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.

A Small Place

1988 · 96 pages

You arrive in Antigua as a tourist and Kincaid tells you what you look like to the people who live there, then turns on the empire and the government that wrecked the island.

★ 6.2

Akenfield

Portrait of an English Village
1969 · 353 pages

Forty-nine Suffolk villagers talk about horse teams, hunger and the Great War. Blythe caught a rural England that machinery was erasing as he wrote, and English country life has had no better witness.

★ 6.0