Recommended English-language Books lists

Set in Sidley Park, an English country house, in the years 1809,1812 and 1989, the play juxtaposes the activities of two modern scholars and the house's current residents with the lives of those who lived there 180 years earlier.

Using these records and voices as a sort of poetic census, she creates a narrative of the river, tracking its life from source to sea. The voices are wonderfully varied and idiomatic - they include a poacher, a ferryman, a sewage worker and milk worker, a forester, swimmers and canoeists - and are interlinked with historic and mythic voices, drowned voices, dreaming voices and marginal notes which act as markers along the way.

Golding’s first novel, a rather pessimistic study of human nature, is recognized as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. The story concerns a group of schoolboys who become stranded on a desert island. Initially the boys behave sensibly, electing a leader and dividing the chores amongst themselves but soon divisions appear within their ranks and the party split into two ‘tribes’. The title refers to a pig’s head left on top of a stick by a mysterious hunter. Some of the boys believe the head was left as an offering to a supposed ‘beast’ believed to inhabit the island.

On the small copper mining island of Bougainville all of the teachers, along with most of the other residents fled while one white man, Mr. Watts, stays on the island and becomes the teacher for many of the remaining native children of the island. Mr. Watts reads to the children from Charles Dickens's novel Great Expectations. The children of the island, including the main character, Matilda, are fascinated by the young orphan boy, Pip, and his travels through London.

On a June morning in 1923, Clarissa Dalloway is preparing for a party and remembering her past. Elsewhere in London, Septimus Smith is suffering from shell-shock and on the brink of madness. Their days interweave and their lives converge as the party reaches its glittering climax.

William Blake's volume of poetry entitled Songs of Innocence and Experience is the embodiment of his belief that innocence and experience were "the two contrary states of the human soul," and that true innocence was impossible without experience. Songs of Innocence contains poems either written from the perspective of children or written about them. Many of the poems appearing in Songs of Innocence have a counterpart in Songs of Experience, with quite a different perspective of the world.

Jay Gatsby is the man who has everything. But one thing will always be out of his reach ... Everybody who is anybody is seen at his glittering parties. Day and night his Long Island mansion buzzes with bright young things drinking, dancing and debating his mysterious character. For Gatsby - young, handsome, fabulously rich - always seems alone in the crowd, watching and waiting, though no one knows what for. Beneath the shimmering surface of his life he is hiding a secret: a silent longing that can never be fulfilled. And soon this destructive obsession will force his world to unravel.

Bassanio, a feckless young Venetian, asks his wealthy friend, the merchant Antonio, for money to finance a trip to woo the beautiful Portia in Belmont. Reluctant to refuse his friend (to whom he professes intense love), Antonio borrows the money from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender. If he reneges on the deal, Shylock jokingly demands a pound of his flesh. When all Antonio's ships are lost at sea, Shylock calls in his debt, and the love and laughter of the first scenes of the play threaten to give way to death and tragedy. The final climactic courtroom scene, complete with a cross-dressed Portia, a knife-wielding Shylock, and the debate on "the quality of mercy" is one of the great dramatic moments in Shakespeare.