Featured Books
Featured Books
Every title the collective has read, guided or pressed into somebody's hands — 162 books, real covers, a line on each, and a direct link to buy.
Showing 50 of 162 books.
Literary Fiction
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
An English butler retraces a lifetime of service and quietly discovers what it cost him.
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Historical Fiction
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Memory walks through the door and sits down in Morrison's fierce, haunted masterpiece.
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Essay
A Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf
The sharpest argument ever made about the money, space and time creative work requires.
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Classic
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student commits murder in theory and then has to live inside it.
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Classic
The Stranger
Albert Camus
A cold, short novel about a man who refuses to perform the feelings expected of him.
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Magical Realism
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Seven generations of Buendias in a town where the miraculous is ordinary.
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Criticism
On Photography
Susan Sontag
Essays that changed how a century looked at looking.
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Classic
Middlemarch
George Eliot
A whole provincial world, rendered with more sympathy than any novel before it.
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Modernist
Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
One London day, one party, and the war humming under every hour.
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Modernist
To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Time passes; a house waits; grief becomes shape and light.
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Classic
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
The wittiest courtship in English, and a study of how judgement misleads.
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Classic
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Bronte
A governess insists on her own worth against everything arranged to deny it.
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Classic
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Love as weather: violent, elemental and unforgiving on the moors.
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Classic
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
A boy is remade by money he did not earn and cannot understand.
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Classic
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
Two marriages, one society, and the terrible clarity of desire.
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Classic
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy
Russia at war and at dinner, in the largest human canvas ever attempted.
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Classic
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky
A patricide becomes an argument about God, freedom and guilt.
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Classic
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Provincial boredom and borrowed romance, sentence by perfect sentence.
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Classic
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
A green light, a made-up man, and the cruelty under American glamour.
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Classic
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville
A whaling voyage that becomes an encyclopedia of obsession.
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Literary Fiction
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
A young Black man in mid-century America, unseen by every institution he enters.
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Literary Fiction
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie tells her own story in a voice nobody can borrow.
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Literary Fiction
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
A man learns to fly by learning where his family came from.
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Literary Fiction
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
A girl longs for blue eyes and the novel indicts everything that taught her to.
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Literary Fiction
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
An Igbo leader and the colonial arrival that unmakes his world.
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Historical Fiction
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Biafra through three lives, told with heat and enormous tenderness.
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Literary Fiction
Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Race, hair, love and return, in a novel that argues while it charms.
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Literary Fiction
Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
A girl finds air outside her father's rigid, violent piety.
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Literary Fiction
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Twins, a river, and one afternoon whose consequences never stop arriving.
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Literary Fiction
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Four lives in an unnamed Indian city during the Emergency.
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Magical Realism
Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
A boy born at independence carries a nation's history in his nose.
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Literary Fiction
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
Boyhood betrayal in Kabul and the long road back to it.
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Literary Fiction
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Two Afghan women build a family out of what war leaves them.
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Historical Fiction
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan, refusing to disappear.
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Literary Fiction
Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata
Winter, distance and desire at a remote hot spring inn.
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Magical Realism
Kafka on the Shore
Haruki Murakami
A runaway boy, a talking cat, and a hole in reality.
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Literary Fiction
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
Grief and first love in late-sixties Tokyo, played very quietly.
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Magical Realism
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
A missing cat leads to a well, a war and a marriage.
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Contemporary
Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata
A woman is perfectly happy; everyone insists she cannot be.
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Speculative Fiction
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Boarding-school friendship shadowed by a purpose the children only half-know.
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Speculative Fiction
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro
An artificial friend watches human love from the window.
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Literary Fiction
Atonement
Ian McEwan
One child's lie, one long war, and fiction's own guilty conscience.
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Post-Apocalyptic
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
A father and son push a cart through ash, carrying the fire.
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Western
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Violence rendered as scripture on the nineteenth-century border.
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Classic
Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
A rural priest goes to Johannesburg and finds his country's wound.
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Literary Fiction
Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
A disgraced professor and a country renegotiating everything at once.
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Adventure
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
A boy, a tiger and a lifeboat; then a second, colder story.
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Dystopian
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
A theocracy built on women's bodies, told in a whisper.
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Speculative Fiction
Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood
The end of the world, engineered by the smartest people in it.
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Dystopian
1984
George Orwell
Surveillance, language and the ordinary machinery of tyranny.
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112 more books to explore
Reading with us this month?
The current pick, the discussion guide and the meeting dates all live in the club room.