Literary Fiction
- To Kill a Mockingbird
- The Great Gatsby
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Anna Karenina
- Normal People
Genre Fiction
- The Lord of the Rings
- Dune
- Crime and Punishment
- The Name of the Wind
- Gone Girl
Nonfiction
- Sapiens
- Educated
- Man's Search for Meaning
- In Cold Blood
- Thinking, Fast and Slow
Classics
- 1984
- Brave New World
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Pride and Prejudice
- Crime and Punishment
Literary Fiction — Novels That Changed the Form
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee (1960)
Scout Finch watches her father Atticus defend a Black man falsely accused of rape in 1930s Alabama. The novel is narrated from childhood but understood through adult eyes — one of the most technically elegant narrative strategies in American fiction. Its moral clarity is unfashionable in academic circles but it remains the novel most readers cite as life-changing.
Check price on Amazon →One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
The Buendía family across seven generations in the fictional town of Macondo. The novel that established magical realism as a serious literary form — the fantastical and the mundane exist on the same plane without explanation or apology. García Márquez wrote it in eighteen months, reading it aloud to his wife each evening. The opening sentence is the best in 20th-century fiction: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad…"
Check price on Amazon →Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (1878)
An aristocratic woman destroys her life for passion while a parallel story follows a landowner finding peace through labour. Tolstoy puts more intelligence per page than any other novelist — every conversation, every party, every farm scene is doing three things simultaneously. The question of why Anna's arc ends the way it does is genuinely debated. The best translation for modern readers is Pevear and Volokhonsky (2001).
Check price on Amazon →The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Jay Gatsby throws parties hoping Daisy Buchanan will appear. Nick Carraway watches. The novel takes three hours to read and rewards a lifetime of returning to it — each decade you understand a different character's failure. The best short American novel, a perfect sentence-level stylist, and the most honest account of the corruption at the heart of the American dream.
Check price on Amazon →Normal People — Sally Rooney (2018)
Connell and Marianne's circling relationship from secondary school to university. Rooney stripped the novel to its bones — no quotation marks, minimal attribution, relentless interiority — to create a novel about the gap between what people say and what they mean. The best contemporary Irish novel since Colm Tóibín's The Blackbird Singing. The Hulu adaptation is excellent.
Check price on Amazon →Classic Dystopia and Philosophy
1984 — George Orwell (1949)
Winston Smith in Oceania, where the Party controls not only behaviour but thought and history itself. Big Brother, Newspeak, doublethink, Room 101, the Memory Hole — Orwell's coinages have become English. The novel is frequently misread as a simple warning about Communism; it is a warning about any system that requires lying to function, which is most of them.
Check price on Amazon →Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
Raskolnikov, a student in St Petersburg, murders a pawnbroker to test his theory that extraordinary men are above conventional morality. What follows is the most gripping psychological disintegration in Western fiction. The novel is also genuinely funny in places — Dostoevsky is rarely praised for his comedy but Raskolnikov's self-deceptions are often absurdist. Faster than its reputation suggests.
Check price on Amazon →Brave New World — Aldous Huxley (1932)
A society of engineered happiness — no pain, no art, no God, no love. Huxley's dystopia is the complement to Orwell's: where 1984 imagines control through pain, Brave New World imagines control through pleasure. In a world of streaming services and pharmaceutical wellbeing, Huxley increasingly looks like the more accurate prophet. The Savage's chapters are the best in the book.
Check price on Amazon →Genre Fiction at Its Highest
The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien (1954–1955)
Frodo Baggins carries the One Ring to Mount Doom to destroy it. Tolkien invented modern fantasy — the quest structure, the secondary world with its own languages and history, the moral weight given to landscape and weather. All fantasy since is either in conversation with Tolkien or deliberately ignoring him. The Appendices, which most readers skip, contain some of the most moving writing in the trilogy.
Check price on Amazon →Dune — Frank Herbert (1965)
Paul Atreides arrives on Arrakis — the desert planet, the only source of the most valuable substance in the universe. Herbert built a novel that works simultaneously as adventure, political science, ecological treatise, and religious philosophy. The world is complete: its ecology, economics, religion, and history all cohere. The most influential science fiction novel ever written.
Check price on Amazon →The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy — Douglas Adams (1979)
The Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Arthur Dent escapes, barely, with his alien friend Ford Prefect. Adams wrote the funniest sustained prose in the English language and embedded real philosophical questions (the nature of consciousness, the impossibility of meaning) inside jokes that become more resonant the more you think about them. The answer is 42.
Check price on Amazon →Gone Girl — Gillian Flynn (2012)
Nick Dunne's wife disappears on their fifth anniversary. Both narrators are lying. Flynn's achievement was making the thriller literary — sharp prose, genuine ideas about gender and marriage performance, and a plot twist that reframes an entire novel's worth of reading. The most influential thriller of the decade: it generated an entire subgenre (domestic noir) and proved literary readers would buy commercial thrillers if the writing was good enough.
Check price on Amazon →These 25 books were selected by cross-referencing the Modern Library 100, the Guardian's Best 100 Novels, BBC's Big Read, the Goodreads Choice Awards (10-year aggregate), and first-hand reading. The criterion was lasting impact — books that change how you read everything after them, not merely books that are good. Lists like this are always subjective; the goal is to start the argument, not end it.
