Twenty Must-Read Novels

Early in 2014 I invited colleagues across the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Chester to vote for their top twenty must-read novels. The results were collated, and then individuals agreed to write commendations for each of the books voted into our collective top twenty; their scholarly enthusiasm shines through on every page of this booklet. We also invited volunteers to produce ‘dissident’s choices’, for books that others might miss.

Any such list is bound to provoke debate. Perhaps we might produce additional lists of European, American and global authors, all of whom are massively underrepresented in the current list. We hope that our selection and advocacy might give you some useful starting points for exploring some of the greatest novels in the Western tradition. It may prompt you to return to an old favourite, or to discover outstanding work for the first time.

My thanks are due to all those who voted, and, in particular, to the tutors in the Department of English who made the time to write in critical admiration of their favourite novels: Professor Derek Alsop, Dr Ashley Chantler, Jen Davis, Dr Melissa Fegan, Dr Francesca Haig, Dr Sarah Heaton, Dr Ian Seed, Dr William Stephenson, Dr Alex Tankard, Professor Chris Walsh, Dr Sally West and Professor Deborah Wynne.

I hope these recommendations inspire you to a life enriched by great reading.

Professor Rob Warner

Faculty of Humanities

University of Chester

The Results

14^th =

Albert Camus, The Outsider

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Ian McEwan, Atonement

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy

10^th =

Franz Kafka, The Trial

Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

4^th =

Jane Austen, Persuasion

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

2^nd =

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

James Joyce, Ulysses

1^st =

George Eliot, Middlemarch

The booklet can be read here: http://www.chester.ac.uk/node/27984