Recommended Reading List – GCSE
There is a good selection of recommended reads below to broaden your horizons
and expand your mind. However, you do not need to stick to this list: if you enjoy a
book by a particular author, then find another one that they have written. There is
also focus on fiction titles, but there is a lot of good non-fiction out there. If you
would like some more advice about non-fiction ask Mrs Zoltie, the Librarian, or your
English Teacher. Your teacher may recommend other titles throughout the year.
Happy Reading
Set Text List
William Shakespeare Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Romeo and Juliet
Merchant of Venice
Modern Drama
Alan Bennett
Harold Brighouse
Arthur Miller
J B Priestley
Willy Russell
R C Sherriff
The History Boys
Hobson’s Choice
A View From a Bridge
An Inspector Calls
Educating Rita
Journey’s End
Prescribed Literary Non-Fiction
Bill Bryson
Kate Adie
Notes from a Small Island
The Kindness of Strangers
Prose from Different Cultures
John Steinbeck
Harper Lee
Meera Syal
Amy Tan
Roddy Doyle
Athol Fugard
Of Mice and Men
To Kill A Mockingbird
Anita and Me
The Joy Luck Club
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Tsotsi
Literary Heritage Prose
Jane Austen
George Elliot
William Golding
Thomas Hardy
Other Wessex Tales
George Orwell
Pride and Prejudice
Silas Marner
Lord of the Flies
The Withered Arm and
Animal Farm
Robert Louis Stevenson The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Recommended Reading List
The Five People you
meet in Heaven
Brick Lane
Money
Handmaid’s Tale
Empire of the Sun
The Wasp Factory
Captain Corelli’s
Mandolin
The Demolished Man
The Sheltering Sky
Fahrenheit 451
Mitch Albom
The Iliad
Homer
Monica Ali
Martin Amis
Margaret Atwood
J G Ballard
Iain Banks
Louis De Bernieres
Fever Pitch
The Kite Runner
Brave New World
Remains of the Day
Three Men in a Boat
The Dubliners
Nick Hornby
Khaled Hosseini
Aldous Huxley
Kazuo Ishiguro
Jerome K Jerome
James Joyce
Alfred Bester
Paul Bowes
Ray Bradbury
Metamorphosis
The Trial
Shindler’s Ark
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Thomas Keneally
Illustrated Man
The Master and
Margarita
A Clockwork Orange
Double Indemnity
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Wise Children
Ray Bradbury
Mikhail Bulgakov
Jack Kerouac
Ken Kesey
Angela Carter
Truman Capote
Miguel de Cervantes
Raymond Chandler
Agatha Christie
On The Road
One Flew Over The
Cuckoo’s Nest
The Shining
The Stand
The Magic Mountain
One Hundred Years of
Solitude
Life of Pi
Enduring Love
Atonement
Paradise Lost
Beloved
The Bloody Chamber
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Don Quixote
The Long Goodbye
Murder on the Orient
Express
The Alchemist
Life and Times of
Michael K
Heart Of Darkness
The Man in the High
Castle
Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep?
Crime and Punishment
Sherlock Holmes
Invisible Man
Birdsong
Paulo Coelho
J M Coetzee
The Bell
The English Patient
Iris Murdoch
Michael Ondaatje
Joseph Conrad
Philip K Dick
1984
Fight Club
George Orwell
Chuck Palahniuk
Philip K Dick
The Fall of the House of
Usher
The Bell Jar
The Godfather
The Fountainhead
Ten Days That Shook The
World
All Quiet on the Western
Front
The Diceman
Wide Sargasso Sea
Midnight’s Children
Cather in The Rye
Nausea
Lovely Bones
A Town Like Alice
The Jungle
White Teeth
The Grapes of Wrath
The Help
The Secret History
Anna Karenina
Twenty Thousand
Leagues Under The Sea
Slaughterhouse Five
The Colour Purple
War of The Worlds
Trainspotting
The Picture of Dorian
Grey
The Right Stuff
Edgar Allan Poe
The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary
A Passage to India
A Room with a View
Spies
Cold Mountain
Cold Comfort Farm
Brighton Rock
Memoirs of a Geisha
Snow falling on Cedars
Chocolat
The Maltese Falcon
Catch 22
A Farewell to Arms
Dune
Gustave Flaubert
E M Forster
E M Forster
Michael Frayn
Charles Frazier
Stella Gibbons
Graham Greene
Arthur Golden
David Guterson
Joanne Harris
Dashiell Hammett
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemmingway
Frank Herbert
The Talented Mr Ripley
The Odyssey
Patricia Highsmith
Homer
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
The Midwich Cuckoos
John Wyndham
Anthony Burgess
James M Cain
John Le Carré
Angela Carter
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ralph Ellison
Sebastian Faulkes
Stephen King
Stephen King
Thomas Mann
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Yann Martel
Ian McEwan
Ian McEwan
John Milton
Toni Morrison
Sylvia Plath
Mario Puzo
Ayn Rand
John Reed
Erich Maria Remarque
Luke Rhinehart
Arundhati Roy
Salman Rushdie
J D Sallinger
Jean-Paul Sartre
Alice Seabold
Neville Shute
Upton Sinclair
Zadie Smith
John Steinbeck
Kathryn Stockett
Donna Tartt
Leo Tolstoy
Jules Verne
Kurt Vonnegut
Alice Walker
H G Wells
Irvine Welsh
Oscar Wilde
Tom Wolfe