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
Gaudy Night
1935 · 544 pages
Harriet Vane, mystery novelist, returns to her Oxford women's college, where someone is sending obscene letters and destroying scholarship. Nobody dies. The question is whether a woman can have both work and love.
★ 4.7
Matilda
1988 · 240 pages
Matilda finished Great Expectations at four, which her parents treat as an insult. Her headmistress at school throws children by the pigtails, and Matilda discovers she can move objects with her eyes.
★ 4.8
The Thirty-Nine Steps
1915 · 128 pages
Wanted for a murder in his own flat, Richard Hannay bolts across the Scottish moors with a dead spy's coded notebook. Hitchcock filmed it, and the innocent fugitive became the thriller's engine.
★ 4.8
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
Three Men in a Boat
1889 · 361 pages
Three Victorians and a fox terrier row up the Thames, and Jerome turns the holiday into English comedy: a tin of pineapple nobody can open, a Hampton Court maze that traps everyone.
★ 4.9
Rebecca
1938 · 448 pages
The second Mrs. de Winter is never given a name, which is the point. She marries a widower, arrives at his Cornish estate, Manderley, and finds the drowned first wife occupying every room.
★ 5.0
The Inimitable Jeeves
1923 · 225 pages
Bertie Wooster's friend Bingo Little falls in love in chapter after chapter, and Bertie's cousins run a betting book on which country vicar preaches longest. Jeeves repairs the damage in a sentence.
★ 5.1
The Pursuit of Love
1945 · 214 pages
Uncle Matthew hunts his children across the Oxfordshire fields with bloodhounds. Linda Radlett escapes that house into two bad marriages and a French duke, in the funniest English novel of the interwar aristocracy.
★ 5.2
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
And Then There Were None
1939 · 250 pages
The best-selling mystery ever written: eight guests and two servants on an island off Devon, accused by a gramophone of murders the law could not touch, then killed to a nursery rhyme.
★ 5.3
Black Beauty
1877 · 186 pages
A horse narrates his own life, passed down from a gentleman's stable to the London cab ranks. Sewell wrote to make drivers feel the head-wrenching bearing rein, and England stopped using it.
★ 5.3
Twenty Years After
1845 · 845 pages
Twenty years on the musketeers are older and on opposite sides: d'Artagnan and Porthos serve Cardinal Mazarin, Athos and Aramis the rebels, and the quarrel carries all four to Charles I's scaffold.
★ 5.3
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
Coleridge
Early Visions
1989 · 622 pages
The finest modern life of a poet. Holmes walks Coleridge's roads and brings him back talking, from "The Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's company to the laudanum and the sailing for Malta.
★ 5.4
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
1889 · 410 pages
Knocked cold in a Hartford arms factory, Hank Morgan wakes in Camelot and sets about industrializing it. The comedy runs a long way before Twain turns it into mechanized slaughter.
★ 5.5
Ivanhoe
1819 · 496 pages
Scott built the Middle Ages everyone still pictures: tournaments, Norman lords over conquered Saxons, Robin Hood in the greenwood, and Rebecca, a Jewish healer tried for witchcraft, who takes the novel over.
★ 5.6
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
1914 · 624 pages
The philanthropists of the title are house painters who give their labor away and defend the system that ruins them. Owen, the socialist, cuts up bread to demonstrate the money trick.
★ 5.7
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