logo search

Britain's favourite books: the top 100

nor flippant, but always gravely polite, and her writing contains a delicate but sharp-edged irony.

  • L.P. Hartley is one of the most distinguished of modern novelists; and one of the most original. For the world of his creation is com­posed of such diverse elements. On the one hand he is a keen and accurate observer of the process of human thought and feeling; he is also a sharp-eyed chronicler of the social scene. But his picture of both is transformed by the light of a Gothic imagination that reveals itself now in fanciful reverie, now in the mingled dark and gleam of a mysterious light and a mysterious darkness.

  • Martin Amis is the most important novelist of his generation and probably the most influential prose stylist in Britain today. The son of Kingsley Amis, considered Britain's best novelist of the 1950s, at the age of 24 Martin won the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Rachel Papers (his father had won the same prize 20 years earlier). Since 1973 he has published seven more novels, plus three books of journalism and one of short stories. Each work has been well received, in particular Money (1984), which was described as "a key novel of the decade." His latest book is The Information (1995). It has been said of Amis that he has enjoyed a career more like that of a pop star than a writer.

  • b) Choose an author, not necessarily one of the greats, you'd like to talk aboot. Note down a few pieces of factual information about his life and work.

  • 7. Team up with another student to talk on the following topics. Use expres­sions of agreement and disagreement.

  • "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." (Samuel Johnson)

  • "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." (Mark Twain)

  • "There's an old saying that all the world loves a lover. It doesn't. What all the world loves is a scrap. It wants to see two lovers strug­gling for the hand of one woman." (Anonymous)

  • "No furniture is so charming as books, even if you never open them and read a single word." (Sydney Smith)

  • "Books and friends should be few but good." (a proverti)

  • 10

  • 11

  • 12

  • 13

  • The Lord of the Rings 14

  • J.R.R. Tolkien

  • 1984 15

  • George Orwell

  • Animal Farm 16

  • George Orwell

  • Ulysses 17

  • James Joyce

  • Catch-22 18

  • Joseph Heller

  • The Catcher in the Rye 19

  • J.D. Salinger

  • To Kill a Mockingbird 20

  • Harper Lee

  • One Hundred Years of 21

  • Solitude

  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez

  • The Grapes of Wrath 22

  • John Steinbeck

  • Trainspotting 23

  • Irvine Welsh

  • Wild Swans 24

  • Jung Chang

  • The Great Gatsby

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald 25

  • Lord of the Flies

  • William Golding 26

  • On the Road

  • Jack Kerouac Brave New World Aldous Huxley The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame Winnie -the-Pooh A. A. Milne The Color Purple Alice Walker The Hobbit J. R. R. Tolkien The Outsider Albert Camus The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe С S. Lewis The Trial Franz Kafka Gone with the Wind Margaret Michell The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie The Diary of Anne Frank

    1. 114

    2. 115

    1. 27 A Clockwork Orange

    2. Anthony Burgess

    1. Sons and Lovers D.S. Lawrence

    2. To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf

    3. If This Is a Man Primo Levi

    4. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

    5. The Wasp Factory Iain Banks

    6. Remembrance of Things Past

    1. Marcel Proust

    2. 34 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

    3. Roald Dahl

    1. Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck

    2. Beloved Toni Morrison

    3. Possession A. S. Byatt

    4. Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad

    5. A Passage to India E. M. Forster

    6. Watership Down Richard Adams

    7. Sophie's World Jostein Gaarder

    8. The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco

    9. Love in the Time of Cholera

    1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

    1. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier

    2. The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro

    1. 46 The Unbearable Lightness ofBeing

    2. Milan Kundera

    1. Birdsong Sebastian Faulks

    2. Howards End E. M. Forster

    3. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh

    4. A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth

    5. Dune

    1. Frank Herbert

    2. 52 A Prayer for Owen Meany

    3. John Irving

    1. Perfume Patrick Susskind

    2. Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak

    3. The Gormeaghast Trilogy Mervyn Peake

    4. Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee

    5. The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

    6. The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood

    7. Testament Of Youth Vera Brittain

    8. The Magus John Fowles

    9. Brighton Rock Graham Greene

    10. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist Robert Tressell

    11. The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov

    12. Tales of the City Armistead Maupin

    1. 65 The French Lieutenant's Woman

    2. John Fowles

    1. Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernieres

    2. Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut

    3. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert Pirsig

    4. A Room with a View E.M. Forster

    5. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis

    6. If Stephen King

    7. The Power and the Glory Graham Greene

    8. The Stand Stephen King

    1. I 74 All Quiet on the Western

    2. \ Front

    3. I Erich Maria Remarque

    4. t 75 Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha

    5. \ Roddy Doyle

    6. г 76 Matilda

    7. I Roald Dahl

    8. !77 American Psycho Bret Easton Ellis 78 Fear and Loathing in I Las Vegas

    9. I Hunter S. Thompson 79 A Brief History of Time Stephen Hawking I 80 James and the Giant Peach ; Roald Dahl \ 81 Lady Chatterley's Lover I D. H. Lawrence

    10. I 82 The Bonfire of the Vanities [ Tom Wolfe

    11. "1

    12. 83 The Complete Cookery Course

    13. Delia Smith

    1. An Evil Cradling Brian Keenan

    2. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence

    3. Down and Out in Paris and London

    1. George Orwell

    1. 2001 - A Space Odyssey Arthur С Clarke

    2. The Tin Drum Giinther Grass

    3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

    1. Alexander Solzhenitsyn

    2. 90 Long Walk to Freedom Nelson Mandela

    1. The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins

    2. Jurassic Park

    1. Michael Crichton

    1. The Alexandria Quartet Lawrence Durrell

    2. Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton

    3. High Fidelity Nick Hornby

    4. The Van Roddy Doyle

    5. TheBFG Roald Dahl

    6. Earthly Powers Anthony Burgess

    7. /, Claudius Robert Graves

    8. The Horse Whisperer Nicholas Evans

    1. 117