Essential Nonfiction
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind — Yuval Noah Harari (2011)
The complete story of the human species — from the cognitive revolution 70,000 years ago to the present. Harari is the best explainer of large ideas writing today: every chapter reframes something you thought you understood. The chapters on agriculture (the greatest fraud in history?), money, and religion are the most discussed. Whatever its academic controversies, no nonfiction book of the past decade has been more widely read.
Check price on Amazon →Educated — Tara Westover (2018)
Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho, never attending school, and earned a PhD from Cambridge. The memoir is a study in what education actually is, how families construct reality, and how people escape identities they were born into. Westover's prose is precise and controlled. The most important memoir of the decade.
Check price on Amazon →Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl (1946)
A psychiatrist's account of surviving Auschwitz and the logotherapy theory he developed from it: that the primary human drive is not pleasure or power but meaning. Written in nine days, the book has sold 12 million copies. Short, dense, and reads differently at every stage of life. The first section (the camps) and the second (logotherapy) work as standalone texts; together they form one of the most important books of the 20th century.
Check price on Amazon →In Cold Blood — Truman Capote (1966)
The 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and the investigation, capture, and execution of the killers. Capote invented literary journalism — nonfiction with the structural and stylistic techniques of the novel — and this is its founding text. The profiles of Perry Smith and Dick Hickock are among the most morally complex in nonfiction: Capote makes you understand the killers without forgiving them.
Check price on Amazon →Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman (2011)
The life's work of a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist — a summary of forty years of research into how humans actually make decisions, which is mostly badly. System 1 (fast, intuitive, error-prone) and System 2 (slow, deliberate, lazy). The chapters on cognitive bias, loss aversion, and the difference between experienced and remembered self are essential for any reader who wants to understand why smart people make predictable mistakes.
Check price on Amazon →The Remaining Eight — Essential Breadth
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (1813)
Elizabeth Bennet navigates the marriage market of Regency England while resisting the arrogant Mr Darcy. Austen's wit is so concentrated it can seem effortless; the social architecture is as precisely built as anything in contemporary literary fiction. The opening sentence remains the most famous in English literature.
Check price on Amazon →The Alchemist — Paulo Coelho (1988)
A shepherd boy follows his Personal Legend to the Egyptian pyramids and discovers what he was looking for was nearby all along. The most-read work of literary fiction of the 20th century. Critics dismiss it; readers return to it across decades. Best read at a moment of transition — before a major decision, after a loss, in the middle of not knowing what to do next.
Check price on Amazon →The Midnight Library — Matt Haig (2020)
Between life and death is a library where every book represents a different life Nora Seed could have lived. Haig wrote it as an anti-depression novel — the argument that any version of a life, honestly lived, is worth living. The most therapeutically useful contemporary novel, widely recommended by doctors and therapists. The philosophical premise (do regrets change under examination?) is handled with more rigour than it initially appears.
Check price on Amazon →A Fine Balance — Rohinton Mistry (1995)
Four characters find temporary shelter together in Bombay during Indira Gandhi's State of Emergency. The novel is about everything the title suggests — the balance between hope and despair, love and brutality, complicity and resistance. Mistry is the closest living equivalent to Dickens in his combination of social panorama and individual tenderness. Often cited as the novel most likely to make a reader cry.
Check price on Amazon →The Secret History — Donna Tartt (1992)
Five students at a small Vermont college study Ancient Greek with an eccentric professor and commit a murder. Told in retrospect from the moment of the killing. Tartt's debut invented dark academia as a genre and remains its defining text. The prose is lush and the moral accounting — Richard's complicity, his attraction to the group's decay — is the real subject.
Check price on Amazon →Project Hail Mary — Andy Weir (2021)
A man wakes alone on a spaceship with no memory of why he's there, millions of miles from Earth, on a mission to save the human species. Weir's third novel and his best: problem-solving as narrative structure, first contact handled with genuine scientific rigour, and an ending that earns every page before it. The most recommended science fiction book of the 2020s.
Check price on Amazon →Born a Crime — Trevor Noah (2016)
Trevor Noah's account of growing up mixed-race in apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa, where his existence was literally a crime. The funniest serious memoir written in the past decade — Noah structures each chapter as a comedy set with a devastating punchline. The chapter on his mother's shooting is among the most powerful writing in contemporary memoir.
Check price on Amazon →The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)
Stevens, an English butler, takes a road trip and slowly reveals — through repression and displacement — that he sacrificed his entire emotional life in service to a man who turned out to be a Nazi sympathiser. Ishiguro's prose is the most controlled in contemporary English fiction: every sentence is doing something with what it withholds. The saddest novel in English and the best argument for reading slowly.
Check price on Amazon →Frequently Asked Questions
Are there books that everyone agrees are the best?
Not exactly, but some books appear on almost every serious list: Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Hamlet, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Ulysses. Among more accessible works, To Kill a Mockingbird and 1984 are as close to universal agreement as fiction gets.
Where should I start if I want to read the classics?
Start with the shorter ones: The Great Gatsby (3 hours), The Picture of Dorian Gray (4 hours), Brave New World (5 hours), Of Mice and Men (2 hours). Build to the longer ones: Pride and Prejudice, Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina. Don't start with Ulysses — read it last, if at all.