Modern Novel “Book Club” Reading Assignment
For this reading assignment, you will choose from among the following list of novels that represent
the philosophical sentiments of the Modern Age, which is the time period that begins during the
onset of WWI and continues through the aftermath of WWII. Some of the novels listed are written
by non-British authors, but all deal with issues of the age.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
A profoundly compelling portrait of the perfect English butler and of his fading, insular world postwar England. At
the end of his three decades of service at Darlington Hall, Stevens embarks on a country drive, during which he
looks back over his career to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving “a great gentleman.” But
lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness” and graver doubts about
his own faith in the man he served.
The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
This novel tells the stories of two outwardly happy couples who meet at a health spa in Germany just before the
start of World War I, and whose loveless, adultery-ridden relationships are strained and gradually disintegrate, with
tragic consequences.
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf's novel follows a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an upper class married Englishwoman, whose
inner life exists in a state of continuous tension. She is torn between the boring conventional existence she has
chosen to lead, and thoughts of what might have been, had she accepted the marriage proposal of the Bohemian
Peter Walsh. But Walsh too, has his doubts, and Woolf shows that all her characters, despite making radically
different life-choices, are ultimately left uneasy and questioning of their role in existence.
1984 by George Orwell
Published in 1949, the book offers political satirist George Orwell's nightmare vision of a totalitarian, bureaucratic
world and one poor stiff's attempt to find individuality. The brilliance of the novel is Orwell's prescience of modern
life--the ubiquity of television, the distortion of the language--and his ability to construct such a thorough version
of hell.
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
The deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a
land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident,
Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.
Dubliners by James Joyce
Declared by their author to be a chapter in the moral history of Ireland, this collection of tales offers vivid, tightly
focused observations of the lives of Dublin's poorer classes.
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
At the staid Marcia Blaine School for Girls, in Edinburgh, Scotland, teacher extraordinaire Miss Jean Brodie is
unmistakably, and outspokenly, in her prime. She is passionate in the application of her unorthodox teaching
methods, in her attraction to the married art master, Teddy Lloyd, in her affair with the bachelor music master,
Gordon Lowther, and—most important—in her dedication to "her girls," the students she selects to be her “crème
de la crème”.
A Room With a View by E. M. Forster
The story of young Lucy Honeychurch, traveling through Italy and returning to England during the repressive
Edwardian period. At once a romance as well as a critique of English society at the beginning of the 20th century.
Animal Farm by George Orwell
This is a classic tale of humanity awash in totalitarianism. A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated
animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and
equality. First published during the epoch of Stalinist Russia, today it is clear that wherever and whenever freedom
is attacked, and under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of Orwell's masterpiece is a
message still ferociously fresh.
Howards End by E. M. Forster
The disregard of a dying woman's bequest, a girl's attempt to help an impoverished clerk, and the marriage of an
idealist and a materialist — all intersect at an estate called Howards End. The fate of this country home symbolizes
the future of England in an exploration of social, economic, and philosophical trends during the post-Victorian era.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in
Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s
fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures
and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries.
The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Masterpiece of semi-autobiographical fiction reveals a powerful portrait of the coming of age of a young man of
unusual intelligence, sensitivity, and character. Telling portrayals of an Irish upbringing and schooling, the Catholic
Church and its priesthood, Parnell and Irish politics, and its aftermath, and problems with art and morality.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Alex, the protagonist, is almost innocently committing violent crimes with his friends; for he isn't trying to be bad,
he just is. He likes violence, and that's the way he is. When Alex's friends gang up on him and leave him to be
arrested by the police, Alex is sentenced to 14 years in prison. But then the opportunity to change presents itself to
Alex, and he can't help but take the offer. Important questions arise: is being good truly good if it is not by choice?
Is it good to be bad, if that is what one chooses?
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Written over the course of twenty-one years and published in 1966, this novel is based on Charlotte Brontë’s Jane
Eyre, takes place in Jamaica and Dominica in 1839–45.
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Dark allegory describes the narrator's journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr.
Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure,
character development, psychological penetration.
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
"Community, Identity, Stability" is the motto of Aldous Huxley's utopian World State. Here everyone consumes
daily grams of soma, to fight depression, babies are born in laboratories, and the most popular form of
entertainment is a "Feelie," a movie that stimulates the senses of sight, hearing, and touch. Though there is no
violence and everyone is provided for, Bernard Marx feels something is missing and senses his relationship with a
young women has the potential to be much more than the confines of their existence allow.
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
After a mysterious accident during their visit to the caves, Dr Assiz is accused of assaulting Adela Quested, a naive
young Englishwoman. As he is brought to trial, the fragile structure of Anglo-Indian relations collapses and the
racism inherent in colonialism is exposed in all its ugliness.
Grendel by John Gardner
The most terrifying monster in English literature, from the great epic Beowulf, tells his side of the story.
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India’s independence.
Greeted by fireworks displays, cheering crowds, and Prime Minister Nehru himself, Saleem grows up to learn the
ominous consequences of this coincidence. His every act is mirrored and magnified in events that sway the course
of national affairs; his health and well-being are inextricably bound to those of his nation; his life is inseparable, at
times indistinguishable, from the history of his country. Perhaps most remarkable are the telepathic powers linking
him with India’s 1,000 other “midnight’s children,” all born in that initial hour and endowed with magical gifts.
