Books
This is what it's all about.
- Latest reads - our 'read feed' of books
- Group reading lists - see what each group has read to date
- Top 100 - our chart of favourite books, determined by the average marks out of ten each books received and the number of groups that have read it.
1. The House of Sleep
Jonathan Coe
A group of students - each with a different obsession with sleep - drift apart and are reunited after their former halls of residence is turned into a sleep laboratory.
8.3
2. The End of the Affair
Graham Greene
A novelist has an affair with his friend's wife and becomes obsessed with her after she suddenly and inexplicably ends it. Set circa WW2, Greene's novel was based partly on his own affair with Lady Catherine Walston.
8.1
3. Any Human Heart
William Boyd
The witty and moving journals of writer Logan Mountstuart (b.1906 d.1991) and accidental social history of the 20th century. Logan mixes with the Bloomsbury Set, serves in WW2 and enjoys the swinging 60s.
8.1
4. Winnie the Pooh
A.A. Milne
The first volume of stories introducing Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood. Published in 1926 and now included free with every Apple iPad!
7.9
5. To Kill A Mocking Bird
Harper Lee
Modern American classic narrated by the daughter of a lawyer defending a black man who has been falsely charged with raping a white woman.
7.9
6. Last Exit To Brooklyn
Hubert Selby Jr
Six stories of lower class Brooklyn life told in coarse, casual language that were banned on publication in Britain in 1964.
7.7
7. The Wild Places
Robert McFarlane
A journey around Britain and Ireland to find genuinely wild places. Mixing history, memory and landscape to evoke, inspire and praise wildness and its importance
7.7
8. The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
Probably the most popular book group book ever worldwide. Five female members of the missionary Price family piece together the story of their move from 1959 Georgia to the Belgian Congo.
7.7
9. Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates
Rediscovered classic of suburban ennui set in mid 1950s Connecticut. Tragedy ensues when a successful couple decide to relocate to France in an attempt to reconnect with their bohemian sides.
7.7
10. Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Family saga that revolves around hermaphrodite Cal and follows three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family - from their tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus to suburban Michigan.
7.7
11. The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald
Set in the decadence of the Jazz age, Fitzgerald's cautionary tale of the American Dream follows Jay Gatsby's rise and fall from grace after he tries to attain the one thing he cannot have - Daisy Buchanan.
7.6
12. The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
In Barnes' eleventh novel, he tells the story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past. A middle aged man recalls how he an dhis clique befriended Adrian Finn at school, and vowed to stay friends for life - until tragedy struck.
7.6
13. God's Own County
Ross Raisin
Debut novel about an unlikely friendship that turns into something more unnerving on a sheep farm in the bleak Yorkshire Moors.
7.5
14. From Hell
Alan Moore
Meticulously researched account of the Jack the Ripper murders by the legendary graphic novelist. Features establishment conspiracy theories, over 40 pages of footnotes and a cast of famous Victorians including Walter Sickert, John Merrick and Queen Victoria herself.
7.4
15. The Complete Maus
Art Spiegelman
Pulitzer prize winning graphic novel that follows the author listening to his father talk about his escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp. A simplistic metaphor (Jews are mice, nazis are cats and so on) masks a deeply moving, warm hearted and even at times witty, family saga.
7.4
16. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Jonathan Safran Foer
After his father is killed in the 9/11 World Trade Centre attacks, nine year old Oskar sets out to solve the mystery of a key he disovers in his father's cupboard.
7.4
17. The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Apocalyptic road story following an unnamed father and son walking alone through a devastated America.
7.4
18. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Jon McGregor
Debut novel remembering abnormal events on an otherwise ordinary street.
7.4
19. The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. A man brings his 10 year old son Daniel there one morning in 1943. Daniel chooses one book "The Shadow of the Wind" As Daniel grows up, several people seem inordinately interested in his find. What begins as a case of literary curiousity turns into a rave to find out the truth behind the life and death of the authoir and to save those he left behind....
7.4
20. The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas
A sailor falsely accused of treason is arrested on his wedding day and imprisoned on an island. He stages a daring escape and sets out to discover the fabulous treasure of Monte Cristo.
7.4
7.3
22. Love In The Time Of Cholera
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A classic text - a love story or the reality of a long marriage? Set in an unnamed South American country, the author warned his readers " Not to fall into his trap"
7.3
23. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz
Energetic 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner about an overweight, Tolkien-loving nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey.With lots of footnotes.
7.3
24. Cold Comfort Farm
Stella Gibbons
Comic novel about an ophan who goes to search for relatives with whom she can live and ends up on an isolated Sussex farm. Parody of gloomy romantic fiction of the time (1932) such as that of of DH Lawrence and Thomas Hardy.
7.2
25. Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov
Victor the journalist shares his flat with a depressed Penguin rescued from an under-funded zoo in Kiev. When the subjects of the obituaries he prepares start to die regularly, it is clear sinister forces are at large.
7.2
26. Decline and Fall
Evelyn Waugh
Waugh's first published novel is a semi-autobiographical, slapstick account of an expelled Oxford student who is forced to take a job teaching at an obscure Welsh public school.
7.2
27. Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
Set in Steinbeck's home state of California, this short novel tells of the inhabitants and events in part of Monterey during the Great Depression. Comedy and tragedy mix as the reader meets Mack, the Doc and Dora as well as Lee Chong, the Chinese businessman who sees all goings on.
7.2
28. The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Told through diaries and letters, Walker's novel highlights the status of young black women in the Deep South in the early 20th century. A poor uneducated young woman repeatedly raped by her father begins a journey towards a new life.
7.2
29. An Instance of The Fingerpost
Iain Pears
Literary murder mystery set in Oxford during the Restoration, which has drawn comparisons with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
7.2
30. Atonement
Ian McKewan
An upper-middle-class woman seeks atonement after as a young girl she jumps to the wrong conclusion and changes the lives of those around her.
7.2
31. Carter Beats the Devil
Glen David Gold
'Carter the Great', a protege of Harry Houdini, goes on the run after the US secret service believe he is implicated in the death of President Ford in 1923.
7.2
32. The Secret History
Donna Tarrt
Cult novel about a close-knit group of six classics students at an elite Vermont college, who carry a terrifying secret after they stage a bacchanal.
7.2
33. The Children's Book
AS Byatt
Complex novel that follows the adventures of several inter-related families from 1895 through World War I. Author Byatt based the book loosely on the life of E.S. Nesbitt and considers whether writing children's books is necessarily good for the children.
7.2
34. Notes From an Exhibition
Patrick Gale
A family piece together the life of their mother, a renowned and troubled abstract artist, who dies after painting obsessively in her Penzance studio.
7.1
35. Slaughterhouse 5
Kurt Vonnagut
Satirical novel about the World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim.
7.1
36. The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde's only published novel is a fasutian tale about a young man who remains ever youthful, but whose increasing debauchery is reflected in his horrifically degrading portrait.
7.1
37. One Day
David Nicholls
Two students meet on the night of their graduation and then go their separate ways. One Day revisits their lives on St Swithin's Day (15 July) each successive year after.
7.1
38. Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
1932 dystopian classic set in a London six hundred years in the future, where people all over the world are part of a totalitarian state, free from war, hatred, poverty, disease, and pain.
7.1
40. The Wasp Factory
Iain Banks
Banks' blackly humourous debut. Narrated by 16 year old Frank, practicer of bizarre rituals in a remote Scottish village. The mysteries of Frank's past start to unfold when his brother escapes from a psychiatric hospital.
7.0
41. Leviathan
Paul Auster
A narrator tries to find out how and why a man comes to blow himself up with a homemade bomb by the side of a Winsconsin road.
7.0
42. Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
Charlie Gordon, IQ 68, is a floor sweeper, and the gentle butt of everyone's jokes, until an experiment in the enhancement of human intelligence turns him into a genius. But then Algernon, the mouse whose triumphal experimental tranformation preceded his, fades and dies, and Charlie has to face the possibility that his salvation was only temporary.
6.9
43. On Green Dolphin Street
Sebastian Faulks
One of Faulks' lesser known novels, this is a US-set love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the Kennedy-Nixon presidential battle.
6.9
44. We're in Trouble
Christopher Coake
This Nevada author's first - and so far only - book is a collection of short stories about staring danger in the face.
6.9
45. On Chesil Beach
Ian McKewan
Novella about a young newlywed's disastrous honeymoon on the Dorset coast before the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
6.9
46. Ghost Children
Sue Townsend
After a man discovers a dumped bag of aborted foetuses, he is prompted to search for and win back the woman he had a youthful affair with until she aborted their out-of-wedlock child.
6.9
47. Mr Norris Changes Trains
Christopher Isherwood
A chance encounter on a train in 1930s Berlin leads William Bradshaw to become the innocent friend and protector of conman Arthur Norris and blindly involves himself in some of Norris' schemes.
6.9
48. The Death of Grass
John Christopher
Out of print until 2009, this prescient 'nature's revenge' tale follows a band of people escaping to a Cumbrian valley after an international virus wiping out rice, wheat and other grasses reaches UK shores.
6.9
49. Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee
An English professor in South Africa loses everything after seducing one of his students, and takes refuge on his daughter's farm which is subjected to a brutal attack.
