrated novella, a parable of alienation, family obligation and the irreversibility of certain transformations.
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268
Autumn
Elisabeth Demand visits her elderly friend Daniel Gluck in a care home as he drifts in and out of sleep and consciousness. Interwoven with their relationship across decades is a fragmented portrait of Britain in the weeks after the 2016 Brexit vote. The first of Smith's Seasonal Quartet and one of the first literary novels to respond directly to Brexit.
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269
The Cherry Orchard
The Ranevskaya family returns to their ancestral estate with its cherry orchard, facing financial ruin and unable to take the practical steps that would save them. Chekhov's final play is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking — a study in the incapacity of people to respond to change, and in the passing of one world and the arrival of another.
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270
On Chesil Beach
On the night of their wedding in 1962, Florence and Edward — both in their early twenties, both carrying things they cannot say — find themselves unable to negotiate what both of them want. McEwan's novella is about the irreversible: the moment a life turns on a failure of communication, and the weight the past puts on those who have to live with it.
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271
Paradise Lost
Satan falls, corrupts Eden, and humanity loses paradise — told in twelve books of blank verse that Milton intended as a justification of God's ways to man. One of the great monuments of English literature and one of the most ambivalent: Satan is so compelling that Blake claimed Milton was secretly of the Devil's party, and readers have disagreed ever since.
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272
Swing Time
Two mixed-race girls grow up in north-west London dreaming of dance — one talented, one not. Their friendship is the heart of the novel, which follows them into adulthood, across countries and into very different lives. Smith's fifth novel is her most ambitious structurally, moving through time and place to examine art, ambition, friendship and the ways race and class shape what's available to us.
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273
Ficciones
Seventeen short stories — many barely five pages — that invented a new form: the intellectual labyrinth. Borges's stories are about libraries that contain every possible book, lotteries that determine all of reality, detectives investigating their own murders, and critics reviewing imaginary masterpieces. Every story is a philosophical puzzle with narrative clothes.
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274
The Family Upstairs
Libby Jones inherits a London house she's never seen from parents she never knew, and begins to unravel the story of what happened there in 1994. Jewell's psychological thriller alternates between Libby's present-day investigation and a chilling account of a commune that took over the house thirty years earlier. A novel about charismatic control, family damage and the long reach of an enclosed world.
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275
Fanny Hill
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure — known as Fanny Hill — follows an orphaned country girl who arrives in London, falls into a brothel, and narrates her subsequent sexual and social education with remarkable candour. The first English-language prose pornography, it is also a novel about class, economics and female survival; it was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and its author briefly imprisoned.
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276
Verity
Struggling writer Lowen Ashby is hired to complete a bestselling thriller series after the author Verity Crawford is incapacitated. Working in the Crawford home, Lowen finds a manuscript — an apparent autobiography — that contains a confession of terrible acts. Hoover's dark thriller is about truth, gaslighting and the stories women tell themselves and each other.
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277
Chess Story
On a transatlantic liner, a mysterious passenger defeats the world chess champion by playing himself in his head — the result of months of solitary confinement by the Gestapo, during which a single book of chess games became his entire mental world. Zweig's final novella, completed days before his death, is about genius, obsession and the particular tortures of the mind turned against itself.
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278
Malibu Rising
Four siblings — Nina, Jay, Hud and Kit Riva, children of a famous but absent surf musician — come together for the annual party at Nina's Malibu house in August 1983. As the night unfolds, Reid weaves back through the family's history to show how they got here. A novel about celebrity, abandonment and the summer a world ends.
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279
Demon Copperhead
Damon Fields — nicknamed Demon Copperhead for his copper hair and his will — grows up in rural Appalachian Virginia in the opioid epidemic, ageing out of foster care into addiction, loss and an attempt to survive a world that has been systematically stripped of its economic future. Kingsolver's Pulitzer Prize-winning retelling of David Copperfield is the most urgent American novel about the opioid crisis.
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280
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Sam and Sadie meet as children in hospital, reunite as adults and spend thirty years making video games together — through creative intensity, falling out, reconciliation and loss. Zevin's novel is about creative partnership, what art requires of those who make it, and the games people play with each other over the course of a life.
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281
In the Dream House
Machado recounts her abusive relationship with a girlfriend through a series of fragmented chapters, each named after a different narrative genre — romance, horror, fable. The memoir invents a form for the queer abusive relationship while also asking why such stories have been so hard to tell and so little believed.
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282
Her Body and Other Parties
Eight stories at the intersection of horror, fantasy and the everyday lives of women — including an extended riff on Law & Order: SVU and a novella about a green ribbon. Machado's debut collection is formally inventive and politically sharp, using genre conventions to illuminate what the female body endures and what it desires.
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283
Housekeeping
Two sisters are left by their mother at their grandmother's house in the isolated town of Fingerbone, Idaho, and eventually passed between aunts until their eccentric Aunt Sylvie arrives to care for them. Robinson's debut is a slow, luminous meditation on memory, transience and the particular form of freedom that comes from having nothing left to lose.
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284
My Name Is Lucy Barton
Lucy Barton lies in a New York hospital recovering from a procedure that has unexpectedly gone wrong. Her estranged mother comes to sit with her and they talk — about people from home, about almost nothing — for five days. Strout's novel about memory, poverty, shame and the impossibility of escaping where you came from is compressed to something very like perfection.
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285
Dept of Speculation
A marriage under strain is told in fragments — aphorisms, observations, diary entries — by a woman who refers to herself in the third person as 'the wife.' Offill's novel is formally radical and emotionally precise: a portrait of a relationship, a creative crisis and the ordinary catastrophe of trying to live alongside another person.
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286
Life After Life
Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies — and is born again, and dies again — repeatedly, each life varying slightly from the last. Living through the same decades of the 20th century in different ways, she is moved closer and closer to a specific moment that might change everything. Atkinson's formally inventive novel asks what we would do if we could do it again.
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287
Never Mind
Five-year-old Patrick Melrose spends a terrible day at his family's Provençal farmhouse while his brilliant, sadistic father, his numbed mother and their assorted guests inflict and absorb the particular cruelties of the English upper class. The first of the Patrick Melrose novels is the shortest and the most compressed — a day in childhood that contains everything.
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288
The Famished Road
Azaro is a spirit child — an abiku — who keeps choosing to remain in the world of the living rather than returning to the spirit world. His life in a Nigerian village is narrated in a torrent of vision, poverty, political upheaval and supernatural encounter. Okri's Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the great works of African magical realism.
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289
A Grain of Wheat
On the eve of Kenyan independence in 1963, the residents of a village gather to celebrate — and to reckon with their different experiences of the Mau Mau uprising, the betrayals it produced, and the price paid by those who fought. Ngugi's novel examines what political independence means when it arrives and what it asks of those who survived the struggle.
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290
My Brilliant Friend
In 1950s Naples, two girls — Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo — form the friendship that will shape both their lives. Lila is brilliant and fierce and will not escape the neighbourhood; Elena, quieter and more pliant, will. The first of Ferrante's four Neapolitan novels is about female friendship, class, ambition and the specific violence of poverty in post-war Italy.
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291
The Shadow of the Wind
In post-Civil War Barcelona, a boy named Daniel is taken by his father to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where he chooses a novel by Julian Carax — and begins to discover that someone has been systematically destroying every copy of Carax's work. Zafon's novel is a love letter to books, to Barcelona and to the Gothic tradition.
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292
Cloud Atlas
Six narratives nested inside each other like Russian dolls — spanning 1850 to a post-apocalyptic future — tell connected stories of exploitation, resistance and survival. Mitchell's formally ambitious novel is both a meditation on time, history and human cruelty, and a demonstration of what the novel can structurally achieve.
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293
Flesh
Following one Hungarian-British man — István — from his teenage years on a Budapest housing estate through decades of life in the economic shadow of London's super-rich, Szalay's spare, propulsive novel tracks a man who is emotionally detached yet persistently unravelled by events beyond his control. Winner of the Booker Prize 2025.
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294
The Story of a New Name
The second of the Neapolitan novels follows Elena and Lila into early adulthood — through Lila's catastrophic marriage, Elena's escape to university in Pisa, and the complicated attraction and rivalry that has always defined them. The novel expands the first book's world to encompass class, sex, politics and the specific violence of Naples in the 1960s.
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295
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay
The third Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the upheaval of the 1970s — Elena as a published novelist, Lila working in squalid factory conditions. Ferrante's novel is about how people escape poverty and what they give up in the process — and about whether the one who leaves can ever truly leave.
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296
My Struggle Book 1
Knausgård spent six years writing six volumes of minute, unsparing autobiography — covering his childhood in Norway, his difficult relationship with his alcoholic father, his family life and creative struggle. The first volume ranges across time and registers, introducing the obsessive intimacy and formal ambition that makes My Struggle one of the defining literary projects of recent decades.
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297
Orbital
Six astronauts orbit Earth every ninety minutes, watching sixteen sunrises a day, as storms and fires rage below and one crew member waits for news of her dying mother. Harvey's Booker Prize-winning novella asks what it means to look at the Earth from outside it — and whether distance creates clarity or only the illusion of it.
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298
James
A radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — rechristened James — who is far more intelligent, self-aware and morally complex than Twain's narrator allows him to be. Everett's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating, often darkly funny examination of race, freedom and the authorship of American stories.
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299
Circe
Circe, daughter of Helios, discovers she has the power to transform men into animals — and must navigate a world of gods, monsters and heroes while finding what she actually is. Miller's novel recasts a figure from the Odyssey as the protagonist of her own story, questioning what power means for a woman the ancient world considered marginal.
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300
The Song of Achilles
Patroclus, a young Greek prince, is exiled to the court of Peleus where he meets the brilliant, gold-haired Achilles. Their childhood friendship becomes love; their love leads to Troy. Miller's retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus is one of the most beloved retellings of classical myth in recent years.
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301
Transit
The second Outline novel follows the narrator Faye through a home renovation, a literary festival and a series of conversations that continue to define her through absence. More overtly connected to a recognisable London life than Outline, Transit extends the trilogy's investigation of identity, change and the stories other people tell us about ourselves.