Atonement by Ian McEwan
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older
sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp
of adult motives together with her precocious literary gifts brings about a crime that will change all their lives.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaajte
The English Patient tells the story of the entanglement of four damaged lives in an Italian monastery as World War
II ends. The exhausted nurse, Hana; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the
riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burn victim who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of
passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.
War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
This is the granddaddy of all alien invasion stories, first published by H.G. Wells in 1898. The novel begins
ominously, as the lone voice of a narrator tells readers that "No one would have believed in the last years of the
nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than
man's..."Things then progress from a series of seemingly mundane reports about odd atmospheric disturbances
taking place on Mars to the arrival of Martians just outside of London.
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much
about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another
maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided
him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of
her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature
and place in the world.
The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
This monumental trilogy by the Nobel Prize-winning author chronicles the lives of three generations of an uppermiddle-class London family obsessed with money and respectability.
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social
trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their sweet
contentment can protect them from the world outside—until the birth of their fifth baby.
The House at Tyneford by Natasha Solomons
It's the spring of 1938 and no longer safe to be a Jew in Vienna. Nineteen-year-old Elise Landau is forced to leave
her glittering life of parties and champagne to become a parlor maid in England. She arrives at Tyneford, the great
house on the bay, where servants polish silver and serve drinks on the lawn. But war is coming, and the world is
changing.
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
This novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an
unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four
strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the
caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an
uncertain future.
July’s People by Nadine Gordimer
For years, it had been what is called a “deteriorating situation.” Now all over South Africa the cities are
battlegrounds. The members of the Smales family—liberal whites—are rescued from the terror by their servant,
July, who leads them to refuge in his village. What happens to the Smaleses and to July—the shifts in character
and relationships—gives us an unforgettable look into the terrifying, tacit understandings and misunderstandings
between blacks and whites.
A Separate Peace by John Knowles
Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a
harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas
is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself,
banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
"This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the
Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous
affair with Sarah Miles—a hate bred of a passion that ultimately lost out to God. Now, a year after Sarah's death,
Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At the
start he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. By the end of the book, Bendrix's hatred has shifted to
the God he feels has broken his life but whose existence he has at last come to recognize.
Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane
The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly
betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds
him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of
legend--the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the Disappeared, over which no gulls
fly--reveals its transfixing reality. Meanwhile the real world of adulthood unfolds its secrets like a collection of
folktales: the dead sister walking again; the lost uncle, Eddie, present on every page; the family house "as cunning
and articulate as a labyrinth, closely designed, with someone sobbing at the heart of it."
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
In the small village of Edgecombe St. Mary in the English countryside lives Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the
unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut. Wry, courtly, opinionated, and completely endearing, the Major
leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum,
and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother’s death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina
Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of
their spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society
insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and regarding her as the permanent foreigner. Can their
relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Blind Assassin is a tale of two sisters, one of whom dies under ambiguous circumstances in the opening pages.
The survivor, Iris Chase Griffen, initially seems a little cold-blooded about this death in the family. But as Margaret
Atwood's most ambitious work unfolds--a tricky process, in fact, with several nested narratives and even an entire
novel-within-a-novel--we're reminded of just how complicated the familial game of hide-and-seek can be.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee
comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been
boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese
families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II.
The Zookeeper’s Wife by Diane Ackerman
When Germany invaded Poland, Stuka bombers devastated Warsaw—and the city's zoo along with it. With most of
their animals dead, zookeepers Jan and Antonina Zabinski began smuggling Jews into empty cages. Another dozen
"guests" hid inside the Zabinskis' villa, emerging after dark for dinner, socializing, and, during rare moments of
calm, piano concerts. Jan, active in the polish resistance, kept ammunition buried in the elephant enclosure and
stashed explosives in the animal hospital. Meanwhile, Antonina kept her unusual household afloat, caring for both
its human and its animal inhabitants—otters, a badger, hyena pups, lynxes.
Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay
Sarah's Key follows the story of Julia Jarmond, an American journalist living in France, who is assigned to complete
an article on the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup in France as well as the story of Sarah, a young girl, who experienced the
roundup first hand. The novel explores France's role in World War II and shines light on an otherwise scarcely
remembered tragedy of the Holocaust.
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows
January 1946: writer Juliet Ashton receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary
and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins a remarkable tale of the island of Guernsey during the German
occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name.
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
The novel illuminates the pain of exile and the ambiguities of postcolonialism with a tapestry of colorful characters:
an embittered old judge; Sai, his sixteen-year-old orphaned granddaughter; a chatty cook; and the cook’s son,
Biju, who is hopscotching from one miserable New York restaurant to another, trying to stay a step ahead of the
INS. When a Nepalese insurgency in the mountains threatens Sai’s new-sprung romance with her handsome tutor,
their lives descend into chaos. The cook witnesses India’s hierarchy being overturned and discarded. The judge
revisits his past and his role in Sai and Biju’s intertwining lives. A story of depth and emotion, hilarity and
imagination, The Inheritance of Loss tells a story of love, family, and loss.
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece-a
novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the
empire. Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh
charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures
denied him by wartime austerities.