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British Classics

Emma by Jane Austen
The Sea by John Banville
The New Confessions by William Boyd
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Riders by Jilly Cooper
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
What Maisie Knew by Henry James
Ulysses by James Joyce
Lady Chatterley's Lover by DH Lawrence
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
At-Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Best of the Rest
Money by Martin Amis
The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Bleak House by Charles Dickens
Howards End by EM Forster
The Forsythe Saga by John Galsworthy
Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Lanark by Alasdair Gray
Living by Henry Green
Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham
Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

European and Russian Classics

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov
If this is a Man by Primo Levi
Confessions of Felix Krull by Thomas Mann
La Vie Mode d'Emploi by Georges Perec
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Best of the Rest
The Coming of Age by Simone de Beauvoir
Life and Fate by Vassily Grossman
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
Embers by Sándor Márai
Blindness by José Saramago
Perfume by Patrick Süskind
Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

American Classics

Independence Day by Richard Ford
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Moby-Dick or, The Whale by Herman Melville
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Fear and Loathing in las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Best of the Rest
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
White Noise by Don DeLillo
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe

Latin American Classics

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
Rayuela by Julio Cortazar
Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Motorcycle Diaries by Ernesto Che Guevara
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz
The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa

Best of the Rest
The President by Miguel Angel Asturias
Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
I, the Supreme by Augusto Roa Bastos
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo

African Classics

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Disgrace by JM Coetzee
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
My Traitor's Heart by Rian Malan
In The Country of Men by Hisham Matar
The No1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith
A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih

Best of the Rest
A Dry White Season by André Brink
The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing
Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton

Asian Classics

Rashomon by Ryunoske Akutagawa
One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
All About H. Hatterr by GV Desani
Heat and Dust by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

Best of the Rest
An Insular Possession by Timothy Mo
The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A Madman's Diary by Lu Xun

Classics from Antiquity

The Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius
The Histories by Herodotus
Works and Days by Hesiod
Iliad by Homer
Odyssey by Homer
De Rerum Natura by Lucretius
Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Art of Love by Ovid
Phaedo by Plato
The Symposium by Plato
Parallel Lives by Plutarch
The Confessions by Saint Augustine
Poems by Sappho
Aeneid by Virgil
The Georgics by Virgil
The Symposium by Xenophon

Best of the Rest
The Politics by Aristotle
On behalf of Caelius by Cicero
The Satires by Juvenal
A History of Rome by Livy
Daphnis and Chloe by Longus
The Civil War by Lucan
Odes by Pindar
The Apology by Plato
Pumpkinification by Seneca

Crime

The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
The Complete Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
LA Confidential by James Ellroy
The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett
Fatherland by Robert Harris
Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
Misery by Stephen King
Get Shorty by Elmore Leonard
Nineteen Seventy Four by David Peace
The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers
The Madman of Bergerac by Georges Simenon
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

Best of the Rest
The Hollow Man by John Dickson Carr
The Innocence of Father Brown by GK Chesterton
The Remorseful Day by Colin Dexter
Devices and Desires by PD James
The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson
The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcom
The Fifth Woman by Henning Mankell
Watchmen by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
Tales of Mystery & Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe
True Grit by Charles Portis
The Godfather by Mario Puzo
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine

Thrillers

Jaws by Peter Benchley
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
Killing Floor by Lee Child
The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy
The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon
The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
On Her Majesty's Secret Service by Ian Fleming
The World at Night by Alan Furst
Marathon Man by William Goldman
Carrie by Stephen King
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum
Where Eagles Dare by Alistair MacLean

Best of the Rest
The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers
Not After Midnight - Five Long Stories by Daphne du Maurier
The Count Of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
The Third Man and other stories by Graham Greene
A Time to Kill by John Grisham
Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

Sci-Fi and Fantasy

I Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
High Rise by JG Ballard
Darkmans by Nicola Barker
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Dune by Frank L Herbert
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Mother London by Michael Moorcock
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake
The Colour Of Magic by Terry Pratchett
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

Best of the Rest
Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
Childhood's End by Arthur C Clarke
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K Dick
The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Scar by China Miéville
Utopia by Thomas More
Animal Farm by George Orwell
The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
Contact by Carl Sagan
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Time Machine by HG Wells
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Romance

Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
A Room with a View by EM Forster
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
The Swimming-Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre-Ambroise-Francois Choderlos de Laclos
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
At Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Elizabeth Smart

Best of the Rest
Possession by AS Byatt
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Go-Between by LP Hartley
The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
The Far Pavillions by Mary Margaret Kaye
Women in Love by DH Lawrence
Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie
Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The Reader by Benhard Schlink
Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
The Graduate by Charles Webb
The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