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302
The Lost Child
The fourth and final Neapolitan novel follows Elena and Lila through the 1970s, 80s and 90s — careers, marriages, children and political upheaval — to a devastating ending that reframes the whole series. Ferrante's conclusion asks whether any escape from Naples was ever truly made, and what the brilliant friendship cost both women.
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303
The Marriage Portrait
Lucrezia de' Medici, married at fifteen to Alfonso II of Ferrara, becomes convinced that her husband is planning to kill her. O'Farrell's novel is based on the real woman who may have been the subject of Browning's 'My Last Duchess', and asks what it meant to be a young woman of extraordinary ability given in marriage to a powerful man who required her compliance.
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304
The Things They Carried
A linked collection of stories about a fictional platoon of US soldiers during the Vietnam War — and about the narrator, also called Tim O'Brien, who mediates between the literal and the told story. O'Brien's most celebrated work asks what it means to tell true war stories and whether 'happening-truth' and 'story-truth' are ever the same thing.
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305
The Joy Luck Club
Four Chinese women who emigrated to America after World War II and their American-born daughters explore their relationships through sixteen interconnected stories — told alternately from each generation's perspective. Tan's debut novel is about the gap between cultures and between generations, and the weight of the stories mothers and daughters cannot tell each other.
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306
Trust
Four separate texts — a novel, a memoir, a manuscript and a diary — together tell the story of a 1920s New York financier and his wife, each contradicting or qualifying the others. Diaz's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks who controls the narrative of a life — and what is erased in the process.
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307
Sing Unburied Sing
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister and their mother Leonie make a journey across Mississippi to collect Leonie's partner from prison, accompanied by the ghost of a boy who died in Parchman Farm decades earlier. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel weaves together the living and the dead in a meditation on race, grief and the specific inheritance of the American South.
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308
Let the Great World Spin
In 1974, Philippe Petit walks a tightrope between the Twin Towers — and the same day touches the lives of a dozen strangers across New York. McCann's National Book Award-winning novel is a formal experiment in interconnection, asking what it means to share a city and a moment in history with people whose lives will never touch.
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309
Days Without End
Thomas McNulty, an Irish immigrant in 1850s America, enlists with the US Army and serves through the Indian Wars and the Civil War — surviving through his love for his fellow soldier John Cole. Barry's National Book Award winner is a novel of extraordinary beauty about violence, tenderness and the survival of love in inhospitable places.
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310
In the Distance
A young Swedish boy travels from his homeland to the American West but ends up in California instead of New York, and spends decades moving east through the frontier, searching for his brother. Diaz's debut is a spare, elegant deconstruction of the Western, told by a giant of a man who is always the outsider everywhere he goes.
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311
Giovanni's Room
An American man in Paris, engaged to a woman, falls in love with an Italian bartender named Giovanni and cannot bring himself to acknowledge what this means. Baldwin's second novel is set almost entirely among white Europeans and is one of the earliest and most searching explorations of gay love and self-deception in American fiction.
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312
Homegoing
Beginning in 18th-century Ghana with two half-sisters — one who marries a British coloniser and one who is sold into slavery — the novel follows each family's lineage for seven generations, to the present day. Gyasi's debut traces slavery's long reach across history and two continents in a formally ambitious generational saga.
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313
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar is an overweight Dominican-American geek who wants to find love and write fantasy novels; his narrator Yunior tells the story of Oscar's doomed family across three generations and between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, weaving together science fiction, Dominican history and the violence of the Trujillo dictatorship. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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314
We Need New Names
Darling grows up in Paradise, a Zimbabwean shantytown, stealing guavas and playing games with her friends, before being sent to live with her aunt in America. Bulawayo's debut novel follows Darling's immigration and assimilation — and her growing understanding of what she carried and what she left behind.
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315
Wise Blood
Hazel Motes returns from the war to Tennessee determined to found the Church Without Christ — a religion without need of redemption. O'Connor's first novel is grotesque, violent and relentlessly theological: a black comedy about someone who resists grace so hard that grace comes for him in the most brutal possible way.
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316
The Alchemist
An Andalusian shepherd boy named Santiago travels from Spain to Egypt following a dream of treasure, guided by the concept of a Personal Legend — the path one is meant to take. Coelho's spiritual parable has sold over 150 million copies and is one of the most-read books in history, presenting a philosophy of destiny, signs and the courage to follow one's heart.
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317
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Miss Jean Brodie, an Edinburgh schoolteacher in the 1930s, selects a group of pupils as the 'crème de la crème' and devotes herself to shaping them — educating them in her own aesthetic and political enthusiasms, including her admiration for Mussolini. Spark's acerbic, perfectly crafted novel asks about the ethics of influence, the relationship between charisma and fascism, and who ultimately betrays whom.
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318
The Quiet American
Thomas Fowler, a jaded British journalist in 1950s Vietnam, watches as the idealistic young American Alden Pyle intervenes in the conflict with disastrous results. Greene's prescient novel about American intervention in Asia asks what damage is done by those who believe they are helping — and whether Fowler's cynicism is any more moral than Pyle's innocence.
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319
The Sense of an Ending
Tony Webster remembers his school friendship with the brilliant Adrian Finn and the relationship they both had with a girl named Veronica — and discovers decades later that his memory of these events is dangerously self-serving. Barnes's Man Booker-winning novella is a study in the gap between how we remember our lives and what we actually did.
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320
Nights at the Circus
Sophie Fevvers, a trapeze artist who claims to have been hatched from an egg and to possess actual wings, captivates American journalist Jack Walser, who follows her from London to St Petersburg to Siberia trying to determine if she is genuine. Carter's carnivalesque novel is both a riotous adventure and a feminist meditation on spectacle, self-creation and what it means for a woman to own her own myth.
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321
Purple Hibiscus
Fifteen-year-old Kambili's father Eugene Achike is publicly revered in Nigeria for his democratic values and privately tyrannical at home — enforcing religious fundamentalism through violence. Adichie's debut novel is about the specific damage of sacred hypocrisy, the silence it imposes on those who love the perpetrator, and what it takes for a young woman to find her voice.
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322
We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre. Told entirely from Eva's perspective — and therefore unreliable in the most interesting ways — Shriver's novel asks whether some people are born evil, whether Eva failed Kevin, or whether she is simply unable to love him because she always knew what he was.
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323
Trainspotting
A group of young heroin addicts in 1980s Edinburgh navigate addiction, friendship, violence and the occasional moment of transcendence. Told in Scottish vernacular dialect across multiple narrators, Trainspotting is both a formally radical novel and one of the most visceral portraits of the underclass since Zola.
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324
Possession
Two literary scholars — Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey — discover a cache of letters between two Victorian poets and gradually realise that the poets had a secret passionate affair. Byatt's novel interweaves the present-day scholarly detective story with poems, letters and fairy tales in the voices of the Victorian characters. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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325
Brick Lane
Nazneen arrives in London from Bangladesh at eighteen for an arranged marriage, spending years in a Tower Hamlets flat while her husband Chanu plans a return to Bangladesh that never comes. Through her relationship with a younger man and the political upheavals around her, Nazneen slowly discovers what she actually wants. Ali's debut was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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326
The Line of Beauty
Nick Guest, a young gay man from a modest background, moves into the Notting Hill home of his Oxford friend Toby Fedden, whose father is a Tory MP. The novel follows Nick across three pivotal years in 1980s Thatcher Britain — through parties, affairs, AIDS and the inevitable end of his borrowed life. Winner of the Booker Prize.
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327
Alias Grace
In 1843, Grace Marks — a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant — was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper in Upper Canada. A young psychiatrist, assigned to assess her, tries to reconstruct what actually happened. Atwood's novel examines how stories about women — their bodies, their madness, their guilt — are constructed and what they conceal.
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328
Enduring Love
Joe Rose and his partner Clarissa are enjoying a picnic when they witness a hot air balloon accident. In the aftermath, Joe is targeted by another witness — Jed Parry — who becomes obsessively convinced they share a bond. McEwan's novel pits scientific rationalism against faith, reason against obsession, and asks what happens when no one believes you about a real threat.
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329
The Sea
Max Morden, a recently widowed art historian, returns to the Irish seaside resort where he spent a childhood summer — and where something happened to a family called the Graces that he has spent his adult life trying not to remember. Banville's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves between past and present in prose of exceptional, almost painful beauty.
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330
Room
Five-year-old Jack has spent his entire life in an eleven-foot-square room with his mother, who was kidnapped seven years earlier. His joyful, narrow perspective narrates their life in captivity and, eventually, their escape. Donoghue's Booker-shortlisted novel asks what it means to love someone completely within an impossible situation.
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331
Fingersmith
Sue Trinder, a London pickpocket, is hired to play a lady's maid to an heiress named Maud Lilly, assisting a conman who plans to steal her inheritance. The plot turns on itself twice in ways that completely reframe everything that came before. Waters's Victorian thriller is also a novel about female desire and the institutions that punish it.
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332
The Gathering
Veronica Hegarty assembles her family for the funeral of her brother Liam, who has drowned himself, and finds herself trying to reconstruct the truth of what happened to Liam in their grandmother's house when they were children. Enright's Booker Prize-winning novel is about family memory, silence, and the specifically Irish relationship to shame.
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333
Brokeback Mountain
Two young Wyoming ranch hands — Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist — herd sheep one summer on Brokeback Mountain and begin a sexual and emotional relationship that neither can acknowledge or abandon, meeting intermittently across two decades in a world that gives them no space for what they are to each other. Proulx's short story is one of the most celebrated pieces of American fiction of the late 20th century.
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334
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
In 1930s New York, Josef Kavalier — a Czech Jewish refugee with an escape artist's training — and his cousin Sammy Clay create a superhero comic called The Escapist. Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about escape in every sense: from Prague, from poverty, from the closet, from death, and finally from the stories we tell about ourselves.
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335
My Name Is Red
In 16th-century Istanbul, an illustrator is murdered — and the miniaturists in the Sultan's atelier must discover which of their number committed the crime while navigating the debate between Eastern and Western styles of representation. Pamuk's Booker International-shortlisted novel is both a detective story and a meditation on artistic identity, tradition and the politics of seeing. He won the Nobel Prize in 2006.
