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 Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad Never Let Me Go John Williams Stoner James Kelman How Late it Was, How Late Isabel Allende The House of the Spirits Donna Tartt The Secret History Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Douglas Coupland Generation X Martin Amis Money Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being London Fields Hanif Kureshi The Buddha of Suburbia Mark Haddon The Curious Incident of the Dog Doris Lessing Briefing for a Descent into Hell in the Nighttime Kamila Shamsie Home Fires Kate Atkinson Behind the Scenes at the Museum Robert Harris Fatherland Life after Life David Lodge Nice Work God In Ruins Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho Cormac McCarthy All the Pretty Horses Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life The Road Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale Ian McEwan Enduring Love The Blind Assassin Atonement Paul Auster New York Trilogy Toni Morrison Beloved Iain Banks The Crow Road Iris Murdoch The Bell The Wasp Factory Anthony Doerr All the Light We Cannot See Sally Rooney Normal People Vladimir Nabokov Lolita Pat Barker Regeneration Trilogy 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 Muriel Spark The Prime of Miss Jean Sarah Waters Tipping the Velvet Brodie Fingersmith Graham Swift Waterland Buchi Emecheta The Joys of Motherhood D M Thomas The White Hotel Louise Erdrich Love Medicine Lionel Shriver We Need to Talk About Kevin William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Rose Tremain Sacred Country Woman Hannah Kent Burial Rites Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Alice Walker Meridian David Guterson Snow Falling on Cedars Richard Yates Revolutionary Road Joseph Heller Catch 22 Irvine Welsh Trainspotting Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls David Nicholls One Day Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture Jeanette Winterson Oranges are not the Only Fruit John Irving The Cider House Rules John Boyne The Heart’s Invisible Furies