Authors
The novelists our lists return to most. Each page ranks their books by how many lists agree on them, and says where the lists would have you start.
A
- Chinua Achebe start with Things Fall Apart
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie start with Half of a Yellow Sun
- Martin Amis start with Money
- Kate Atkinson start with Life After Life
- Margaret Atwood start with The Handmaid's Tale
- Jane Austen start with Pride and Prejudice
B
- Beryl Bainbridge start with Every Man for Himself
- James Baldwin start with Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Pat Barker start with The Silence of the Girls
- Julian Barnes start with The Sense of an Ending
- Sebastian Barry start with Days Without End
- Saul Bellow start with The Adventures of Augie March
C
- Albert Camus start with The Stranger
- Peter Carey start with Oscar and Lucinda
- John le Carré start with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
- J. M. Coetzee start with Disgrace
- Joseph Conrad start with Heart of Darkness
- Jim Crace start with Harvest
D
- Roald Dahl start with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Don DeLillo start with Underworld
- Charles Dickens start with Great Expectations
- E. L. Doctorow start with Ragtime
- Anthony Doerr start with All the Light We Cannot See
- Fyodor Dostoevsky start with Crime and Punishment
- Helen Dunmore start with The Siege
E
- George Eliot start with Middlemarch
- Percival Everett start with James
F
- William Faulkner start with The Sound and the Fury
- Elena Ferrante start with My Brilliant Friend
- Gustave Flaubert start with Madame Bovary
- Ford Madox Ford start with The Good Soldier
- E.M. Forster start with A Passage to India
G
- Graham Greene start with Brighton Rock
H
- Thomas Hardy start with Tess of the d'Urbervilles
- Shirley Hazzard start with The Bay of Noon
- Ernest Hemingway start with The Old Man and the Sea
- Alan Hollinghurst start with The Line of Beauty
I
- Kazuo Ishiguro start with Never Let Me Go
J
- Henry James start with The Golden Bowl
- James Joyce start with Ulysses
K
- Franz Kafka start with The Trial
- Barbara Kingsolver start with The Poisonwood Bible
- R. F. Kuang start with Yellowface
L
- D. H. Lawrence start with The Rainbow
- Harper Lee start with To Kill a Mockingbird
- Doris Lessing start with The Golden Notebook
- Andrea Levy start with Small Island
M
- Thomas Mann start with The Magic Mountain
- Hilary Mantel start with Wolf Hall
- Gabriel García Márquez start with One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Cormac McCarthy start with The Road
- Ian McEwan start with Atonement
- Andrew Miller start with Oxygen
- Rohinton Mistry start with A Fine Balance
- David Mitchell start with Cloud Atlas
- Toni Morrison start with Beloved
- Iris Murdoch start with The Sea, the Sea
N
- Vladimir Nabokov start with Lolita
- V. S. Naipaul start with A House for Mr Biswas
O
- Maggie O'Farrell start with Hamnet
- George Orwell start with Nineteen Eighty-Four
P
- Richard Powers start with The Overstory
- Terry Pratchett start with Night Watch
R
- Marilynne Robinson start with Gilead
- Sally Rooney start with Normal People
- Philip Roth start with American Pastoral
- J. K. Rowling start with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
- Salman Rushdie start with Midnight's Children
S
- Kamila Shamsie start with Home Fire
- Carol Shields start with The Stone Diaries
- Ali Smith start with How to Be Both
- Zadie Smith start with White Teeth
- Muriel Spark start with The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
- John Steinbeck start with The Grapes of Wrath
- Robert Stone start with A Flag for Sunrise
- William Styron start with Sophie's Choice
T
- Donna Tartt start with The Goldfinch
- Colm Tóibín start with Brooklyn
- J. R. R. Tolkien start with The Lord of the Rings
- Leo Tolstoy start with Anna Karenina
- Rose Tremain start with The Gustav Sonata
- William Trevor start with The Children of Dynmouth
- Anne Tyler start with A Spool of Blue Thread
U
- John Updike start with Rabbit Is Rich
W
- Sarah Waters start with Fingersmith
- Evelyn Waugh start with Brideshead Revisited
- Edith Wharton start with The Age of Innocence
- Colson Whitehead start with The Underground Railroad
- Virginia Woolf start with Mrs Dalloway