Reading List: Classic fiction (Many available in Penguin popular classics)
Emily Bronte
Wilkie Collins
Joseph Conrad
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
F Scott Fitzgerald
Henry James
Thomas Hardy
Aldous Huxley
DH Lawrence
Harper Lee
George Orwell
John Steinbeck
William Golding
J.D.Salinger
RL Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Mary Shelley
Jonathan Swift
Wuthering Heights
The Woman in White
Heart of Darkness
Victory
Robinson Crusoe
Journal of the Plague Year
Moll Flanders
Oliver Twist
David Copperfield
Nicholas Nickleby
A Tale of Two Cities
The Great Gatsby
The Diamond as Big as The Ritz and Other Stories
Turn of the Screw
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Brave New World
Sons and Lovers
To Kill A Mockingbird
Animal Farm
Nineteen Eighty -Four
The Grapes of Wrath
Cannery Row
Tortilla Flat
Lord of the Flies
The Catcher in the Rye
Franny and Zooey
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Treasure Island
Dracula
Frankenstein
Gulliver's Travels
The following websites are also useful:
www.madaboutbooks.com
www.teenreads.com
www.readingmatters.co.uk
www.guardian.co.uk/books
www.goodreads.com
Modern day fiction with links to Psychology, History, Sociology and
Politics. Authors adopt a variety of narrative strategies.
Iain Banks
Pat Barker
Melvyn Bragg
A.S. Byatt
Peter Carey
Sebastian Faulks
Michael Frayn
Charles Frazier
Nicci French
Mark Haddon
Joseph Heller
Khaled Hosseini
Ken Kesey
Hilary Mantel
Cormac McCarthy
Ian McEwan
Toni Morrison
Brian Moore
Joseph O’Connor
Michael Ondaatje
Zadie Smith
Irvine Welsh
Tom Wolfe
The Wasp Factory
Regeneration Trilogy
Border Crossing
The Soldier’s Return
A Son of War
Possession
Oscar and Lucinda
True History of the Kelly Gang
Birdsong
Spies
Cold Mountain
The Red Room
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
Catch- 22
The Kite Runner
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Wolf Hall
Bring Up the Bodies
The Road
Enduring Love
Beloved
Lies of Silence
Star of the Sea
The English Patient
White Teeth
Trainspotting
The Bonfire of the Vanities
The following websites are also useful:
www.goodreads.com
www.madaboutbooks.com
www.teenreads.com
www.readingmatters.co.uk
www.guardian.co.uk/books
The Wasp Factory is the first novel by Scottish writer Iain Banks. It was published in
1984. It is written from a first person perspective, told by sixteen-year-old Frank
Cauldhame, describing his childhood and all that remains of it. Frank observes
many shamanistic rituals of his own invention, and it is soon revealed that Frank
was the perpetrator of three deaths of children within his family before he reached
the age of ten himself. As the novel develops, his brother's escape from a mental
hospital and impending return lead on to a violent ending and a twist that
undermines all that Frank believed about himself.
Regeneration is a prize-winning novel by Pat Barker, first published in 1991. The
novel was a Booker Prize nominee and was described by the New York Times Book
Review as one of the four best novels of the year in its year of publication.[1] It is the
first of three novels in the Regeneration Trilogy of novels on the First World War, the
other two being The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize
in 1995.[2] The novel is loosely based on the history of psychology and the real-life
experiences of British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I
at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh.
Beloved is a novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American
Civil War (1861–1865), it is inspired by the story of an AfricanAmerican slave, Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in
Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state.
Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three
children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the plantation
in Kentucky from which Sethe recently fled. A woman presumed to be her daughter,
called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road,
Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full
of a baby's venom."[1]
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.[2] It was adapted during 1998
into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey. During 2006 a New York
Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it as the best work of American
fiction of the past 25 years
Enduring Love (1997) is a novel by British writer Ian McEwan. The plot concerns
Rose, scientific author and journalist, and our first-person narrator claims that the
"beginning" of this story "is simple to mark". However, the following events appear
anything but simple. Whilst enjoying a picnic with his long-term partner Clarissa
Mellon, a literature academic and Keats scholar, a ballooning accident occurs - a
catastrophe for virtually all those involved and leads to two strangers becoming
perilously entangled.
The Road is a 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. It is a postapocalyptic tale of a journey of a father and his young son over a period of several
months, across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed
most of civilization and, in the intervening years, almost all life on Earth. The novel
was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted to a film by the same name in 2009,
directed by John Hillcoat, starring Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee.
Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by British writer A. S. Byatt. It
won the 1990 Booker Prize. Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the
title Possession refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the
practice of collecting historically significant cultural artifacts, and to the possession
that a biographer feels they have of their subject. The novel incorporates many
different styles and devices: diaries, letters and poetry, in addition to third-person
narration. Possession is as concerned with the present day as it is with the Victorian
era, pointing out the differences between the two time periods, and satirizing such
things as modern academia and mating rituals.
Oscar and Lucinda is a novel by Australian author Peter Carey which won the
1988 Booker Prize, the 1989 Miles Franklin Award, and was shortlisted for The Best
of the Booker. It tells the story of Oscar Hopkins, the Cornish son of a Plymouth
Brethren minister who becomes an Anglican priest, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a
young Australian heiress who buys a glass factory. They meet on the ship over to
Australia, and discover that they are both gamblers, one obsessive the other
compulsive. Lucinda bets Oscar that he cannot transport a glass church
from Sydney to a remote settlement at Bellingen, some 400 km up the New South
Wales coast. This bet changes both their lives forever
Birdsong is a 1993 war novel by English author Sebastian Faulks. Faulks' fourth
novel, it tells of a man called Stephen Wraysford at different stages of his life both
before and during World War I. The novel came 13th in a 2003 BBC survey called
the Big Read which aimed to find Britain's favourite book.[2] It has also been adapted
three times under the same title – for radio (1997), the stage (2010)
and television (2012).
While most of the novel concentrates on Stephen's life in France before and during
the war, the novel also focuses on the life of Stephen's granddaughter, Elizabeth, and
her attempts to find out more about her grandfather's experiences in World War I.
The story is split into seven sections which cover three different time periods.
Throughout the novel there are echoes of several war poets such as Siegfried
Sassoon and Wilfred Owen (1918)
Spies (2002) is a psychological novel by English author and dramatist Michael
Frayn. Narrating in the form of a bildungsroman,[1] an elderly man, Stephen
Wheatley, reminisces about his life during the Second World War as he wanders
down the now modernised London cul-de-sac that he once called home.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 mystery novel by
British writer Mark Haddon. Its title quotes the fictional detective Sherlock
Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 short story "Silver Blaze". Haddon and The
Curious Incident won the Whitbread Book Awards for Best Novel and Book of the
Year,[1] the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book,[2] and the Guardian
Children's Fiction Prize.[3] As a writer for The Guardian remarked, "Unusually, it was
published simultaneously in separate editions for adults and children."[4]
The novel is narrated in the first-person perspective by Christopher John Francis
Boone, a 15-year-old boy who describes himself as "a mathematician with some
behavioral difficulties" living in Swindon, Wiltshire. Although Christopher's
condition is not stated, the book's blurb refers to Asperger syndrome, highfunctioning autism, or savant syndrome. In July 2009, Haddon wrote on his blog that
"curious incident is not a book about asperger’s....if anything it’s a novel about
difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and
revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder," and that he
is not an expert on autism spectrum disorder or Asperger syndrome.
Cold Mountain is a 1997 historical novel by Charles Frazier which won the
U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[1] It tells the story of W. P. Inman, a wounded
deserter from the Confederate army near the end of the American Civil War who
walks for months to return to Ada Monroe, the love of his life; the story shares
several similarities with Homer's The Odyssey.[2] The novel alternates chapter-bychapter between Inman's and Ada's stories. It was Charles Frazier's first novel and a
major bestseller, selling roughly three million copies worldwide. It was also adapted
into an award-winning film of the same name.
Wolf Hall (2009) is a multi-award winning historical novel by English author Hilary
Mantel, named after the Seymour family seat of Wolfhall or Wulfhall in Wiltshire. Set
in the period from 1500 to 1535, Wolf Hall is a fictionalized biography documenting
the rapid rise to power of Thomas Cromwell in the court of Henry VIII, through the
death of Sir Thomas More. The novel won both the Man Booker Prize and the
National Book Critics Circle Award.[1][2] In 2012, The Observer named it as one of
"The 10 best historical novels".[3]
Bring Up the Bodies is a historical novel by Hilary Mantel and sequel to her awardwinning Wolf Hall. It is the second part of a planned trilogy charting the rise and fall
of Thomas Cromwell, the powerful minister in the court of King Henry VIII. Bring Up
the Bodies won the 2012 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Costa Book of the Year. It is
to be followed by The Mirror and the Light.