Comedy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge
Queen Lucia by EF Benson
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding
Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Diary of a Nobody by George & Weeden Grossmith
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel by François Rabelais
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans & Ronald Searle
The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse

Best of the Rest
The Ascent of Rum Doodle by WE Bowman
The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury
What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe
The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by JP Donleavy
Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Porterhouse Blue by Tom Sharpe
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh
Thank You Jeeves by PG Wodehouse

War and History

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R Browning
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples by Winston Churchill
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
Legion of the Damned by Sven Hassel
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
The Face of Battle by John Keegan
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
The Discovery of France by Graham Robb
A History of the Crusades by Steven Runciman
1066 and All That by WC Sellar & RJ Yeatman
A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan
Longitude by Dava Sobel
The Making of the Middle Ages by RW Southern
History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides
The Guns of August by Barbara W Tuchman
Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut
Sword of Honour Trilogy by Evelyn Waugh

Best of the Rest
Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War by Antony Beevor
A Short History Of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine
Europe: A history by Norman Davies
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond
The Siege by Helen Dunmore
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
Dispatches by Michael Herr
Hitler by Ian Kershaw
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
Histories by Tacitus

Lives

Experience by Martin Amis
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell
A Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
Wild Swans by Jung Chang
Alan Clark: Diaries (Vol I) by Alan Clark
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence
The Moon's a Balloon by David Niven
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
The Diaries of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald
The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey
Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius
Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects by Giorgio Vasari
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde

Best of the Rest
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee & Walker Evans
Out of Africa by Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen)
Anthony Blunt: His Lives by Miranda Carter
The Hare with Amber Eyes by Edmund de Waal
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell
Churchill: A Life by Martin Gilbert
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
Giving up the Ghost by Hilary Mantel
Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K Massie
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and the Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi
Maus by Art Spiegelman
Walden by Henry Thoreau
The Double Helix by James Watson

Money and Power

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson
Who Moved my Cheese? by Dr Spencer Johnson
The General Theory of Employment by John Maynard Keynes
Whoops! by John Lanchester
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Of the Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
The Art of War by Sun Tzu

Best of the Rest
Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman
The Great Crash of 1929 by John Kenneth Galbraith
The Road to Serfdom by Frederick Hayek
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Freakonomics by Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner

Poetry

The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Don Juan by Lord Byron
Family Values by Wendy Cope
The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
The Wasteland by TS Eliot
Howl, Kaddish and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
The Man with Night Sweats by Thom Gunn
Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Dart by Alice Oswald
The Selected Poems of Li Po by Li Po
Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Sonnets by William Shakespeare
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth & Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Best of the Rest
Selected Poems by Yehuda Amichai
Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
Selected Poems by John Clare
Songs and Sonnets by John Donne
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Station Island by Seamus Heaney
Montage of a Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes
Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
The Golden Gate by Vikram Seth
White Egrets by Derek Walcott

Plays

Life is a Dream by Pedro Calderon de la Barca
Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov
Top Girls by Caryl Churchill
The Bacchae by Euripides
The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol
Largo Desolato by Vaclav Havel
Ghosts by Henrik Ibsen
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
The Would-be Gentleman by Jean-Baptiste Molière
The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Oedipus the King by Sophocles

Best of the Rest
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
The Rover by Aphra Behn
The Vortex by Noel Coward
The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco
Insignificance by Terry Johnson
Blasted by Sarah Kane
Enron by Lucy Prebble
Miss Julie by August Strindberg
I Will Marry When I Want by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

Children's Classics

Watership Down by Richard Adams
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner
The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
The Doll People by Ann M Martin & Laura Godwin
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Child that Books Built by Francis Spufford
The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Charlotte's Web by EB White

Best of the Rest
The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
How the Whale Became by Ted Hughes
The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
Stig of the Dump by Clive King
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling
A Boy and a Bear in a Boat Rhymes by Dave Shelton
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
The Sword in the Stone by TH White
The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams

Food and Drink

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
French Country Cooking by Elizabeth David
Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
How to Eat by Nigella Lawson
The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break by Steven Sherrill
The Kitchen Diaries, volume I + II by Nigel Slater
The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten
Thai Food by David Thompson

Best of the Rest
A Long Finish by Michael Dibdin
Sichuan Cookery by Fuchsia Dunlop
Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith
Judgement of Paris by George Taber

Sport and Pastimes

Addicted by Tony Adams
It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
All Played Out by Pete Davies
Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby
My Father and other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach
Beyond a Boundary by CLR James
On Bullfighting by AL Kennedy
The Rider by Tim Krabbe
The Fight by Norman Mailer
The Damned United by David Peace

Best of the Rest
How Steeple Sinderby Wanderers Won the FA Cup by JL Carr
The Austerity Olympics by Janie Hamilton
Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand
King of the World by David Remnick
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe