Must Read Books Before You Die
Why not join our New Year's Resolution to catch up with some great classics old and new. This way you can take a risk and try something outside your comfort zone or pick out something you wouldn't normally read - we're sure you'll be pleasantly surprised!
Each week we'll be making a new recommendation to help you explore some of the greatest novels of all time - taking you back to those great and glorious classics of literature, as well as some modern stomach-turning cult fiction. Whether it's 'Ulysses', 'The Long Good-Bye' or 'Interview With the Vampire' that you left behind on your reading shelf, let's pick them up, dust them off, and make 2010 a well read year!
Author: E M Forster
Publication Date: 19891100
The winner of the Whitbread Best First Novel 1990, this is the story of Karim Amir, "an Englishman born and bred - almost", who lives with his English mother and Indian father in the South London suburbs. It is written by the author of "My Beautiful Launderette" and "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid".
Author: James Ellroy
Publication Date: 7 September 2006
On 11th January, 1947 in Los Angeles, a beautiful young woman walked into the night and met her horrific destiny. Five days later, her tortured body was found drained of blood and cut in half. The newspapers called her 'The Black Dahlia'. Two cops embark on a hellish journey that takes them to the core of the dead girl's twisted life.
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentucky, an era is ending as slavery comes under attack from the abolitionists. For Sethe, Paul D. Halle and the others, the benign imprisonment of Sweet Home is destroyed. By the Nobel Prize-winning author of "Song of Solomon" and "Tar Baby".
When the downtrodden animals of Manor Farm overthrow their master Mr Jones and take over the farm themselves, they imagine it is the beginning of a life of freedom and equality. But gradually a cunning, ruthless elite among them, masterminded by the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, starts to take control.
Author: Virginia Woolf
Publication Date: 19761028
Mrs Dalloway offers the reader an impression of a June day in London in 1923. Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of a Conservative member of Parliament, is preparing to give an evening party, while Septimus Warren Smith hears birds in Regent's Park chattering in Greek. There seems to be nothing, except perhaps London, to link Clarissa and Septimus.
Captain Gault has decided that his family must leave Lahardane. They are after all Protestants living in the big house in rural Cork, and the country is in turmoil. It is 1921. But 8-year-old Lucy can't bear to leave the seashore, the old house, the woods - so she hatches a plan. It is then that the calamity happens.
Written in 1932, when the Western world was poised on the brink of social and scientific revolution, this novel is Huxley's nightmare vision of the future.
Features a satirical indicement of military madness and stupidity, and the desire of the ordinary man to survive it. This work tells a tale of the dangerously sane Captain Yossarian, who spends his time in Italy plotting to survive.
Joseph and Harriet Blackstone emigrate from Norfolk to New Zealand in search of new beginnings and prosperity. But the harsh land near Christchurch where they settle threatens to destroy them almost before they begin. When Joseph finds gold in the creek he is seized by an obsession with the voluptuous riches awaiting him deep in the earth.
Author: George Grossmith
Publication Date: 26 August 1999
Mr Pooter is an office clerk and upright family man in a dull 1880s suburb. His diary is a portrait of the class system and the inherent snobbishness of the suburban middle classes. It sends up contemporary crazes for Aestheticism, spiritualism and bicycling.
Winner of the 1973 Booker Prize, this story is set in Spring of 1857, with India on the brink of a bloody mutiny. Then the Sepoys at the military cantonment revolt and the British community retreats into the Residency. As food and ammunition grow short, the Residency becomes ever more vulnerable.
The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.
Author: J. G. Ballard
Publication Date: 19 January 1995
First published in 1973, this novel provides the hellish tableau in which Vaughan, a 'TV scientist', experiments with erotic atrocities among crash victims, each more sinister than the last: ultimately, he craves a union of blood, semen and engine coolant in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor.
Author: Bram Stoker
Publication Date: 27 March 2003
When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula with the purchase of a London house, he makes a series of horrific discoveries about his client. Soon after wards, various bizarre incidents unfold in England: an apparently unmanned ship is wrecked off the coast of Whitby and a young woman discovers strange puncture marks on her neck.
Film tie-in edition of Bernhard Schlink's exceptionally powerful novel - 'A thriller, a love story and a deeply moving examination of a German conscience' [Independent on Saturday]
Heart of Darkness
With the Congo Diary
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publication Date: 24 February 2000
Marlow voyages into the wildness and jungle of the Belgian Congo to meet Kurtz, a company agent, and having found him, realizes that Kurtz has won supremacy over the natives through unrestrained violence. The story explores the workings of the subconscious, and addresses political imperialism.
Spins out a multiple mystery of obsession and betrayal (both scholarly and romantic). This book creates an exuberant enquiry into the ways in which art mirrors life and then turns around to shape it.
Author: Truman Capote
Publication Date: 3 September 1998
With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, Holly Golightly is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Her brownstone apartment vibrates with martini-soaked parties as she plays hostess to millionaires and gangsters alike. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal.
Author: John Irving
Publication Date: 1 July 1986
Focuses on the life and times of T S Garp, the bastard son of Jenny Fields - a feminist leader ahead of her times. This title also focuses on the life and death of a famous mother and her almost-famous son.
Author: Henry Fielding
Publication Date: 20040729
A novel in which a wealthy widower's humdrum existence is shattered when he discovers a baby boy abandoned in his bed, whom he adopts and names Tom Jones, a decision he may later come to regret.
One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop. The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah's neighbour, Smilla, suspects murder. She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.
Author: Graham Greene
Publication Date: 19980903
From the author of THE POWER AND THE GLORY, now reissued with a new jacket. A story of gang war in the underworld of Brighton. Pinkie, only seventeen, has already brutally killed a man. Now believing he has escaped retribution, he is unprepared for Ida Arnold, who is determined to avenge the death.
Author: Iain Banks
Publication Date: 1 April 1992
Author: D. H. Lawrence
Publication Date: 3 September 1998
Constance Chatterley is deeply unhappy as she is married to Clifford who is paralyzed below the waist. Oppressed by her dreary life, she finds refuge and regeneration in the arms of Mellors the game-keeper. But can she break out against the constraints of society, and yield to her instinctive desire for him?
Author: Graham Swift
Publication Date: 6 May 2004
Sarah is in prison. Every fortnight she is visited by George, the private eye she employed to observe the final stage of her husband's affair. The visits and the days between lead George back into Sarah's past and into events he can picture only too well. This is a tale of love, murder, and suspense.
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell
Publication Date: 6 April 2006
Margaret's safe existence is turned upside down when she has to move to the grim northern town of Milton. Not only does she have her eyes opened by the poverty and hardship she encounters there, but she is thrown into confusion by stern factory owner John Thornton - whose treatment of his workers brings them into fierce opposition.
The New York Trilogy
"City of Glass", "Ghosts" and "Locked Room"
Author: Paul Auster
Publication Date: 5 February 2004
Three stories on the nature of identity. In the first a detective writer is drawn into a curious and baffling investigation, in the second a man is set up in an apartment to spy on someone, and the third concerns the disappearance of a man whose childhood friend is left as his literary executor.
Set onboard an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1864, this novel is both a love story and an historical tour-de-force that relates the developing romance between Oscar Hopkins, an Oxford seminarian, and Lucinda Leplastrier, a Sydney heiress with a fascination for glass.
Author: Jonathan Swift
Publication Date: 19700326
Swift's scornful satire, written to vex the world rather than divert it's, takes a caustic look at those most contemporary concerns irrational prejudice, social inequality, ivory tower elitism and the correct way to open a boiled egg.