501 Must-Read Books​

Classic Fiction

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
The Beast Within by Émile Zola
Bliss and Other Stories by Katherine Mansfield
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Epic of Gilgamesh by Anonymous
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Histoires extraordinaires by Edgar Allan Poe
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Howards End by E. M. Forster
The Iliad by Homer
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
King Solomon's Mines by Henry Rider Haggard
Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Stories by Anton Chekhov
The Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Utopia by Thomas More
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Vathek by William Beckford
The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Waverley by Walter Scott
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Classics

Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
Three Men in a Boat—To Say Nothing of the Dog by Jerome K. Jerome

Modern Fiction

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald
Auto da Fé by Elias Canetti
Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Blind Owl by Ṣādiq Hidāyat
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street by Naguib Mahfouz
Cakes and Ale by W. Somerset Maugham
Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernières
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Changing Places by David Lodge
Chéri by Colette
Cold heaven by Brian Moore
Collected Stories by Isaac Babel
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Couples by John Updike
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
The Diviners by Margaret Laurence
Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands by Jorge Amado
Embers by Sándor Márai
Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
The Engineer of Human Souls by Josef Škvorecký
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Felicia's Journey by William Trevor
Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz
Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
The File on H.: A Novel by Ismail Kadare
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
From the Fifteenth District by Mavis Gallant
Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
God's Grace by Bernard Malamud
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor
The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Group by Mary McCarthy
Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
Herzog by Saul Bellow
A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes
The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton-Burnett
A House for Mr. Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Hunger by Knut Hamsun
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
In Praise of Older Women by Stephen Vizinczey
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
It by Stephen King
Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
July's People by Nadine Gordimer
The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
Last Exit to Brooklyn by Jr Hubert Selby
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lost Horizon by James Hilton
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master: A Novel by Colm Tóibín
Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick
Mr. Weston's Good Wine by T. F. Powys
Nadja by André Breton
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
The nephew by James Purdy
The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The Old Man and The Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Once Were Warriors by Alan Duff
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
The Palm-wine Drinkard by Amos Tutuola
A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
Pereira Declares: A Testimony by Antonio Tabucchi
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi
Possession by A. S. Byatt
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Progress of Love by Alice Munro
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
The Regeneration Trilogy by Pat Barker
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The Sea of Fertility by Yukio Mishima
The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen
The Short Stories of Saki by Saki
Soldiers of Salamis by Javier Cercas
Sophie's Choice by William Styron
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Staying On by Paul Scott
The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Surfacing by Margaret Atwood
The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien
The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
The Trial by Franz Kafka
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
Underworld by Don DeLillo
Unless by Carol Shields
Victory: An Island Tale by Joseph Conrad
Voss by Patrick White
The Wars by Timothy Findley
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Where the Jackals Howl by Amos Oz
The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas
Wildlife by Richard Ford
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
The World According to Garp by John Irving
Zeno's Conscience by Italo Svevo

Science Fiction

1984 by George Orwell
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
I Am Legend by Richard Matheson
Brain Wave by Poul Anderson
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
City by Clifford D. Simak
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
Donovan's Brain by Curt Siodmak
Dune by Frank Herbert
Dwellers in the Mirage by Abraham Merritt
Erewhon by Samuel Butler
The Green Child by Herbert Read
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares
Inverted World by Christopher Priest
The Island of Dr. Moreau by H. G. Wells
Islandia by Austin Tappan Wright
Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis
The People Trap by Robert Sheckley
Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
Ringworld by Larry Niven
The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner
Shikasta: Re, Colonised Planet 5 by Doris Lessing
Slan by A. E. Van Vogt
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Solaris by Stanisław Lem
The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder by James De Mille
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
The Time Traders by Andre Norton
To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip José Farmer
Two Planets by Kurd Lasswitz
Who Goes There?: The Novella That Formed the Basis of the Thing by Jr. John W. Campbell

Children's Fiction

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street by Dr. Seuss
Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
At the Back of the North Wind by George MacDonald
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm by Jacob Grimm
The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
The Complete Verse and Other Nonsense by Edward Lear
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kästner
The Fellowship of the Ring: Being the First Part of The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
Five Children and It by E. Nesbit
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, Book 1) by Philip Pullman
The Golem by Isaac Bashevis Singer
The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling
Heidi by Johanna Spyri
The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler
Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling
The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Mary Poppins by P. L. Travers
Nobody's Boy by Hector Malot
Perrault's Complete Fairy Tales by Charles Perrault
Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie
The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sophie's Misfortunes by Comtesse de Ségur
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting
Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
The Sword in the Stone by T. H. White
The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
The War of the Buttons by Louis Pergaud
The Weirdstone of Brisingamen by Alan Garner
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle