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336
The End of the Affair
Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, has an intense affair with the wife of a civil servant that ends mysteriously — without explanation — in wartime London. Years later, obsession and jealousy drive him to discover why. Greene's most personal novel is about love, hate and the possibility of religious faith arriving through the most unexpected door.
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337
The Subtle Knife
The second volume of His Dark Materials introduces Will Parry, a boy from our world, and the Subtle Knife — a blade that can cut between worlds. Will and Lyra meet in the city of Cittàgazze and begin to understand the full scale of what they are caught in. Pullman develops the trilogy's theological argument and its critique of authoritarian certainty.
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338
The Amber Spyglass
The final volume of His Dark Materials brings Lyra and Will to the land of the dead while their parents and allies fight to determine the fate of consciousness itself. Pullman completes his rewriting of Paradise Lost, making Lyra's choice — and its cost — the theological and emotional climax of the trilogy. Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year.
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339
Sula
Nel Wright and Sula Peace grow up together in the Bottom, a Black community above the Ohio Valley town of Medallion, and their friendship is the novel's structuring force. Sula rejects conventional life; Nel conforms. Morrison's second novel asks whether a woman who refuses to be a good woman is therefore evil — and who gets to make this judgment.
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340
Lincoln in the Bardo
Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery where his son Willie has just been buried, and the novel unfolds through the voices of the ghosts inhabiting the bardo — the intermediate state between death and whatever comes next — as they witness Lincoln's grief and try to help Willie move on. Saunders's Man Booker-winning debut novel is formally unlike anything else.
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341
The Sea the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a famous theatre director, retires to a remote cottage by the sea to write his memoirs — and encounters his first love, whom he still believes is imprisoned by a bad marriage. Murdoch's Booker Prize-winning novel is about obsession, self-deception and the stories we tell about our own past.
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342
Kudos
The final volume of the Outline trilogy follows the narrator Faye through a literary festival, interviews and conversations — as always defined only by what others tell her and by what she chooses not to say. Cusk brings the trilogy to a formally restrained close that is also its most overtly political installment.
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343
The Lightning Thief
Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson discovers he is the son of a Greek god and finds himself at Camp Half-Blood, a summer camp for demigods. When Zeus's lightning bolt is stolen, Percy must retrieve it to prevent a war between the Olympians. Riordan's novel introduces one of the most popular series in contemporary YA and middle-grade fiction, reanimating Greek mythology for a new generation.
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344
Wonder
Auggie Pullman, a ten-year-old boy with a facial difference, attends mainstream school for the first time after years of home education. Told through multiple perspectives — Auggie's, his sister's, his friends' — the novel asks what it takes to see past appearance and what kindness actually requires of ordinary people. One of the most widely assigned middle school novels in America.
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345
Small Island
Two couples — the Jamaican migrants Gilbert and Hortense, newly arrived in London in 1948, and the English couple Queenie and Bernard — share a house in the years after the Second World War. Levy's Orange Prize-winning novel asks what Britain promised the Windrush generation and what it actually gave them, exploring the gap between the coloniser's idea of England and its daily reality.
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346
The Buddha of Suburbia
Karim Amir — half-English, half-Indian — grows up in the South London suburbs in the 1970s and gradually makes his way into the worlds of theatre and popular culture. Kureishi's debut novel is both a coming-of-age story and a study in the specific experience of the child of South Asian immigrants in Thatcher-era Britain — what it means to be seen as perpetually foreign in the only country you know.
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347
Waterland
Tom Crick, a history teacher who is about to lose his job, tells his class the story of the Fens — the flat, watery landscape of East Anglia — and of the events of his own past that have shaped him. Swift's formally inventive novel interweaves personal history with natural history, asking what history is and whether it teaches anything.
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348
Paradise
Yusuf is taken by his merchant father as payment of a debt to the wealthy trader Uncle Aziz, and travels with him through East Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. Gurnah's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel draws on the Quranic story of the Garden of Eden and Joseph and his brothers, examining colonialism, slavery and the African world the European encounter destroyed.
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349
The Stone Diaries
Daisy Goodwill Flett narrates her own life — from birth in Manitoba in 1905 through to old age — in a biography that uses documents, letters, photographs and others' perspectives alongside Daisy's own unreliable account. Shields's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what a woman's life looks like when she tries to see it clearly.
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350
About a Boy
Will Freeman, a wealthy, commitment-phobic 36-year-old who has never grown up, begins attending a single parents' support group to meet women. He meets Marcus, an awkward twelve-year-old whose mother is depressed, and the two form an unlikely relationship that changes both of them. Hornby's novel is about maturity, responsibility and the unexpected routes to both.
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351
The Help
Skeeter Phelan, a white aspiring writer in 1960s Jackson, Mississippi, partners with two Black maids — Aibileen and Minny — to secretly publish a book of accounts from domestic workers. Stockett's debut novel was an enormous commercial success and is also one of the most debated novels about race, voice and the ethics of who tells whose story.
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352
Flights
A series of loosely connected narratives, fragments and reflections — some fiction, some essay, some travel writing — circling the themes of flight, the body, movement and what we leave behind. Tokarczuk's International Booker Prize and Nobel Prize-winning novel resists conventional form to create something that accumulates rather than argues.
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353
A Brief History of Seven Killings
The attempted assassination of Bob Marley in 1976 Jamaica radiates outward through decades and continents, told through more than seventy voices — gang members, CIA operatives, journalists, ghosts. James's Booker Prize-winning novel is enormous in ambition and in length, capturing the chaos and violence of a specific political moment through an extraordinary polyphony.
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354
A Visit from the Goon Squad
Music executive Bennie Salazar and his assistant Sasha are at the centre of a set of stories spanning decades and shifting perspectives, formal registers and even one chapter written as a PowerPoint presentation. Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel asks what time does to people, to music and to the stories we tell about both.
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355
Breathing Lessons
Maggie and Ira Moran drive to a friend's funeral and back across a single day, the journey surfacing forty years of marriage, compromise and what each has given up and kept. Tyler's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on the ordinary marriage as the site of everything — love, resentment, disappointment and the kind of durable intimacy that asks no great questions.
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356
The Vanishing Half
Twin sisters Desiree and Stella Vignes run away from their small Southern Black community at sixteen — and their lives split: one returns home with her dark-skinned daughter, the other passes as white in a life her family knows nothing about. Bennett's novel spans generations to ask what race is, what it costs to perform an identity, and what is owed to the people you leave behind.
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357
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye, an ordinary Seoul housewife, stops eating meat after a violent dream — and her quiet refusal escalates into a total rejection of human violence that her family answers with force. Told in three sections by three different narrators, none of them Yeong-hye, Han Kang's International Booker Prize-winning novel is about the violence done to a woman who simply says no. Han won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
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358
Convenience Store Woman
Keiko Furukura has worked in the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years — and she is happy, having found in the store's routines and scripts a way of performing humanity that society otherwise denies her. Murata's short novel is a deadpan, unsettling comedy about conformity, the pressure to marry and reproduce, and what counts as a normal life.
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359
Fourth Wing
Violet Sorrengail, trained for the scribe's quiet life, is forced by her commanding-general mother into the brutal dragon riders' college at Basgiath, where cadets die routinely and her physical frailty makes her a target. Yarros's romantasy phenomenon — dragons, deadly trials and an enemies-to-lovers romance — defined the genre's mainstream breakout and sold millions through BookTok.
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360
A Court of Thorns and Roses
When huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast claims her life as forfeit and drags her to the faerie lands of Prythian — where her captor Tamlin is more than he appears and an ancient blight threatens both worlds. Maas's Beauty and the Beast retelling launched the bestselling romantasy series of its era.
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361
Small Things Like These
In the weeks before Christmas 1985, coal merchant Bill Furlong makes a delivery to the local convent in a small Irish town and discovers something that forces him to choose between his community's complicit silence and his own conscience. Keegan's miniature masterpiece about the Magdalene laundries is one of the shortest novels ever shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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362
The Covenant of Water
In Kerala, South India, a family is afflicted across three generations by a peculiar condition — in every generation, someone dies by drowning. Spanning 1900 to 1977, Verghese's saga interweaves medicine, faith, caste and the extraordinary changes of 20th-century India. An Oprah's Book Club selection and one of the most-read literary novels of its year.
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363
Human Acts
The Gwangju Uprising of 1980 — when South Korean paratroopers massacred pro-democracy protesters — is told through seven perspectives, living and dead, across different years. Han Kang's formally radical novel asks how a community survives the memory of mass violence — and whether the survivors have any obligation to the dead. Han won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
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364
Kim Jiyoung Born 1982
Kim Jiyoung is a 33-year-old South Korean woman who has quit her job to raise her daughter. Her psychiatrist's clinical account of her life, told in the third person, is a systemic record of everything Korean society required of a woman from birth — the sexism at school, at work, in marriage, from strangers. Published in Korea in 2016, it became a global feminist phenomenon.
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365
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Harold Fry, a retired man, sets out to post a letter to a dying old friend and decides instead to walk the 500 miles to visit her, convinced that his walking will keep her alive. Joyce's debut novel is about grief, guilt, the marriages we construct and the pilgrimages we take — alone — to find something we lost long before we started walking.
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366
The Reader
Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg in postwar Germany has an affair with Hanna Schmitz, a tram conductor twenty years his senior, who asks him to read aloud to her. Years later he discovers her in a war crimes trial, and realises what the reading meant and what she was hiding. Schlink's novella is one of the most read and most debated books about German guilt, literacy and the generation born after the Holocaust.
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367
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Toru Okada, a Tokyo man between jobs, searches for his missing cat — and finds himself drawn into increasingly strange events involving a dry well, the Manchurian campaigns of WWII, and his wife's disappearance. Murakami's most ambitious novel moves between domestic suburban Japan and wartime history in a meditation on violence, passivity and the hidden life of things.
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368
Suite Francaise
Written between 1940 and 1942 while Némirovsky was in hiding from the Nazis — she died in Auschwitz in 1942 — Suite Française consists of two novellas about the fall of France: one following Parisians fleeing the German advance, one set in a village under occupation. Published sixty years after her death from a manuscript her daughter carried across Europe without reading.
