Sixth Form Reading List Modern/Contemporary Fiction

The books on this list should act as a starting point for you to explore modern and contemporary fiction. They are not in any particular order but simply represent a wide selection of texts that might be considered more interesting and/or challenging than the majority.

Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart John Irving The Cider House Rules Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day John Williams Stoner Never Let Me Go Isabel Allende The House of the Spirits Delia Owens Where the Crawdads Sing Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Donna Tartt The Secret History Martin Amis Money Douglas Coupland Generation X London Fields Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog Hanif Kureshi The Buddha of Suburbia in the Nighttime Doris Lessing Briefing for a Descent into Hell Kate Atkinson Behind the Scenes at the Museum Kamila Shamsie Home Fires Life after Life Robert Harris Fatherland God In Ruins David Lodge Nice Work Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale The Road The Blind Assassin Ian McEwan Enduring Love Paul Auster New York Trilogy Atonement Iain Banks The Crow Road Toni Morrison Beloved The Wasp Factory Iris Murdoch The Bell Sally Rooney Normal People Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See Pat Barker Regeneration Trilogy Vladimir Nabokov Lolita The Silence of the Girls Zadie Smith Swing Time Julian Barnes A history of the World in White Teeth 10½ Chapters Edna O’Brien The Country Girls Flaubert’s Parrot Alice Sebold The Lovely Bones John Banville The Book of Evidence Andrew O’Hagan Our Fathers Alan Hollinghurst The Line of Beauty David Mitchell Cloud Atlas Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita Bernadine Evaristo Girl, Woman, Other Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange Jill Paton Walsh Knowledge of Angels A S Byatt Possession Mohsin Hamid The Reluctant Fundamentalist Colson Whitehead The Underground Railroad E Annie Proulx The Shipping News Italo Calvino If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller Elizabeth Strout My Name is Lucy Barton Anne Tyler Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Thomas Pynchon Gravity’s Rainbow Angela Carter Nights at the Circus Jonathan Franzen The Corrections The Passion of New Eve Jean Rhys The Wide Sargasso Sea The Bloody Chamber Good Morning, Midnight Peter Carey Oscar and Lucinda Philip Roth The Human Stain Kate Chopin The Awakening Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Naomi Alderman The Power Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children J M Coetzee Foe Shame Don DeLillo White Noise The Satanic Verses Roddy Doyle Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha Graham Swift Waterland Sarah Waters Tipping the Velvet D M Thomas The White Hotel Fingersmith Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin Douglas Stuart Shuggie Bain Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner Louise Erdrich Love Medicine Rose Tremain Sacred Country William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom Hannah Kent Burial Rites John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Alice Walker Meridian Woman Richard Yates Revolutionary Road Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Irvine Welsh Trainspotting David Guterson Snow Falling on Cedars David Nicholls One Day Joseph Heller Catch 22 Jeanette Winterson Oranges are not the Only Fruit Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls John Boyne The Heart’s Invisible Furies Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture