READING SUGGESTIONS FOR UPPER SCHOOL PUPILS
(Key Stage 5 or KS5)
Ancient Times
The Oresteia by Aeschylus
Fables by Aesop
Comedies by Aristophanes
Poetics by Aristotle
Dramas by Euripides
The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer
The Theban Plays by Sophocles
The Aeneid by Virgil
Middle Ages and Renaissance
The Arabian Nights
Beowulf
Decameron by Boccaccio
Don Quixote by Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
The Divine Comedy by Dante
Tis Pity She’s a Wh**re by Ford
Volpone by Jonson
The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd
Dr Faustus by Marlowe
The Prince by Machiavelli
Utopia by More
Complete Tragedies: Comedies, Histories, Sonnets all by Shakespeare
The Faerie Queene by Spenser
17th and 18th Centuries
Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake
Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Poems by Robert Burns
Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders both by Daniel Defoe
Poems by John Donne
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Tom Jones; Joseph Andrews both by Henry Fielding
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Gibbon
Complete Poems by Herbert
Complete Poems by Marvell
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Comedies by Moliere
Selected Poems by Alexander Pope
The Social Contract by Rousseau
School for Scandal by Sheridan
Humphrey Clinker by Smollett
Tristram Shandy by Sterne
Gulliver’s Travels; A Modest Proposal both by Jonathan Swift
Vanity Fair by WM Thackeray
Candide by Voltaire
Early 19th Century and Victorian
Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion all by Jane Austen
Poems by Browning
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Poems by Lord Byron
Plays by Anton Chekhov
The Awakening by Chopin
Selected Poems by ST Coleridge
David Copperfield; Hard Times both by Charles Dickens
Poems by Emily Dickinson
The Brothers Karamazov; Crime and Punishment both by Dostoevsky
All for Love by John Dryden
Middlemarch; Silas Marner both by George Eliot
Madame Bovary by Gustav Flaubert
Mary Barton by Mrs Gaskell
Jude The Obscure by Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of A Justified Sinner by Hogg
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Dramas by Henrik Ibsen
Poems by Keats
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Stories Edgar by Poe
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Selected Poems by P B Shelley
Selected Poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Vanity Fair by WM Thackeray
War and Peace by Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Poems by William Wordsworth
Poems by WB Yeats
Early to Late 20th Century
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Selected Poems by WH Auden
The New York Trilogy by Auster
Regeneration by Barker
The Wasp Factory by Banks
Possession by AS Byatt
Forty Years On by Bennett
Waiting for Godot by Beckett
A Man for all Seasons by Bolt
Nights at the Circus; A Company of Wolves; The Bloody Chamber all by Carter
Elephant by Carver
Top Girls by Churchill
The Woman in White; The Moonstone both by Collins
The Secret Agent; Heart of Darkness both by Joseph Conrad
The Coward Collection by Coward
The Seagull; The Three Sisters both by Anton Chekhov
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
Ragtime by EL Doctorow
Poems and Plays by TS Eliot
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Sound and the Fury by EM Faulkner
The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night both by F Scott Fitzgerald
A Passage to India; Howard’s End; Aspects of the Novel all by EM Forster
The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
Translations; Dancing at Lughnasa both by Friel
Poems by Robert Frost
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Goodbye To All That by Robert Graves
Brighton Rock; The Power and the Glory both by Graham Greene
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Skylight; Closer both by David Hare
Selected Poems by Harrison
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Sun Also Rises; A Farewell to Arms; For Whom the Bell Tolls all by Ernest
Hemingway
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley