100 Novels That Shaped Our World
Books for 2020-2021
Titles marked in red have already been studied in previous years, or chosen by a member for the coming year.
Identity
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Days Without End – Sebastian Barry
Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels
Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
Small Island – Andrea Levy
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe (already studied)
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Love, Sex & Romance
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Forever – Judy Blume
Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Riders – Jilly Cooper
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Hurston
The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye
The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak
The Passion – Jeanette Winterson
The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton (NC)
Adventure
City of Bohane – Kevin Barry
Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman
Ivanhoe – Walter Scott
Mr Standfast – John Buchan
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler (CT)
The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins
The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien
Life, Death & Other Worlds
A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin
Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri
Dune – Frank Herbert
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Gilead – Marilynne Robinson
The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett
The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin
The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman
The Road – Cormac McCarthy
Politics, Power & Protest
A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini (MA)
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley (PW)
Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie
Lord of the Flies – William Golding (PW)
Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman
Strumpet City – James Plunkett
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (already studied)
V for Vendetta – Alan Moore
Unless – Carol Shields
Class & Society
A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul (already studied)
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee
Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens
Poor Cow – Nell Dunn
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – A Sillitoe
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – B Moore
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark (already studied)
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (already studied)
Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (already studied)
Coming of Age
Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery
Golden Child – Claire Adam
Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood
So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell
Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan
The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien
The Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling
The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole – Sue Townsend (JB)
The Twilight Saga – Stephenie Meyer
Family & Friendship
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild (RS)
Cloudstreet – Tim Winton
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons (already studied)
I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith
Middlemarch – George Eliot (already studied)
Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin
The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx (MW)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë
The Witches – Roald Dahl
Crime & Conflict
American Tabloid – James Ellroy
American War – Omar El Akkad
Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Regeneration – Pat Barker
The Children of Men – P.D. James
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid
The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith (CT)
The Quiet American – Graham Greene
Rule Breakers
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville
Habibi – Craig Thompson
How to be Both – Ali Smith
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse
The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde