40 books to read before you die
- 10 Jun 2019
Whatever the breathless claims about reading, one thing is certain: losing yourself in a great novel is one of life’s most enduring and dependable joys. Job satisfaction comes and goes, partners enrapture and abscond, but you can always fall back on the timeless ability of literature to transport you to a different world.
From Jane Austen’s mannered drawing rooms to the airless tower blocks of 1984, novels do something unique. They simultaneously speak to the heart and mind.
They teach you about the history of our world, the possibilities of our future and the fabric of our souls.
So where do you start? It’s a fraught question, because the obvious answer – “the literary canon” – means a pantheon of predominantly dead, white dudes.
The power structures at play for centuries have meant that a very narrow band of people have been given the opportunity to say something universal about the human condition.
As it stands, whittling this list down to 40 novels has been a process that makes Brexit negotiations look simple and amicable. We hope you enjoy the selection – or at least enjoy arguing about who should or should not have made the cut.
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, Sue Townsend
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
- Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
- 1984, George Orwell
- Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel
- The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
- Lord of the Flies, William Golding
- Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
- Middlemarch, George Eliot
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
- Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
- Dune, Frank Herbert
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
- The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Philip K Dick
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- Dracula, Bram Stoker
- The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
- The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
- Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
- Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
- Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
- 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Trial, Franz Kafka
- Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
- The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
The Independent