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369
Young Mungo
Mungo Hamilton, a sensitive sixteen-year-old in 1990s Glasgow, is in love with James, a Catholic boy from across the sectarian divide. His mother, dealing with addiction, sends him away on a fishing trip with two strangers whose presence becomes increasingly threatening. Stuart's second novel returns to the world of Shuggie Bain — Glasgow poverty, damaged masculinity — while extending his emotional range.
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370
Bridget Jones Diary
Bridget Jones, a thirty-something London singleton, keeps a diary of her calories, cigarettes, alcohol units and disastrous romantic encounters, including her boss Daniel Cleaver and the aloof Mark Darcy. Fielding's novel — a deliberate Austen retelling set in 1990s London — defined a new comedy of manners and spawned a cultural phenomenon that changed how women's commercial fiction was published and discussed.
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371
The Ministry for the Future
In the near future, a new UN body — the Ministry for the Future — attempts to address the climate crisis through financial engineering, geoengineering, political pressure and occasional violence. Robinson's novel is structured as a series of chapters in radically different forms — news reports, speeches, interior monologues — making the case that the systems causing climate change can only be dismantled by the same forces that built them.
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372
1Q84
In 1984 Tokyo, a fitness instructor named Aomame and a novelist's ghostwriter named Tengo find their lives converging toward an alternate version of the world — a 1Q84 where two moons hang in the sky and mysterious forces called the Little People shape reality. Murakami's most ambitious novel since The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is a love story set at the intersection of cult religion, magical realism and alternate history.
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373
The House on Mango Street
Esperanza Cordero, a young Chicana girl, narrates her life in a Chicago barrio through a series of vignettes — lyrical, spare and exact — about her neighbourhood, her family and her growing awareness of what she will need to do to escape while also honouring where she came from. One of the most widely assigned texts in American schools for its exploration of identity, belonging and aspiration.
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374
In the Time of the Butterflies
The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva and María Teresa — are heroines of the Dominican resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship. Three were murdered on Trujillo's orders in 1960; Dedé survived to remember them. Alvarez's novel imagines their inner lives from childhood through to the assassination, telling the story of how ordinary women become revolutionaries.
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375
Waiting
Lin Kong, an army doctor in rural China, waits eighteen years for the bureaucratic permission to divorce his village wife Shuyu and marry his beloved Manna Wu — trapped between two women, two worlds and a system that controls every dimension of private life. Ha Jin's National Book Award-winning novel is a study in patience, repression and the cost of choices deferred across decades.
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376
Breath Eyes Memory
Sophie Caco grows up with her aunt in Haiti before being sent to New York to join the mother she barely knows — a woman whose trauma is transmitted to her daughter in ways Sophie spends the novel trying to understand and survive. Danticat's debut is about the specific legacy of sexual violence, the bond between mothers and daughters, and what it means to carry your country in your body.
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377
Austerlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, begins to recover the buried memory of his own identity — he was brought to England as a child on the Kindertransport and never knew his origins. Sebald's narrator encounters him across forty years of chance meetings. The novel weaves together architecture, memory and the slow emergence of a traumatic history in prose saturated with photographs.
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378
November 9
On the day Fallon is moving from Los Angeles to New York, she meets Ben in a restaurant — and they agree to meet every November 9th for five years, with no contact in between, to see if what they feel survives the distance and the passage of time. Hoover's novel about love, fate and the stories people tell themselves is one of her most structurally inventive.
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379
The Shipping News
Quoyle, a failed journalist in upstate New York, takes his two daughters to the remote Newfoundland coast where his family originated after his wife's death. Working for the local newspaper covering the shipping news, he slowly assembles a life from its wreckage. Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about renewal in a harsh landscape and the community that makes it possible.
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380
The Human Stain
Coleman Silk, a classics professor, is forced to resign after a remark interpreted as racist — a remark that conceals a secret about his own identity he has kept for fifty years. The third of Roth's American Trilogy, it is set in the summer of the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and asks what America does with its private truths.
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381
The World According to Garp
T.S. Garp, the illegitimate son of a feminist icon who never wanted a husband, grows up in New England schools, becomes a novelist, and navigates a life of extraordinary personal loss. Irving's breakthrough novel is about accidents, violence, family and the bizarre randomness of fate — and it established the large, comic, tragic American novel as Irving's form.
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382
On Beauty
Two academic families — one liberal white British, one conservative Black American — are connected by a long professional rivalry, their children's entanglements and a painting that both men want to own. Smith's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is a deliberate retelling of E.M. Forster's Howards End set in a New England college town.
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383
MaddAddam
The third volume of Atwood's Oryx and Crake trilogy brings together the survivors of the biotech apocalypse — the Crakers, Toby, Zeb, Amanda and others — as they try to build a new world while the last of the old-world threats closes in. Atwood completes her argument about biotechnology, corporate power and what comes after the human.
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384
The Sellout
A young Black farmer in a fictional suburb of Los Angeles is taken to the Supreme Court for reinstating slavery and segregation in his town — and somehow his actions have made his community happier. Beatty's Booker Prize-winning novel is a savage, absurdist satire of race in America that doesn't spare anyone: not the oppressors, not the activists, not the Supreme Court, not the narrator himself.
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385
Fates and Furies
The story of a marriage told twice: first through the husband Lotto's romantic, heroic account of his life as a playwright; then through his wife Mathilde's radically different account of the same events — the version she never shared, full of the things he chose not to see. Groff's novel was Barack Obama's favourite book of 2015 and a National Book Award finalist.
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386
The Night Watchman
Thomas Wazhashk, a night watchman on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in 1953, leads the fight against a congressional bill designed to terminate the tribe's legal status. Erdrich's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is based on her own grandfather's resistance to termination and is one of the defining works of Native American literature.
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387
The Bastard of Istanbul
Asya, a young Turkish woman, and Armanoush, an Armenian-American, discover that their families are connected through the Armenian genocide — a history that Turkey officially denies and Asya's family has suppressed. Shafak's novel was put on trial in Turkey under the law against insulting Turkishness and became a global symbol of literary freedom.
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388
Perfume
Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in 18th-century Paris without a body odour of his own, has the most extraordinary sense of smell in history. He devotes his life to creating the perfect perfume — through increasingly monstrous means. Süskind's philosophical thriller is a satire of genius, obsession and the aestheticisation of violence, set in a meticulously researched pre-revolutionary France.
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389
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
In a small Georgia mill town, a deaf-mute named John Singer becomes the unlikely confessor to a series of lonely people — a teenage girl, a Black doctor, an itinerant communist, a drunken café owner. McCullers's debut, written when she was twenty-two, is a meditation on isolation, the impossibility of communication and the American South on the eve of WWII.
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390
Foster
A young girl is sent to stay with relatives she barely knows for the summer while her mother has a baby. The Kinsellas' farm becomes a revelation of what a gentle, attentive household feels like — and the child slowly understands the loss it contains. Keegan's 89-page novella is formally perfect and devastatingly tender.
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391
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Janina Duszejko, an eccentric elderly woman who reads horoscopes and cares obsessively about animal welfare, finds herself drawn into a series of mysterious deaths among the hunters of her Polish village. Tokarczuk's eco-detective novel is also a polemic about the relationship between humans and animals, written with philosophical urgency and unexpected comedy.
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392
Salvage the Bones
The Batiste family in rural Mississippi — three brothers, a pregnant teenage girl — prepare for Hurricane Katrina in the week before it strikes. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel is told through Esch, the lone girl, who is pregnant and reading Medea. The hurricane, when it comes, is rendered with devastating intimacy.
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393
HHhH
The story of Operation Anthropoid — the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS, by Czech and Slovak resistance fighters in 1942 — is interrupted constantly by the narrator's self-questioning about the ethics and limitations of fictionalising real historical events. Binet's Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman winner is both a WWII thriller and a radical meditation on historical fiction.
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394
Prophet Song
In a near-future Ireland rapidly sliding into authoritarianism, Eilish Stack watches as her husband is taken by the secret police, her eldest son joins the resistance, and the state dismantles civil society with bureaucratic precision. Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel compresses an apocalypse into a family story, its long, breathless sentences enacting the panic of a world coming apart.
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395
Bel Canto
When terrorists seize a South American vice-president's mansion during a soprano's recital, they take dozens of hostages — and the weeks of captivity that follow become a strange, suspended world in which music, love and an unlikely community develop in the middle of a political crisis. Patchett's PEN/Faulkner winner is about beauty, connection and the life that forms in confinement.
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396
East of Eden
Two families — the Trasks and the Hamiltons — play out variations of the Cain and Abel story across generations in the Salinas Valley of California. Steinbeck's most ambitious novel is his explicit attempt to write the great American novel, weaving biblical myth, family saga and the philosophy of timshel — the Hebrew word that became his central argument about human freedom and choice.
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397
The Testament of Mary
Mary, the mother of Jesus, is old and living in Ephesus, watched over by two men who are compiling her son's story. Her testimony is bitter, frightened and devastatingly human — the account of a mother who was there and who remembers it differently from the story that is being written. Tóibín's novella is one of the most formally bold works of contemporary literary fiction.
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398
Sophie's Choice
Stingo, a young Southern writer in Brooklyn in 1947, becomes close to Sophie Zawistowski — a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz — and her brilliant, tormented lover Nathan. The novel builds to Sophie's terrible secret: the choice she was forced to make in the camp. Styron's National Book Award-winning novel is about guilt, survival and the American encounter with European atrocity.
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399
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Junior, a fourteen-year-old Spokane Indian growing up on the reservation, decides to transfer to the all-white school in the nearby town of Reardan — a decision that makes him feel he has abandoned his community while also opening a different future. Alexie's semi-autobiographical YA novel is one of the most challenged and most assigned books in American schools.
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400
Portnoy's Complaint
Alexander Portnoy delivers a monologue to his psychoanalyst about his Jewish Newark childhood, his overbearing mother, his obsessive sexuality and his inability to reconcile his desires with his identity. Roth's breakthrough novel is both a comedy of Jewish American identity and one of the most formally uninhibited novels ever published — and one of the most controversial on its appearance.
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401
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Owen Meany, a small boy with an unnaturally high voice who believes he is God's instrument, kills his best friend John's mother with a foul ball — and then reveals he has seen a vision of how and when he will die. Irving's most celebrated novel interweaves the Vietnam era, New Hampshire prep school life and a meditation on faith as something you are forced into, not chosen.
