The Tiger in the Smoke
1952 · 288 pages
A war widow receives photographs of the husband she buried. The trail runs into a London fog where the killer Jack Havoc is loose, and Allingham makes the thriller an argument about evil.
★ 4.6
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Daughter of Time
1951 · 206 pages
Bored in a hospital bed, a Scotland Yard inspector studies a portrait of Richard III and reopens the murder of the two princes, working entirely from chronicles and documents fetched to his bedside.
★ 4.7
The Diary of a Nobody
1892 · 176 pages
Charles Pooter, a London clerk of vast unearned dignity, records every slight from tradesmen and every dinner-party triumph. He paints his bath red with enamel and mistakes the dissolving water for blood.
★ 4.8
White Teeth
2000 · 464 pages
Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal met in a tank in 1945 and are still arguing in North London, while their children reject every inheritance on offer. Smith made multicultural Britain a comic epic.
★ 5.2
Virginia Woolf
1996 · 944 pages
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
★ 5.3
The Way of All Flesh
1903 · 315 pages
Theobald Pontifex beats piety into his son with perfect Christian conviction, and Ernest spends the novel working free of him. Butler handed the revolt against Victorian respectability its sharpest and funniest weapon.
★ 5.7
Moll Flanders
1722 · 480 pages
Born in Newgate prison, five times a wife, once to her own brother, Moll totals her thefts and marriages in pounds and shillings. English fiction had never let a woman talk this way.
★ 5.9
The Alchemist
1610 · 530 pages
Plague empties London, a master flees, and his butler turns the house into a con shop, selling the philosopher's stone to every greedy fool who knocks. Jonson built the swindle like clockwork.
★ 6.1
A Dance to the Music of Time
First Movement
1955 · 732 pages
Powell's twelve novels follow one English generation from a boarding school in 1921 into the 1970s. These first three introduce the narrator Nick Jenkins and Widmerpool, the ridiculous boy whose rise never stops.
★ 6.2
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
1892 · 213 pages
Twelve cases at 221B Baker Street, from the king undone by Irene Adler to the whistle in the night at Stoke Moran. No human character in fiction has been played by more actors.
★ 6.7
Richard III
1592 · 448 pages
Richard tells the audience in his first speech that he means to be a villain, then makes them accomplices. He courts a widow beside the corpse of the king he murdered.
★ 6.8
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
1963 · 240 pages
Alec Leamas takes one last assignment in East Germany, posing as a burnt-out defector, never told what his own service wants. Graham Greene called it the best spy story he had read.
★ 6.8
The End of the Affair
1951 · 160 pages
Jealousy narrated from the inside by a man who hates the God he does not believe in. A wartime bomb falls on the lovers, and the woman makes a promise she keeps.
★ 6.9
The Secret Agent
1907 · 320 pages
Conrad wrote the first great modern novel of terrorism. Verloc keeps a seedy London shop, informs on anarchists for a foreign embassy, and is ordered to bomb the Greenwich Observatory to frighten England.
★ 6.9
Henry IV, Part Two
1599 · 338 pages
Falstaff ages and the king dies while Prince Hal waits for the crown. Shakespeare wrote no colder scene than the new king telling his old tavern friend that he does not know him.
★ 7.0
The Diary of Samuel Pepys
1669 · 352 pages
Nine years of Restoration London set down every night in shorthand. Pepys watched the Great Fire from a boat and he was as frank about his own adulteries as about the plague.
★ 7.0
The Picture of Dorian Gray
1891 · 112 pages
Told by a charming aristocrat that beauty is everything, Dorian Gray wishes his portrait would age in his place, and it does. Wilde's epigrams carry every page, and the horror arrives beneath them.
★ 7.0
A Christmas Carol
1843 · 116 pages
Scrooge hates Christmas until his dead business partner turns up wrapped in chains and three spirits walk him through his own life. The modern Christmas takes its shape from this book.
★ 7.1
Oliver Twist
1838 · 416 pages
Born in a workhouse, Oliver asks for more, is sold off, and runs to London, where Fagin's gang of child pickpockets takes him in. Dickens made child poverty impossible to ignore.
★ 7.1
Henry IV, Part One
1597 · 274 pages
Falstaff is the greatest comic creation in English, a fat knight who lies about everything, and Prince Hal wastes his youth drinking with him while rebellion gathers against his father the king.
★ 7.2