6.9
50. Freedom
Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's novel - famously spotted on Obama and Oprah - tragically captures the temptations and burdens of too much liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl and the heavy weight of empire.
6.8
51. Shades of Grey
Jasper Fforde
Jasper Fforde takes leave from his Thursday Next series to pen this kind of Douglas-Adams-meets-1984 depiction of a world where social standing is determined by your perception of colour.
6.8
52. Of Bees and Mist
Erick Setiawan
Family saga set in a mythical town where spirits and spells, witchcraft and demons, and prophets and clairvoyance are an everyday reality.
6.7
53. The Driver's Seat
Muriel Spark
An accountant who has worked for the same firm for 16 years ups and leaves everything and flees abroad as a garishly-dressed temptress - leading to her self destruction.
6.7
54. A Study in Scarlet
Arthur Conan Doyle
The first novel to feature the famous detective, in which Holmes and Watson meet for the very first time.
6.7
55. The City & the City
China Mielville
The body of a murdered woman is discovered in the remarkable, crumbling European city of Besźel.
6.7
56. Blonde Bombshell
Tom Holt
'A heart-warming tale of Armageddon' set on the canine dominated planet of Osta.
6.7
57. Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Picareque novel about Ignatius J. Reilly, a 30-year old slacker still living with his mother who sends him out to get a job. A picaresque novel set in New Orleans, which sadly became a hit after its author committed suicide.
6.7
58. Fugitive Pieces
Anne Michaels
Novel following the life of a Jewish child in Poland who narrowly escapes being killed by the Nazis and is rescued by a Greek geologist.
6.7
59. Then We Came to the End
Joshua Ferris
Comic novel about the white collar American workplace, which takes place in a Chicago ad agency as the 1990s dotcom boom starts to go bust.
6.7
60. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Laurie Lee
A young man walks out of his childhood Cotswold home to London to make his fortune by labouring and playing the violin, and ends up in Spain on the eve of its civil war.
6.7
61. A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters
Julian Barnes
A history of earth made up of several fictional short stories that begins with a stowaway on board Noah's Ark and takes in the Titanic, Chernobyl, Medieval France and astronauts.
6.7
62. Red April
Santiago Roncagliolo
This winer of the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is a whodunnit set in 2000 that unfolds around presidential elections and Holy Week in Peru.
6.7
63. A Change of Climate
Hilary Mantel
Acclaimed, epic family saga set in the windswept countryside of Norfolk and the violent townships of South Africa in the 1950s from the 2009 Booker winner.
6.7
64. Started Early, Took My Dog
Kate Atkinson
Fourth in Atkinson's series of crime thrillers featuring ex-Policeman Jackson Brodie that won Richard & Judy's Best Read of the Year in 2011.
6.7
65. Started Early, Took My Dog
Kate Atkinson
A day like any other for security chief Tracy Waterhouse, until she makes a shocking impulse purchase. That one moment of madness is all it takes for Tracy's humdrum world to be turned upside down, the tedium of everyday life replaced by fear and danger at every turn.
6.7
66. March
Geraldine Brooks
s the North reels under a series of unexpected defeats during the dark first year of the American Civil War, one man leaves behind his family to aid the Union cause. His experiences will utterly change his marriage and challenge his most ardently held beliefs. Riveting and elegant as it is meticulously researched, March is an extraordinary novel woven out of the lore of American history.
6.7
67. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
John Berendt
Southern Gothic novel about the eccentric residents of the town of Savanah, Louisiana. Berendt based the plot on real-life events that occurred in the 1980s.
6.7
68. Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel
Mexican magic realism. A young girl only able to express herself when she cooks is prevented from marrying her lover by a family tradition of the youngest daughter taking care of her mother until the day she dies.
6.7
69. The Windup Girl
Paulo Bacigalupi
Biopunk novel set in 23rd Century Thailand where manually wound springs are used as energy storage devices after global fuel sources have depleted.
6.7
72. A Matter of Death and Life
Andrey Kurkov
The Ukrainian author who won many fans with Death and the Penguin returns with a novella about a man who hires a contract killer to quickly and unexpectedly end his own life, but who then changes his mind. Oops.
6.7
73. When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies
Andy Beckett
A page-turning, non-academic history of the decade that brought Britain strikes, the three day week, North Sea Oil and the rise of Thatcher and fall of Heath.
6.7
74. Five Quarters of the Orange
Joanne Harris
After the War a widow returns to her childhood village in France from which her family was once expelled. As with Harris' other novels such as Chocolat, food and cooking is a theme throughout.