History

The Age of the Cathedrals: Art and Society, 980–1420 by Georges Duby
The Annals by Tacitus
The Armada by Garrett Mattingly
Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson
The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller by Carlo Ginzburg
Chinese Shadows by Simon Leys
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt
Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire by Niall Ferguson
The Crusades through Arab Eyes by Amin Maalouf
Daily Life in Ancient Rome by Jérôme Carcopino
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
The Decline of the West [complete] by Oswald Spengler
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman
The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama
The Fall of Berlin 1945 by Antony Beevor
The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes
Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul by Roy Porter
Frozen Desire by James Buchan
God's First Love: Christians and Jews Over Two Thousand Years (Phoenix Giants S.) by Friedrich Heer
Hiroshima by John Hersey
The Histories by Herodotus
A History of Warfare by John Keegan
Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives by Alan Bullock
The Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy by Martin Gilbert
The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Ariès
The Iron King by Maurice Druon
Islam in History: Ideas, People, and Events in the Middle East by Bernard Lewis
Leviathan & the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life by Steven Shapin
London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd
Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade by Henri Pirenne
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Fernand Braudel
Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years by Felipe Fernández-Armesto
The Naked Heart by Peter Gay
The Origins of the Second World War: 1919-1939 by A. J. P. Taylor
The ornament of the world by María Rosa Menocal
Pagans and Christians by Robin Lane Fox
Pandaemonium 1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers by Humphrey Jennings
Pax Britannica: the Climax of an Empire by Jan Morris
A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century by John Brewer
Plutarch's Lives by Plutarch
Rites of Spring : The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age by Modris Eksteins
Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T. E. Lawrence
A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolome de Las Casas
The Story of English by Robert McCrum
The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 by Eamon Duffy
The Trial of Socrates by I. F. Stone
The Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles
The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon

Memoirs

84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff
Amiel's Journal by Henri Frédéric Amiel
An Angel at My Table by Janet Frame
Aubrey's brief lives by John Aubrey
Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda
The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
The Book of Margery Kempe by Margery Kempe
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir by Paul Monette
Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl
Childhood, Youth & Exile by Alexander Herzen
The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Vol. III: Autobiographies by William Butler Yeats
The Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Confessions by Augustine
Diaries 1910 - 1923 by Franz Kafka
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
The Diary of Alice James by Alice James
The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys
Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments by Edmund Gosse
From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Parts 1-3 (Goethe: The Collected Works, Vol. 4) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A Grief Observed by C. S. Lewis
In the Castle of my Skin by George Lamming
Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton
Journal of Katherine Mansfield by Katherine Mansfield
Journals: 1889-1949 by André Gide
The Letters by Pliny the Younger
Memoirs by Pablo Neruda
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C. G. Jung
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
My Left Foot by Christy Brown
My Place by Sally Morgan
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
Paula by Isabel Allende
Pentimento by Lillian Hellman
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson by Nigel Nicolson
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde
The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje
The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited by Vladimir Nabokov
The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus by Cyril Connolly
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1933-1941 by Victor Klemperer
The Words by Jean-Paul Sartre

Thriller

Above the Dark Circus by Hugh Walpole
The Big Clock by Kenneth Fearing
Blood Sport by Dick Francis
Bones and Silence by Reginald Hill
Born Victim by Hillary Waugh
The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich
The Case of the Abominable Snowman by Nicholas Blake
The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen
The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
Deadlock by Sara Paretsky
Death in the Wrong Room by Anthony Gilbert
Death of My Aunt by C. H. B. Kitchin
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly by John Franklin Bardin
Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
Dover One by Joyce Porter
The Engagement by Georges Simenon
Final Curtain by Ngaio Marsh
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Glass-Sided Ants' Nest by Peter Dickinson
Hamlet, Revenge! by Michael Innes
He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr
How Like an Angel by Margaret Millar
In The Last Analysis by Amanda Cross
A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
The Last Detective by Peter Lovesey
The Laughing Policeman by Maj Sjöwall
Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles
The Man in the Net by Patrick Quentin
The Man Who Killed Himself by Julian Symons
Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Høeg
More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham
The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
The Murder Room by P. D. James
The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux
No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
An Oxford Tragedy by J. C. Masterman
A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse
The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley
Psycho by Robert Bloch
Quiet as a Nun by Antonia Fraser
A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes
The Red Box by Rex Stout
A Red Death by Walter Mosley
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Red House Mystery by A. A. Milne
The Rose At Ten by Marco Denevi
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer
The Sleeping Car Murders by Sébastien Japrisot
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré
The Steam Pig by James McClure
Suicide Excepted by Cyril Hare
The Sunday Woman by Carlo Fruttero
Thus Was Adonis Murdered by Sarah Caudwell
Trent's Last Case by E. C. Bentley
Trial and Error by Anthony Berkeley
Unnatural Exposure by Patricia Cornwell
Vendetta by Michael Dibdin
The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

Travel Writing

Among the Believers: An Islamic Journey by V. S. Naipaul
Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape by Barry Lopez
The Cruise of the Snark by Jack London
Danube by Claudio Magris
Dead Man's Chest: Travels After Robert Louis Stevenson by Nicholas Rankin
Destinations: Essays from Rolling Stone by Jan Morris
Eothen by Alexander William Kinglake
From Southern Cross to Pole Star by A. F. Tschiffely
Golden Earth: Travels in Burma by Norman Lewis
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin
Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon
Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile by John Hanning Speke
Journals of the Western Islands by Samuel Johnson
Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft by Thor Heyerdahl
My Journey to Lhasa by Alexandra David-Néel
Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat
On Fiji Islands by Ronald Wright
On the Narrow Road: A Journey into Lost Japan by Lesley Downer
Le poisson-scorpion by Nicolas Bouvier
The Purple Land by W. H. Hudson
The Road to Oxiana by Robert Byron
Roads to Santiago by Cees Nooteboom
A Rose for Winter by Laurie Lee
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West by Francis Parkman
Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford
The Seasick Whale: An Israeli Abroad by Ephraim Kishon
Seven Years in Tibet by Heinrich Harrer
A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby
The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen
A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain
The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands by Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Travels of Ibn Battutah by Ibn Battutah
The Travels of Marco Polo by Marco Polo
Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes by Robert Louis Stevenson
Travels with Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck
The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels by Freya Stark
Video Night in Kathmandu: And Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East by Pico Iyer
The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin

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