Catch-22
The finished novel describes the wartime experiences of Army Air Corps
Captain John Yossarian. Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat
missions, but the military bureaucracy is always able to find a way to make him
stay.[17] As Heller observed, "Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being
crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts – and the question is: What does a
sane man do in an insane society?"[9] Heller has also commented that "peace on earth
would mean the end of civilization as we know it."
The Kite Runner is a novel by Khaled Hosseini. Published in 2003 by Riverhead
Books, it is Hosseini's first novel,[1] and was adapted into a film of the same name in
2007.The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a young boy from the Wazir Akbar
Khan district of Kabul, whose closest friend is Hassan, his father's
young Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events,
from the fall of Afghanistan's monarchy through the Soviet military intervention, the
exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the rise of the
Taliban regime.
Lies of Silence is a novel by Brian Moore published in 1990. It focuses on the
personal effects of The Troubles, a period of ethnic, religious and political conflict
in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s to 1998. The plot revolves around the
protagonist, Michael Dillon, and his wife, Moira Dillon, who are held hostage in their
house by terrorists that are members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army(IRA).
The men force Dillon, an apolitical hotel manager, to drive his bomb-laden car to the
hotel he manages in order to kill a leading Protestant reverend, members of
the Orange Order, and militant Protestants, all of whom are attending the same
function. However, various aspects of female psychology are also present throughout
the novel.
One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest
The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night
shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often
spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the
hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not
believe that these patients were insane, but rather that society had pushed them out
because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act
and behave.
Star of the Sea is an historical novel by the Irish writer Joseph O'Connor published
in 2004. The novel is set in 1847 against the backdrop of the Irish famine. Star of the
Sea became an international number one bestseller, selling more than 800,000
copies in a year.The Star of the Sea of the title is a famine ship, making the journey
from Ireland to New York. Aboard are hundreds of refugees, many from humble and
desperate backgrounds. Key protagonists are David Merridith Lord Kingscourt, his
wife Laura, their servant Mary Duane, the ship's captain Josias Lockwood, a
friendless Irishman named Pius Mulvey, and American journalist Grantley Dixon.
The narrative of the novel follows multiple threads interwoven by Grantley Dixon
from documents such as diaries and letters, or from conversations/interviews with
some of the principal characters or their relatives/descendants.
The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist Michael
Ondaatje. The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned
English accented Hungarian man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian-Italian thief, and
an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an
Italian villa. The novel won the Canadian Governor General's Award and the Booker
Prize for fiction. The novel was adapted into an award-winning film of the same
name in 1996. The narrative is non-linear and the main characters are examined in
depth and detail.
White Teeth is a 2000 novel by the British author Zadie Smith. It focuses on the later
lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman
Archie Jones, and their families in London. The book won multiple honours,
including the 2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, the 2000 Whitbread
Book Award in category best first novel, the Guardian First Book Award,
the Commonwealth Writers First Book Prize, and the Betty Trask
Award. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language
Novels from 1923 to 2005
Trainspotting is the first novel by Scottish writer Irvine Welsh, first released in
1993. It takes the form of a collection of short stories, written in
either Scots, Scottish English or British English, revolving around various residents
of Leith, Edinburgh who either use heroin, are friends of the core group of heroin
users, or engage in destructive activities that are implicitly portrayed
as addictions that serve the same function as heroin addiction. The novel is set in the
late 1980s[1] and has been called "the voice of punk, grown up, grown wiser and
grown eloquent".[2]
The novel has since achieved a cult status, added to by the global success of the film
based on it, Trainspotting (1996), directed by Danny Boyle.[3] Welsh later wrote a
sequel, Porno, in 2002. Skagboys, a novel that serves as a prequel, was published in
April 2012.[4]
'Trainspotting' is a slang term for injecting heroin: the drug running along the
'tracks' or veins. It is also said that 'trainspotting' is slang for spotting the drug
dealer, or being on the look out for a drug dealer.
The Bonfire of the Vanities is a 1987 novel by Tom Wolfe. The story is a drama
about ambition, racism, social class, politics, and greed in 1980s New York City and
centres on four main characters: WASP bond trader Sherman
McCoy, Jewish assistant district attorney Larry Kramer, British expatriate journalist
Peter Fallow, and black activist the Reverend Reginald Bacon.
The novel was originally conceived as a serial in the style of Charles Dickens'
writings; it ran in 27 instalments in Rolling Stone starting in 1984. Wolfe heavily
revised it before it was published in book form. The novel was a bestseller and a
phenomenal success, even in comparison with Wolfe's other books.