RECOMMENDED READING LIST FOR HURTWOOD HOUSE A-LEVEL ENGLISH

In your two years studying Advanced Level English at Hurtwood your teacher will be presenting you with extracts from a very wide range of the classics. This is in addition to your set texts, of course. We have found that these Practical Criticism lessons often set off a hunger to read the whole of the book from which the extract was taken. Often, a particular passion for a writer will follow, so we expect you to be a frequent borrower from the school library anyway.

 

The list which follows contains a few familiar classics. Represented here, too, are a number of books which we could call 'The New Canon': recent writing of high quality. You will find plenty here to enlarge your window on the world - that is one of the things studying English is about - and provide a satisfying "wider reading" profile.

 

Author Title

 

P Ackroyd Chetterton

P Ackroyd Hawksmoor

I Allende The House of Spirits

M Angelou I Know why the Caged Bird Sings

K Amis Lucky Jim

M Amis London Fields

K Atkinson Behind the Scenes at the Museum

M Atwood Bluebeard’s Egg (short stories)

M Atwood The Hand maid’s Tale

>B Bainbridge Every Man for Himself

J Ballard Empire of the Sun

J Barnes Cross Channel (short stories)

J Barnes The History of the World in 10½ Chapters

J Barnes Talking it Over

W Boyd Our Man in Africa

C Brontë Jane Eyre

E Brontë Wuthering Heights

B Bryson Notes from a Small Island

A Burgess A Dead Man in Deptford

A Camus The Plague

A Carter Wise Children

J Chang Wild Swans

B Chatwin Why am I Here?

M Cobold Guppies

J Conrad The Heart of Darkness

S Deane Reading in the Dark

C Dickens David Copperfield

C Dickens Hard Times

M Drabble The Millstone

M Drabble The Garrick Year

D du Maurier Rebecca

H Dunmore A Spell of Winter

H Dunmore Zennor in Darkness

G Eliot The Mill on the Floss

G Eliot Middlemarch

S Faulks Birdsong

F Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

P Fitzgerald The Beginning of Spring

E M Forster A Passage to India

J Fowles The Collector

S Gibbons Cold Comfort Farm

J Gaarder Sophie’s World

W Golding Lord of the Flies

W Golding Pincher Martin

R Graves Goodbye to All That

R Graves I, Claudius

G Greene The Power and the Glory

T Hardy Tess of the d’Urbervilles

T Hardy The Mayor of Casterbridge

T Hardy Jude the Obscure

J Heller Catch 22

H Hesse Siddhartha


 

H Hesse Narziss and Goldmund

C Hope Serenity House

N Hornby Fever Pitch

J Irvine A Prayer for Owen Meaney

K Ishiguro The Remains of the Day

H James Washington Square

P D James Cover Her Face

J Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

J Joyce Ulysses

B Keenan A Evil Cradling

G Keiller Lake Woebegone (short stories)

M Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being

D H Lawrence Sons and Lovers

H Lee To Kill a Mockingbird

L Lee Cider with Rosie

C S Lewis The Screwtape Letters

P Lively Moontiger

P Lively Pack of Cards (short stories)

D Lodge Nice Work

A Lurie Love and Friendship

C McCullers The Ballad of the Sad Café (short stories)

I McEwan A Child in Time

F Maddox Ford The Good Soldier

N Mandela The Long Walk to Freedom

B Okri The Famished Road

M Ondatze The English Patient

G Orwell Animal Farm

G Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London

M Peake Gormenghast

M Roberts Daughters of the House

J D Salinger The Catcher in the Rye

J Steinbeck Of Mice and Men

P Susskind Perfume

A Solzhenitsyn A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

G Swift Waterland

G Swift Learning to Swim and other stories

D Tartt The Secret History

A Thomas-Ellis The Inn at the End of the Road

J R R Tolkien The Hobbit

J R R Tolkien The Lord of the Rings

L Tolstoy Anna Karenina

R Tremain Restoration

R Tremain Sacred Country

W Trevor Fools of Fortune

L van der Post Yet Being Something Other

A Walker The Colour Purple

E Waugh Decline and Fall

E Waugh Brideshead Revisited

I Welsh Trainspotting

E Wharton The Age of Innocence

J Winterson Oranges are not the only Fruit

V Woolf Orlando

 

 

Hurtwood