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402
Brooklyn
Eilis Lacey leaves Enniscorthy in County Wexford in the early 1950s for Brooklyn, where she builds a life, falls in love and becomes someone new — until a death brings her back to Ireland, and she has to choose between the life she has made and the life she left. Tóibín's novel is about emigration, identity and the terrible cost of not fully belonging anywhere.
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403
And the Mountains Echoed
A brother and sister are separated in 1950s Afghanistan — one sold by their impoverished father, one left behind — and the decision echoes through generations and continents. Hosseini's third novel is his most structurally ambitious: a multigenerational saga told through many voices, all connected by one act and its consequences.
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404
The Poisonwood Bible
Nathan Price, a Baptist minister consumed by guilt and religious fervour, moves his wife and four daughters from Georgia to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — and brings his certainties into a world that will destroy them. Told through the voices of the four daughters and their mother, Kingsolver's novel is about colonialism, religion and what it costs those who are forced to follow someone else's mission.
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405
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Francie Nolan grows up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 20th century — in a family defined by a charming, alcoholic father and a relentlessly practical mother, by poverty and by an extraordinary hunger for books and beauty. Smith's novel is one of the great American coming-of-age stories and a portrait of immigrant aspiration that never sentimentalises the struggle.
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406
The Satanic Verses
Two Indian actors survive a plane explosion over the English Channel by falling — and land transformed: one into a figure of divine radiance, one into something diabolical. Rushdie's novel is a meditation on identity, migration, good and evil, and the nature of revelation — and it became the most politically explosive novel of the 20th century.
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407
Redeployment
Fourteen stories about American soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — some combat veterans, some rear-echelon, some still in country. Klay's National Book Award-winning debut collection is one of the most clear-eyed accounts of what the Iraq War did to the people who fought it and to the civilians who didn't.
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408
Commonwealth
A stolen kiss at a California christening in 1964 begins the dismantling of two families whose children grow up intertwined across fifty years. Patchett's most personal novel traces what divorce does to children across generations — and how the story of a family becomes the story a novelist tells.
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409
Annie John
Annie John grows up in Antigua through childhood and adolescence, her intense relationship with her mother slowly shifting from adoration to estrangement. Kincaid's autobiographical novel is about female independence, colonialism's effect on the self, and the specific loss of leaving the island that formed you.
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410
An Officer and a Spy
The Dreyfus Affair — the wrongful conviction and imprisonment of Jewish French army officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason in 1894 — is told from the perspective of Colonel Georges Picquart, who discovers the cover-up and tries to expose it from within a hostile institution. Harris's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is both a spy thriller and a study in institutional injustice.
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411
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies
Nine stories about Black women and the Black church — their desires, their hypocrisies, their grace, their hidden lives. Philyaw's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning debut is a formally accomplished, deeply felt collection about what the church gives Black women and what it withholds from them.
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412
Chronicle of a Death Foretold
The whole town knows that Santiago Nasar is going to be murdered — including the men who will murder him — and yet no one prevents it. García Márquez's slim masterpiece tells the story backwards and sideways, as a reporter reconstructing the events that everyone knew were coming. A meditation on fate, honour culture and collective complicity.
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413
The Tin Drum
Oskar Matzerath, born in Danzig in 1924, decides at age three never to grow up and beats his tin drum obsessively, watching the rise of Nazism from below adult eye level. Grass's Booker Prize-winning novel is one of the 20th century's great satirical novels — grotesque, comic and devastating — told from the unreliable perspective of a wilfully stunted narrator.
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414
Blindness
A sudden epidemic of blindness strikes an unnamed city, and the infected are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum where social order rapidly collapses. Saramago's novel follows one woman — the only person who can see — through the catastrophe. It is both a philosophical fable about what civilisation actually requires and a viscerally disturbing account of what people do when structure disappears.
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415
The New York Trilogy
Three connected detective novels — City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room — in which the conventions of detective fiction are systematically dismantled: detectives lose their identities, the cases dissolve, the distinctions between investigator and subject collapse. Auster's debut fiction is a postmodern meditation on identity, language and the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty.
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416
Milkman
An eighteen-year-old woman in an unnamed city during 'the Troubles' is stalked by a much older paramilitary figure known only as 'the milkman' — and finds that resisting his attention makes her the subject of community gossip and suspicion. Burns's Booker Prize-winning novel, narrated by a woman known only as 'middle sister,' is written in a dense, looping, deliberately unnamed style that captures the paranoid texture of life under constant surveillance.
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417
The Promise
Three generations of a white South African family gather for funerals across four decades — 1986, 1996, 2004 and 2018 — and a promise made by the dying matriarch to leave a small house to the family's Black servant, Salome, remains unfulfilled at each one. Galgut's Booker Prize-winning novel is a portrait of South Africa from apartheid to the present, told through a family's accumulating broken promises.
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418
Less
Arthur Less, a minor novelist about to turn fifty, accepts a series of literary invitations around the world to avoid attending his ex-boyfriend's wedding — and finds himself, almost despite his own bumbling, on a journey toward something like self-acceptance. Greer's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a comic, tender portrait of an unsuccessful writer who turns out to be the hero of his own story after all.
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419
Babel
Robin Swift, taken from Canton to Oxford to study at the Royal Institute of Translation — Babel — discovers that the British Empire's power runs on magical silver activated by translation, and that his education is inseparable from the empire's exploitation of the languages and people it has colonised. Kuang's novel is a dark academia fantasy that is also a sustained argument about language, colonialism and the violence embedded in empire.
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420
Home Fire
Isma, Aneeka and Parvaiz Pasha are the British children of a jihadist father; when Parvaiz is recruited to ISIS, his sister Aneeka's relationship with the son of the Home Secretary becomes a test of loyalty, love and the limits of the state. Shamsie's Women's Prize-winning novel is a contemporary retelling of Sophocles' Antigone, asking what a sister owes a brother the state has declared an enemy.
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421
An American Marriage
Roy and Celestial are newly married when Roy is wrongfully convicted and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. The novel follows both of them — and Celestial's childhood friend Andre — through the twelve years of Roy's sentence and what happens when he is released. Jones's novel, an Oprah's Book Club selection and Women's Prize winner, is about love, loyalty and what the carceral system does to relationships.
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422
Angel Down
During the First World War, soldiers in No Man's Land discover a fallen angel among the dead. Kraus's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — written entirely as a single unbroken sentence — blends war narrative, allegory, magical realism and science fiction into one continuous breath, an extraordinary formal experiment applied to the horror of trench warfare.
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423
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Maali Almeida — a war photographer, gambler and closeted gay man — wakes up dead in a celestial visa office in 1990 Colombo, with seven moons to discover who killed him and to retrieve photographs that could end Sri Lanka's civil war. Karunatilaka's Booker Prize-winning novel uses ghosts, bureaucratic afterlife and dark comedy to confront the atrocities of Sri Lanka's conflict.
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424
The Netanyahus
In 1959-60, a historian at a small upstate New York college hosts a visiting lecturer named Benzion Netanyahu — whose family, including his teenage son Benjamin, descends on the campus in chaos. Cohen's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a satirical campus novel that is also a meditation on Jewish American identity, Zionism and a strange footnote of real history.
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425
Night Watch
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a mother and daughter arrive at a West Virginia asylum, and the novel moves between their story and the war years that brought them there. Phillips's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about trauma, memory and the institutions that both housed and concealed the war's psychological wounds.
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426
The Book of Form and Emptiness
After his father's death, thirteen-year-old Benny begins hearing voices from objects around him — and finds refuge in the public library, where a mysterious book seems to be narrating his own life. Ozeki's Women's Prize-winning novel is about grief, mental health, consumerism and the objects that accumulate around loss.
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427
Trust Exercise
Students at a competitive performing arts high school in the 1980s fall in love, betray each other and are shaped by a charismatic drama teacher — and then the novel restarts, reframing everything from a different perspective, and again. Choi's National Book Award-winning novel is a formally audacious examination of memory, narrative authority and who gets to tell the story of what happened.
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428
The Rabbit Hutch
In a crumbling apartment complex in a Rust Belt city, a group of residents — including eighteen-year-old Blandine, fresh out of the foster care system and obsessed with medieval mystics — converge toward a single shocking night. Gunty's National Book Award-winning debut is a portrait of American decline rendered with formal inventiveness and unexpected tenderness.
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429
Celestial Bodies
Three sisters in a changing Omani village — Mayya, Asma and Khawla — navigate marriage, love and loss across a society moving from a world of slavery and tribal custom to modernity. Alharthi's International Booker Prize-winning novel was the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the prize, and the first by an Omani woman to be translated into English.
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430
Kairos
In late-1980s East Berlin, a young woman begins a relationship with an older, married writer — an affair that becomes a mirror for the slow-motion collapse of East Germany itself. Erpenbeck's International Booker Prize-winning novel is about love, control and the way personal and political history become inseparable when a state ends.
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431
Merci Suarez Changes Gears
Merci Suárez, a scholarship student at a Florida private school, navigates middle school social dynamics, a strained friendship, and her beloved grandfather's increasingly worrying memory lapses. Medina's Newbery Medal-winning novel is a warm, specific portrait of a Cuban-American family and the particular pressures of being the kid who doesn't quite fit at a wealthy school.
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432
New Kid
Jordan Banks, a Black seventh-grader who would rather draw cartoons than attend a prestigious mostly-white private school, navigates the daily friction of being one of the few kids of colour in his class. Craft's graphic novel won the Newbery Medal — the first graphic novel to do so — for its honest, funny depiction of code-switching and microaggressions.
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433
The Poet X
Xiomara Batista, a Dominican-American teenager in Harlem, channels her anger, faith and desire into a notebook of poems she's afraid to share — until a school slam poetry club gives her a place to perform. Acevedo's novel-in-verse won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, the Carnegie Medal and the Printz Award — a rare triple.
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434
The Only Good Indians
Ten years after four young Blackfeet men do something they shouldn't have during an elk hunt, something is coming for them — and for the families and communities around them. Jones's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is a horror story rooted in Indigenous experience, generational trauma and the specific landscape of the Blackfeet reservation.
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435
Interior Chinatown
Willis Wu, an actor perpetually cast as 'Generic Asian Man' in a police procedural filmed in his own neighbourhood, lives his life as if it were a screenplay — formatted as a script, complete with stage directions. Yu's National Book Award-winning novel is a satire of Hollywood's treatment of Asian Americans that becomes something much stranger and sadder as it develops.
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436
The Safekeep
In 1961 in the rural Netherlands, Isabel lives alone in the house she inherited, suspicious of everyone — until her brother's girlfriend Eva comes to stay, and Isabel's careful, controlled life begins to unravel as she discovers what the house actually conceals about the war years. Van der Wouden's Women's Prize-winning debut is a slow-burn novel about desire, guilt and the things postwar Europe chose not to remember.
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437
Brotherless Night
Sashi, a sixteen-year-old in Jaffna in 1981, dreams of becoming a doctor — and watches her brothers, one by one, drawn into the Tamil militant movement as Sri Lanka descends into civil war. Ganeshananthan's novel is about the impossible choices available to women in a community torn apart by violence from every direction — the state, the militants, and the war itself.
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438
The Book of Goose
Two girls in postwar rural France collaborate on a book of brutal, brilliant stories that becomes a literary sensation — credited to only one of them. Decades later, the other reflects on what their friendship and their fraud cost each of them. Li's PEN/Faulkner-shortlisted novel is about authorship, female friendship and the specific violence of being used by someone you love.
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439
Blackouts
A young man visits a dying mentor, Juan Gay, in a strange desert hotel, and the two trade stories — including the suppressed history of a real 1941 study of queer life that Juan has spent years annotating and erasing. Torres's National Book Award-winning novel is formally experimental, blending fiction, history and visual material into a meditation on queer erasure and recovery.
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440
When You Trap a Tiger
Lily moves with her family to live with her dying grandmother, and discovers that the magical tiger from her grandmother's Korean folktales may be real — and that returning what it stole could heal her family. Keller's Newbery Medal-winning novel blends Korean folklore with a contemporary story about grief, identity and the stories families pass down.
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441
Spinning Silver
Miryem, a moneylender's daughter, finds she can turn silver into gold — a gift that draws the attention of the Staryk, cold fae lords from a world of ice and silver, and binds her to one of them in marriage. Novik's Locus Award-winning fantasy, loosely inspired by Rumpelstiltskin, weaves together three women's stories of bargains, debts and the price of survival in a world where every transaction has consequences.
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442
Witch King
Kai, a demon who has been imprisoned and left for dead, wakes to find years have passed and the world he knew has changed — and sets out with his allies to discover who betrayed him and why. Wells's Locus Award-winning standalone fantasy moves between past and present to tell a story of magic, politics and friendship in a richly imagined world built on systems of power that aren't human-centred.
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443
Nettle and Bone
Marra, a princess who became a nun to avoid the political marriages used to control her sisters, sets out on an impossible quest — build a dog from bones, weave a cloak of nettles, capture moonlight in a jar — to kill the prince who is destroying her family. Kingfisher's Hugo Award-winning fairy-tale novel is darkly funny, genuinely frightening in places, and centres on women too old, too plain or too unimportant for most fairy tales to notice.
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444
Small Rain
A poet experiences a sudden, excruciating pain that leads to a hospitalisation for a rare cardiac emergency, and the days that follow — confined to an ICU during the pandemic — become an extended meditation on the body, illness, love and what matters when survival itself is uncertain. Greenwell's PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel is an intensely interior account of crisis, told with extraordinary precision about pain, fear and tenderness.
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445
The Long Take
Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, drifts through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the years after the Second World War, unable to return home, haunted by what he saw and did in Normandy. Robertson's Walter Scott Prize-winning work — part novel, part book-length poem — captures postwar American cities being demolished for freeways while a generation of traumatised veterans disappear into them.
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446
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free
After the Battle of Corunna in 1809, a British officer suffering what would now be called PTSD deserts and flees to the Hebrides — pursued by two men sent to bring him back for an act committed during the retreat that he cannot face remembering. Miller's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is a pursuit narrative and a study of war's psychological wounds, set against the Scottish landscape's vast indifference.
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447
Look Both Ways
Ten interconnected stories follow different groups of kids walking home from the same middle school on the same afternoon — each story a small world of its own, each connected to the others by the walk itself. Reynolds's Carnegie Medal-winning collection captures the texture of childhood and adolescence with warmth, humour and unexpected depth.
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448
The Eyes and the Impossible
Johannes, a free dog living in a vast urban park, runs faster than any other animal and serves as the Eyes for the park's ancient Bison overlords — observing everything that happens within the park's walls. Eggers's Newbery Medal-winning novel is a fable about freedom, observation and the walls that separate the wild from the managed, narrated by a dog who has never known anything but the park.
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449
The First State of Being
In the summer of 1999, twelve-year-old Michael, anxious about Y2K and obsessed with survival preparation, encounters a boy who has time-travelled from the future — and the encounter changes how Michael understands time, fear and what actually matters. Kelly's Newbery Medal-winning novel is about anxiety, friendship and the strange comfort of knowing the future doesn't end the way you fear.
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450
Freewater
Twelve-year-old Homer escapes a Virginia plantation with his sister and finds Freewater, a hidden community of formerly enslaved people living in the Great Dismal Swamp — a real historical phenomenon largely absent from American children's literature. Luqman-Dawson's Newbery Medal-winning novel is based on the real maroon communities that existed in the swamp for generations.
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451
The Reformatory
In 1950s Florida, twelve-year-old Robert is sent to a brutal reform school for boys after a single act of defiance — and discovers the school is haunted by the ghosts of boys who died there, killed by the staff and buried in unmarked graves. Due's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is based on the real history of the Dozier School for Boys, using horror to confront a genuinely buried atrocity in American history.
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452
The Devil Takes You Home
A man facing his daughter's terminal illness and crushing medical debt takes a job as a hitman for a cartel — and the job spirals into something far more dangerous and supernatural than he anticipated. Iglesias's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel blends noir, horror and Latino working-class desperation in prose that switches between English and Spanish.
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453
Someone You Can Build a Nest In
Shesheshen, a shapeshifting monster who has lived in a ruined keep for centuries, falls in love with Homily, the woman sent by a group of monster-hunters to kill her — and must navigate romance while hiding what she really is. Wiswell's Nebula Award-winning novel is a horror-romance that takes its monster's perspective entirely seriously, asking what love looks like when one partner literally cannot show their true self.
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454
These Days
Over four nights of the Belfast Blitz in April and May 1941, two sisters navigate love, ambition and survival as the city around them is destroyed by German bombing raids — a chapter of WWII history rarely covered in fiction. Caldwell's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel renders the Blitz from a specifically Northern Irish perspective, usually overshadowed by London's experience.
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455
Hungry Ghosts
In 1940s rural Trinidad, the disappearance of a wealthy landowner sets off a chain of events that exposes the brutal inequalities between a barracks of poor labourers and the estate that employs them. Hosein's Walter Scott Prize-winning novel is a richly textured portrait of colonial-era Trinidad's caste and class divisions, drawing on Hindu mythology and the island's specific historical layers.
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456
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line
Nine-year-old Jai, obsessed with true-crime television shows, decides to investigate when children begin disappearing from his Indian slum — using the detective techniques he's learned from TV to navigate a real mystery that adults around him seem unable or unwilling to solve. Anappara's Edgar Award-winning debut combines a child's voice and dark humour with a serious examination of poverty, religious tension and India's missing children crisis.
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457
The Mermaid of Black Conch
A mermaid, cursed decades earlier by jealous women, is caught by fishermen off a Caribbean island — and a local fisherman who frees her finds his life transformed by a connection that crosses the boundary between human and myth. Roffey's Costa Book of the Year-winning novel draws on Caribbean folklore to tell a story about love, transformation and what communities do with what they cannot categorise.
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458
Lark
Brothers Nicky and Kenny set out for a walk on the moors above their Yorkshire town — Kenny, who has Down syndrome, in his element among the wildlife he loves — when a sudden fog and a dog's escape turn an ordinary afternoon into a fight for survival. McGowan's Carnegie Medal-winning novella is the final book in the Truth of Things quartet, a devastatingly tender portrait of brotherly love and working-class life in northern England.
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459
October October
Ten-year-old October has spent her whole life living wild in the woods with her father — until an accident forces her to move to London to live with the mother she barely knows. Balen's Carnegie Medal-winning novel is about wildness, belonging and the different kinds of home a child can have, told in lyrical, nature-saturated prose.
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460
The Blue Book of Nebo
After a catastrophic event leaves the world without electricity, a mother and her teenage son survive in rural Wales, each keeping a journal — hers in the present, his looking back — that together reveal what happened and what they've kept from each other. Ros's Carnegie Medal-winning novel, originally written in Welsh, is a quiet, devastating post-apocalyptic story about survival, secrets and language itself.
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461
The Boy Lost in the Maze
A boy searching for his absent father is guided through a verse narrative that weaves in the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur — both stories about boys trying to find their way through labyrinths, literal and emotional. Coelho's Carnegie Medal-winning verse novel combines contemporary family experience with classical mythology.
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462
Jade Legacy
The concluding volume of the Green Bone Saga follows the Kaul family across decades as the magical jade trade that has defined their clan's power confronts a changing world — globalisation, new technology, and generational shifts that the old ways cannot survive unchanged. Lee's World Fantasy Award-winning novel completes an epic that has been compared to The Godfather for its multigenerational crime-family structure, set in a richly imagined magical East Asian-inspired world.
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463
Beach Read
Two rival writers swap genres for a summer; sharp, funny, surprisingly tender contemporary romance.
-
464
Like Water for Chocolate
A young woman pours her forbidden love into her cooking, with magical results; sensual and bittersweet.
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465
People We Meet on Vacation
Best friends, one ruined trip and years of will-they-won't-they; the comfort read of the modern rom-com revival.
-
466
On Photography
What taking and viewing photographs does to us; a brilliant, much-quoted set of essays.
-
467
Mere Christianity
A clear, conversational case for the Christian faith; influential well beyond its tradition.
