Best Novels & English Literature

📗 Moll Flanders ✍️ Daniel Defoe - 1722 Written in a time when criminal biographies enjoyed great success, Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders details the life of the irresistible Moll and her struggles through poverty and sin in search of property and power. By 1722, Defoe had become recognized as a novel…

📗 Robinson Crusoe ✍️ Daniel Defoe - 1719 Daniel Defoe’s great masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe perhaps is the greatest adventure in all of English literature. It relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraord…

📗 A Christmas Carol ✍️ Charles Dickens - 1843 A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens’ most loved books – a true classic and a Christmas time must-read. Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to sh…

📗 Swing Time ✍️ Zadie Smith – 2016 A richly layered novel of friendship, ambition, and identity, Swing Time follows two girls from a working-class London neighborhood whose shared passion for dance shapes their lives in dramatically different ways. Moving across decades and continents, the story ex…

📗 Sense and Sensibility ✍️ Jane Austen - 1811 Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of tragic love provide the theme for Jane Austen’s dramatically human narrative. In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, Sense and Sensibility is the answer to those c…

📗 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ✍️ Mark Twain - 1876 The classic adventures of one of American literature’s most beloved characters from Mark Twain. There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer—even in the darkest moments, affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams o…

📗 The Underground Railroad ✍️ Colson Whitehead – 2016 A powerful work of historical fiction infused with imaginative brilliance, The Underground Railroad follows Cora, a young enslaved woman who escapes a Georgia plantation in search of freedom. Reimagining the Underground Railroad as a literal sub…

📗 Swing Time ✍️ Zadie Smith – 2016 A richly layered novel of friendship, ambition, and identity, Swing Time follows two girls from a working-class London neighborhood whose shared passion for dance shapes their lives in dramatically different ways. Moving across decades and continents, the story ex…

📗 Agnes Grey ✍️ Anne Brontë - 1847 Concerned for her family’s financial welfare and eager to expand her own horizons, Agnes Grey takes up the position of governess, the only respectable employment for an unmarried woman in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, Agnes cannot anticipate the hardship…

📗 Sense and Sensibility ✍️ Jane Austen - 1811 Two sisters of opposing temperaments who share the pangs of tragic love provide the theme for Jane Austen’s dramatically human narrative. In its marvelously perceptive portrayal of two young women in love, Sense and Sensibility is the answer to those c…

📗 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ✍️ Mark Twain - 1876 The classic adventures of one of American literature’s most beloved characters from Mark Twain. There is sheer delight in Tom Sawyer—even in the darkest moments, affection and wit permeate its pages. For adults it re-creates the vanished dreams o…

📗 A Christmas Carol ✍️ Charles Dickens - 1843 A Christmas Carol is one of Charles Dickens’ most loved books – a true classic and a Christmas time must-read. Ebenezer Scrooge is a mean, miserable, bitter old man with no friends. One cold Christmas Eve, three ghosts take him on a scary journey to sh…

📗 The Fifth Season ✍️ N. K. Jemisin – 2015 Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel, The Fifth Season is a groundbreaking work of speculative fiction set in a world plagued by catastrophic climate upheavals known as “Fifth Seasons.” Through interconnected narratives, Jemisin follows three women with…

📗 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ✍️ Mark Twain - 1884 In recent years, neither the persistent effort to “clean up” the racial epithets in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn nor its consistent use in the classroom have diminished, highlighting the novel’s wide-ranging influence and its co…

📗 Bleak House ✍️ Charles Dickens - 1853 The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system a…

📗 The Catcher in the Rye ✍️ Jerome David Salinger - 1951 The Catcher in the Rye is J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel of post-war alienation told by angst-ridden teen Holden Caulfield. Controversial at the time of publication for its frank language, it was an instant best-seller, and remains beloved by bot…