6.7
75. All Families Are Psychotic
Douglas Coupland
Postmodern caper revolving around the disfunctional Drummond family who are reunited in Florida to watch their astronaut daughter Sarah blast off from the Kennedy Center.
6.7
76. Motherless Brooklyn
Jonathan Lethem
Detective thriller about an orphan with Tourette's Syndrome wo seeks to avenge his gangmaster's death.
6.7
77. Time Will Darken It
William Maxwell
Quiet American novel about a man who entertains some distant relatives and unwittingly sets in motion events that will threaten his marriage, his career and his standing in the community.
6.7
78. The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint
Brady Udall
Rites of passage novel about a young boy on an Indian reservation who hits his head and ends up in hospital with no memory and only a typewriter for company.
6.7
79. A Prayer For Owen Meany
John Irving
Rambling but beloved book about a dwarfish boy with a strange voice who forsees the date of his own death — and believes he is an instrument of God to be redeemed by martyrdom.
6.7
80. Ghostwritten
David Mitchell
The Cloud Atlas author's debut — and some say best — novel, which moves from east to west in ten chapters linked only by subtle coincidences.
6.7
82. Londonstani
Gautam Malkani
'The Catcher in the Rye' with a hip young British-Asian accent' according to the Times, Londonstani follows a young aspiring gangsta around Southall.
6.7
83. Northern Lights
Philip Pullman
Pullman introduces Lyra and her animal daemon in in the first of his 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, which managed to appeal to adults and children alike - but not the upper echelons of The Church.
6.7
84. Mr. Alfred MA
George Friel
Forgotten, grittily realistic novella about a Glasgow teacher who descends into a breakdown after he gets rather too close to one of his pupils.
6.7
85. A Scanner Darkly
Philip K. Dick
An narcotics agent goes undercover to learn who is supplying a deadly drug called 'Substance D' which separates the brain's two spheres. To pass as an addict, he must become a user.
6.7
86. The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Indian writer Arundhati Roy's 1998 Booker winner (and so far only book) about the childhood experiences of a pair of non identical twins who become victims of circumstance.
6.7
87. The Reader
Bernard Schlinck
Controversial Oprah Book Club favourite addressing German war guilt. A teenager is seduced by an older woman who is tried for war crimes.
6.7
88. Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Novel set during the 'Prague Spring' of 1968, which explores artistic and intellectual Czech society during the Communist era.
6.7
89. Pies and Prejudice
Stuart Maconie
The exiled Northener takes time out from 'talking head' TV appearances to go in search of the 'real' North of England and find out where the cliches end - taking in Wigan Pier, Blackpool Tower, Scousers and pies.
6.7
90. An Ice-cream War
William Boyd
Ghana-born Boyd's debut follows the fortunes of several characters whose lives are swept up by fighting in German East Africa during WW1, including an expat farmer and a young English aristocrat.
6.7
91. Hangover Square
Patrick Hamilton
Tragic tale of unrequieted love set amongst the grimly publands of 'darkest Earl's Court' as WW2 looms.
6.7
92. Alma Cogan
Gordon Burn
Burns rewrites the history of Britain's best-selling but quickly forgotten vocalist of the 1950s and reveals the dark side of fame.
6.7
93. The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen
Novel about a mother determination to get her splintered family together for one last Christmas.
6.7
94. The Accidental Tourist
Anne Tyler
Gentle romantic commedy about a man addicted to routine who has his life turned upside down by the arrival of an eccentric dog trainer called Muriel.
6.7
95. The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night Time
Mark Haddon
A fifteen year old autistic boy who lives with his father finds a poodle in his garden speared by a garden fork. As he sets out to find the culprit, he ends up uncovering the truth about his own family.
6.7
96. Snowdrops
A.D. Miller
Fast-paced drama that unfolds during a beautiful but lethally cold Russian winter, written by the Economist's former Moscow correspondent.
6.6
97. The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins
The first one of the Hunger Games Trilogy. A young-adult science fiction novel. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives in a post-apocalyptic world in the country of Panem where North America once existed. This is where a government working in a central city called the Capitol holds power. The Hunger Games are an annual televised event where the Capitol chooses one boy and one girl from each of 12 districts to fight to the death. The Hunger Games exist to demonstrate that not even children are beyond the reach of the Capitol's jurisdiction.
6.6
98. A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan
Jennifer Egan's spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other's pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.
6.5
99. Room
Emma Donoghue
Joseph Fritzl inspired story told from the perspective of a five year old boy who is being held captive in a small room with his mother. Shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker prize.
6.5
100. Tunnel Visions
Christopher Ross
Ruminations by an ex-corporate lawyer after he takes a McJob at Oxford Circus tube station.
6.4
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