-
468
Seabiscuit
An undersized horse lifts Depression-era America; a beautifully told underdog story.
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469
The Night Circus
A magical competition staged inside a circus that appears only at night; atmospheric and gorgeously imagined.
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470
It Ends with Us
A romance that turns into a clear-eyed story about a difficult cycle; a phenomenon among readers.
-
471
Dear Life
Quietly profound stories of small-town lives by a Nobel laureate and master of the form.
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472
Fun Home
A literary graphic memoir about a father, a funeral home and coming out; intricate and deeply felt.
-
473
Into the Wild
A young man walks into the Alaskan wilderness and doesn't come back; a haunting study of an idealist.
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474
Walden
Two years living simply by a pond; the founding text of American nature writing and self-reliance.
-
475
Consider the Lobster
Restless, footnote-laden essays on everything from tennis to ethics; brilliant and exhausting in the best way.
-
476
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Dark, funny, grace-haunted stories of the American South; unsettling and unforgettable.
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477
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
A shy freshman finds friends and faces buried pain; a beloved, bruised coming-of-age story.
-
478
The Myth of Sisyphus
Why life worth living despite its apparent absurdity; the essay that frames absurdism.
-
479
Into Thin Air
A first-hand account of the deadly 1996 Everest disaster; tense, honest and unforgettable.
-
480
Caste
American racism reframed as a caste system, compared with India and Nazi Germany; ambitious and resonant.
-
481
A History of God
Four thousand years of how Jews, Christians and Muslims have imagined God; lucid and even-handed.
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482
Men Explain Things to Me
The essay collection that helped popularise a now-famous idea; sharp feminist criticism.
-
483
Bring Up the Bodies
Cromwell engineers the fall of Anne Boleyn; tense, brilliant and even sharper than its predecessor.
-
484
Divergent
A society sorted into factions and a girl who fits none of them; fast-paced YA dystopia.
-
485
Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Tender, violent poems of family, war and desire; a striking debut collection.
-
486
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
Strange, humane case studies from the edges of the brain; neurology as storytelling.
-
487
The Power of Habit
How habits work in people, companies and societies, and how to change them; readable and useful.
-
488
Say Nothing
A disappearance during the Troubles opens onto a whole history of violence and memory; superb narrative nonfiction.
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489
H Is for Hawk
Training a goshawk while grieving a father; a fierce, beautiful memoir of nature and loss.
-
490
Evicted
Poverty and the housing crisis told through eight families; immersive, humane reporting.
-
491
Regeneration
Shell-shocked officers and the psychiatrist treating them; a quiet, powerful look at war's hidden wounds.
-
492
The Flatshare
Two strangers share one bed on opposite schedules and fall for each other by note; a charming high-concept romance.
-
493
The Outsiders
Class warfare among teenagers, written by a teenager; the book that arguably invented modern YA.
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494
Oryx and Crake
A man may be the last human after a engineered catastrophe; sharp, scary speculative fiction.
-
495
Six of Crows
A crew of teenage outcasts pull off an impossible heist; slick, dark and endlessly entertaining.
-
496
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
A year of close, ecstatic attention to a Virginia valley; meditative nature writing of the highest order.
-
497
Station Eleven
A travelling theatre troupe keeps art alive after a pandemic; quietly hopeful and beautifully structured.
-
498
A Wrinkle in Time
Children travel across the universe to rescue a father; a strange, brave science-fantasy classic.
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499
The Emperor of All Maladies
A 'biography' of cancer across centuries of struggle to understand it; a Pulitzer-winning epic of medicine.
-
500
Quiet
The hidden strengths of introverts in a world that prizes talking; validating and well-argued.
-
501
Daring Greatly
Why vulnerability is a strength, not a weakness; a warm, research-led argument for showing up.
-
502
A Clockwork Orange
Ultra-violence, free will and a teenage narrator with his own invented slang; provocative and stylistically dazzling.
-
503
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
The woman whose cells transformed medicine without her consent; science, ethics and a family's story.
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504
Outliers
What actually makes high achievers; the book that popularised the idea of deliberate practice.
-
505
A Room of One's Own
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two wom
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506
A Head Full of Ghosts
A family's possession ordeal becomes a reality show; clever modern horror that keeps you guessing.
-
507
A Good Girl's Guide to Murder
Everyone is talking about A Good Girl's Guide to Murder! With shades of Serial and Making a Murderer this is the story about an investigation turned obsession, full of twists and turns and with an end
-
508
Death Comes for the Archbishop
In 1851 French Bishop Latour and his friend Father Valliant are dispatched to New Mexico to reawaken its slumbering Catholicism. Moving along the endless prairies, Latour spreads his faith the only wa
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509
Mort
Death takes on an apprentice, with predictably chaotic results; a great entry point to Discworld.
-
510
Catch-22
Catch-22 is like no other novel. It has its own rationale, its own extraordinary character. It moves back and forth from hilarity to horror. It is outrageously funny and strangely affecting. It is tot
-
511
Go Tell It on the Mountain
In one of the greatest American classics, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy's discovery of the terms of his identity. Baldwin's rendering of his protagonist's spiritual, sexual, and moral str
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512
Stardust
A young man crosses into a fairy realm to fetch a fallen star; a charming, grown-up fairy tale.
-
513
Good Omens
An angel and a demon team up to stop the apocalypse because they rather like the world; co-written with Terry Pratchett and very funny.
-
514
Dombey and Son
Dombey and Son is both a firm and a family and the ambiguous connection between public and private life lies at the heart of Dickens' novel. Paul Dombey is a man who runs his domestic affairs as he ru
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515
The People in the Trees
In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed
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516
Eva Luna
The history of a woman born poor, orphaned early, and who eventually rose to a position of unique influence.
-
517
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Two magicians revive English magic during the Napoleonic wars; witty, footnoted and utterly original.
-
518
Uprooted
A village girl taken by a cold wizard discovers her own power against a malevolent wood; a fairy-tale standalone.
-
519
Annihilation
Area X has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The twelfth expedition arrives expecting the unexpected, and Area X de
-
520
Far from the Madding Crowd
Independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gen
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521
A Darker Shade of Magic
A magician moves between parallel Londons; brisk, inventive and fun.
-
522
Steve Jobs
The authorised, unflinching life of Apple's founder; a study in genius and difficulty.
-
523
Angela's Ashes
A poverty-stricken Irish childhood told with humour and grace; a much-loved memoir.
-
524
Outlander
A 1940s nurse is flung back to eighteenth-century Scotland; epic time-slip romance and adventure.
-
525
The Hound of the Baskervilles
A spectral hound stalks a Devon moor and Holmes is on the case; the most atmospheric of the canon.
-
526
The Talented Mr. Ripley
A charming sociopath assumes another man's life; cool, amoral suspense you can't look away from.
-
527
The Glass Castle
A chaotic, nomadic upbringing remembered without bitterness; a remarkable family memoir.
-
528
Catching Fire
Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the Hunger Games. She and fellow District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark are miraculously still alive. Katniss should be relieved, happy even. After all, she has r
-
529
Flowers for Algernon
Until he was thirty-two, Charlie Gordon --gentle, amiable, oddly engaging-- had lived in a kind of mental twilight. He knew knowledge was important and had learned to read and write after a fashion, b
-
530
In the Woods
A detective with a buried childhood trauma works a case that mirrors it; literary, atmospheric crime.
-
531
2001: A Space Odyssey
From the dawn of humanity to a journey beyond Jupiter; cold, awe-struck and visionary.
-
532
Hatchet
Brian Robison, a teenage boy struggling through his parents divorce, is flying up north to stay with his dad for the summer. However, his plane crashes and he is forced to survive the Canadian wildern
-
533
The Dispossessed
A physicist travels between an anarchist moon and its capitalist neighbour; SF as serious political thought.
-
534
Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies is a 1954 novel by Nobel Prize–winning British author William Golding. The book focuses on a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island and their disastrous attempt to g
-
535
Holes
Stanley Yelnats is under a curse. A curse that began with his no-good-dirty-rotten-pig-stealing great-great-grandfather and has since followed generations of Yelnatses. Now Stanley has been unjustly s
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536
The Man in the High Castle
An alternate history where the Axis won the war; a paranoid, brilliant puzzle-box of a novel.
-
537
The Woman in White
Identity, conspiracy and a figure in white on a moonlit road; the original sensation novel.
-
538
Magpie Murders
A murder mystery inside a murder mystery; a loving, ingenious tribute to golden-age crime.
-
539
Cat's Cradle
A satirical end-of-the-world tale about science, religion and human folly; bleakly hilarious.
-
540
The War of the Worlds
Martians invade Victorian England; the original alien-invasion story and still a tense read.
-
541
Looking for Alaska
Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even mo
-
542
The Time Machine
A traveller journeys to the far future and finds humanity strangely divided; short and seminal.
-
543
The Martian
An astronaut stranded on Mars must science his way to survival; funny, tense and gloriously nerdy.
-
544
Number the Stars
Ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen and her best friend, Ellen Rosen, often think about life before the war. But it's now 1943, and their life in Copenhagen is filled with school, food shortages, and the
-
545
Maniac Magee
Jeffrey Lionel "Maniac" Magee might have lived a normal life if a freak accident hadn't made him an orphan. After living with his unhappy and uptight aunt and uncle for eight years, he decides to run-
-
546
Project Hail Mary
A lone astronaut wakes with no memory on a mission to save Earth; a crowd-pleasing puzzle of a thriller.
-
547
Tender is the Night
A psychiatrist, Dick Diver, treats and eventually marries a wealthy patient, Nicole. Eventually, this marriage destroys him.
-
548
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a novel written by Ken Kesey. Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of institutional processes and the human mind; including a criti
-
549
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927) tells the story of several unrelated people who happen to be on a bridge in Peru when it collapses, killing them. Philosophically, the book explores the problem of ev
-
550
Klara and the Sun
"Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who,
-
551
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and fro
-
552
Parable of the Sower
A young woman builds a new faith amid social collapse; eerily prescient near-future SF.
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553
The way we live now
From a review of the Anthony Trollope canon in The Economist (2020/04/08 edition): *“The Way We Live Now” (1875) is as much a portrait of the last few decades as it is of the high Victorian age, and e
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554
Mockingjay
The last book in the Hunger Games Series. This book is filled with excitement and action regarding the ongoing war with the capital.
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555
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
Winner of the 2001 Carnegie MedalOne rat, popping up here and there, squeaking loudly, and taking a bath in the cream, could be a plague all by himself. After a few days of this, it was amazing how gl
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556
The Warden
The Chronicles of Barsetshire, Book 1: The Warden The tranquil atmosphere of the cathedral town of Barchester is shattered when a scandal breaks concerning the financial affairs of a Church-run almsho
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557
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse wrote Siddhartha after he traveled to India in the 1910s. It tells the story of a young boy who travels the country in a quest for spiritual enlightenment in the time of Guatama Buddha.
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558
The Bell Jar
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by American poet Sylvia Plath. It is an intensely realistic and emotional record of a successful and talented young woman's descent into madness.
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559
The Gene
The Gene: An Intimate History is a book written by Siddhartha Mukherjee, an Indian-born American physician and oncologist. It was published on 17 May 2016 by Scribner. The book chronicles the history
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560
The Bostonians
First published in 1886, The Bostonians is one of James' wittiest social satires. It begins with the arrival in Boston of Basil Ransom, in search of a career. The book turns on the relationship betwee
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561
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
This is Christopher's murder mystery story. There are no lies in this story because Christopher can't tell lies. Christopher does not like strangers or the colours yellow or brown or being touched. On
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562
The Da Vinci Code
The Da Vinci Code is a 2003 mystery thriller novel by Dan Brown. It is Brown's second novel to include the character Robert Langdon: the first was his 2000 novel Angels & Demons. The Da Vinci Code fol
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563
The Graveyard Book
Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place—he's the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiqu
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564
The Return of the King
THE RETURN OF THE KING, which brings to a close the great epic of war and adventure begun in The Fellowship of the Ring and continued in The Two Towers, is the third and final part of J. R. R. Tolkien
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565
The Return of the Native
The native of the title is Clym Yeobright, who returns to the area from the bright society of Paris and, as any reader of Hardy knows, all is not smooth. He is quickly taken by and marries the one wom
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566
White Fang
The story of a wolf/dog cross, who is raised by Indians, and becomes a deadly fighter.
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567
The Giver
At the age of twelve, Jonas, a young boy from a seemingly utopian, futuristic world, is singled out to receive special training from The Giver, who alone holds the memories of the true joys and pain o
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568
The Sound and the Fury
In many ways this was an experimental novel, using several differing narrative styles. Divided into four parts, the author relates the same episodes from four different viewpoints, using a different s
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569
The Waves
Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. Social events, individual achievements and disappointments form the outer structure of the b
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570
Vanity Fair
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimen
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571
The Thirty-Nine Steps
Richard Hannay has just returned to England after years in South Africa and is thoroughly bored with his life in London. But then a murder is committed in his flat, just days after a chance encounter
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572
The Testaments
15 years after the sons of Jacob seized power in the USA and became Gilead. The story is told from three female viewpoints; Daisy, Agnes and Lydia. Daisy struggles with coming to the realization of he
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573
The Windup Girl
What Happens when bio-terrorism becomes a tool for corporate profits? And what happens when said bio-terrorism forces humanity to the cusp of post-human evolution? In The Windup Girl, award-winning au
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574
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
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575
Where the Red Fern Grows
Where the Red Fern Grows is a 1961 children's novel by Wilson Rawls about a boy who buys two hunting dogs. ---------- Also contained in: Prentice Hall Literature: Bronze
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576
To Paradise
Spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, an unforgettable cast of characters are united by their reckonings with the qualities that make us human--fear, love,
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577
Emma
A clever, comfortable heroine meddles in everyone's love life but her own; sparkling social comedy for readers who like their romance with a sting.
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578
The Brothers Karamazov
Faith, doubt and a family torn apart by a father's death; a demanding but rewarding novel of big questions.
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579
Moby-Dick
One captain's ruinous hunt for a white whale, wrapped in a strange, magnificent encyclopaedia of the sea.
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580
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A runaway boy and an escaping enslaved man raft down the Mississippi; a landmark of American voice and conscience.
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581
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man stays young while his portrait rots — a glittering, sinister fable about vanity.
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582
Les Miserables
An ex-convict's long road to redemption set against the misery and barricades of nineteenth-century France.
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583
Madame Bovary
A provincial wife chases the grand passions of her novels into debt and disaster; the great study of romantic illusion.
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584
The Old Man and the Sea
An old fisherman's solitary struggle with a great marlin; spare, elemental and deeply moving.
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585
Mrs Dalloway
A single London day inside one woman's mind, drifting between a party and the war that won't let go.
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586
To the Lighthouse
A family, a holiday house and the passage of time, rendered in some of the most luminous prose in English.
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587
Of Mice and Men
Two migrant labourers and a fragile dream of a place of their own; a short, heartbreaking American tragedy.
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588
The Catcher in the Rye
A few raw days in the life of a teenager adrift in New York; the original voice of adolescent alienation.
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589
The Scarlet Letter
Sin, shame and hypocrisy in a Puritan colony, centred on a woman who refuses to be broken.
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590
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A girl falls down a rabbit hole into glorious nonsense; a children's book that adults never stop rereading.
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591
Middlemarch
Ambition, marriage and idealism in a provincial English town; widely held to be the wisest of all Victorian novels.
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592
A Passage to India
A misunderstanding at the Marabar Caves exposes the fault lines of colonial India.
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593
Babbitt
"Zenith is the finest example of American life and prosperity to be found anywhere." Zenith is the Midwestern city where George F. Babbitt lives and works. A successful real estate agent, his business
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594
David Copperfield
It adds to the charm of this book to remember that it is virtually a picture of the author's own boyhood. It is an excellent picture of the life of a struggling English youth in the middle of the last
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595
Ethan Frome
Edith Wharton wrote Ethan Frome as a frame story — meaning that the prologue and epilogue constitute a "frame" around the main story How It All Goes Down It's winter. A nameless engineer is in Starkfi
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596
Inferno
Dante, after becoming lost on the path of life, is led by Virgil into Hell to begin his journey back to the light of God.
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597
Meditations
Meditations is a collection of personal reflections and notes by the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (reigned 161 to 180 AD), offering a profound look into the philosophy of Stoicism. It was never inten
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598
The Canterbury Tales
A collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century. The tales (mostly in verse, although some are in prose) are told as part of a story-telling contes
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599
The Mill on the Floss
From the author of MIDDLEMARCH and SILAS MARNER, a story of frustrated intelligence and longing, featuring the intelligent Maggie, who yearns to be loved, and her brother Tom, who is forced to study.
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600
The Portrait of a Lady
Young American Isabel Archer charms European society, but falls prey to the machinations of a calculating older woman.
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601
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, w
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602
This Side of Paradise
This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald's romantic and witty first novel, was written when the author was only twenty-three years old. This semi-autobiographical story of the handsome, indulged, an
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603
Uncle Tom's Cabin
This unforgettable novel tells the story of Tom, a devoutly Christian slave who chooses not to escape bondage for fear of embarrassing his master. However, he is soon sold to a slave trader and sent d
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604
Song of Solomon
A young man traces his family's history back through myth and migration in search of who he is.
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605
Lolita
A monstrous narrator's seductive confession; dazzling, disturbing prose that never lets you off the hook.
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606
The Trial
A man is arrested for a crime no one will name, lost in a bureaucracy with no exit; the great parable of modern dread.
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607
Blood Meridian
A brutal, biblical western about a scalp-hunting gang; bleak, beautiful and not for the faint-hearted.
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608
Middlesex
Three generations of a Greek-American family and a story of identity that crosses borders and bodies.
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609
White Teeth
Two London families across generations and cultures; a dazzling, exuberant debut about modern multicultural Britain.
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610
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Two women's lives bound together through decades of war in Kabul; devastating and tender.
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611
Life of Pi
A boy adrift in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, and a question about faith and the stories we choose to believe.
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612
A Little Life
Four friends across decades, centred on one man's buried trauma; immersive, beautiful and almost unbearably sad.
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613
Normal People
Two young people drawn together and apart from school to university; spare, precise and emotionally exact.
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614
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
A lonely, rigidly routined woman edges toward connection; funny, dark and ultimately warm.
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615
Little Fires Everywhere
Two families collide in a tidy suburb over questions of motherhood and class; quietly explosive.
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616
Where the Crawdads Sing
A girl raised alone in the marsh becomes a murder suspect; a runaway hit blending nature writing and courtroom drama.
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617
Girl, Woman, Other
Twelve interlinked lives, mostly Black British women, across a century; vivid, polyphonic and joyful.
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618
Midnight's Children
A boy born at the stroke of India's independence is mystically tied to the nation's fate; exuberant and sprawling.
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619
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Love and politics in Prague Spring, threaded with ideas about weight, choice and chance.
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620
Norwegian Wood
A tender, melancholy story of first love and loss in 1960s Tokyo; the most grounded of Murakami's novels.
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621
Kafka on the Shore
Two strange journeys converge in a dreamlike tale of talking cats, libraries and fate; surreal and hypnotic.
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622
Gilead
An ageing minister writes to his young son; a luminous meditation on faith, family and grace.
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623
The Namesake
A son of Indian immigrants in America grapples with the name and the inheritance he didn't choose.
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624
Love in the Time of Cholera
A man waits fifty years for the woman he loves; a grand, unfashionable hymn to romantic persistence.
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625
A Gentleman in Moscow
A count sentenced to house arrest in a grand hotel builds a whole life within its walls; charming and wise.
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626
Animal Farm
Animal Farm is a brilliant political satire and a powerful and affecting story of revolutions and idealism, power and corruption. 'All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.'
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627
Dubliners
James Joyce's disillusion with the publication of Dubliners in 1914 was the result of ten years battling with publishers, resisting their demands to remove swear words, real place names and much else,
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628
Lord Jim
This compact novel, completed in 1900, as with so many of the great novels of the time, is at its baseline a book of the sea. An English boy in a simple town has dreams bigger than the outdoors and em
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629
The Good Soldier
This is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme intimacy - or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and y