aListofBooks

Ultimate Best Books

List: Books You Can't Live Without by The Guardian

Atonement

Atonement

Ian McEwan

4.1 (10)

The play – for which Briony had designed posters, programs and tickets, constructed the sales booth out of a folding screen tipped on its side, and lined the collection box in red crepe paper – was written by her in a two-day tempest of composition, causing her to miss a breakfast and a lunch.

#102
RANK
8,015
POINTS
0 votes on this list
The Secret History

The Secret History

Donna Tartt

4.25 (8)

The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. (Prologue)Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

#254
RANK
2,431
POINTS
0 votes on this list
A Tale of Two Cities

A Tale of Two Cities

Charles Dickens

4.27 (11)

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other wayin short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

#70
RANK
10,734
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Rebecca

Rebecca

Daphne du Maurier

4.31 (13)

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.

#83
RANK
9,700
POINTS
0 votes on this list
The Bell Jar

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

4.0 (8)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.

#81
RANK
9,924
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Notes from a small island

Notes from a small island

Bill Bryson

3.83 (5)

My first sight of England was on a foggy March night in 1973 when I arrived on the midnight ferry from Calais.

#308
RANK
1,854
POINTS
0 votes on this list
A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany

John Irving

4.5 (8)

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice - not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God;- I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.

#117
RANK
7,140
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Ulysses

Ulysses

James Joyce

2.46 (13)

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.

#79
RANK
9,957
POINTS
0 votes on this list
A Town Like Alice

A Town Like Alice

Nevil Shute

4.5 (4)

James MacFadden died in March 1905 when he was forty-seven years old; he was riding in the Driffield Point-to-Point.

#304
RANK
1,904
POINTS
0 votes on this list
Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy

4.25 (8)

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

#191
RANK
3,914
POINTS
0 votes on this list