- Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet
- Gabriel Josipovici, Everything Passes
- Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
- Jenny Diski, Skating to Antarctica
- Joan Didion, The White Album
- Mark Mills, The Savage Garden
- Franco Moretti, ed. The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture
- Diane Ackerman, The Zookeeper’s Wife
- Brian Lynch, The Winner of Sorrow
- Ian Rankin, The Falls
- David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster
- Anthony Trollope, The Eustace Diamonds
- Kenko, Essays in Idleness
- Tom McCarthy, Remainder
- Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s Nose
- John Darnton, Black and White and Dead All Over
- Jenny Diski, Stranger on a Train
- Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall
- David Wroblewski, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle
- John Mullan, How Novels Work
- Thomas Bernhard, Frost
- Jenny Davidson, The Explosionist
- Ngaio Marsh, Death in a White Tie
- A.J.A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo
- Andre Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
- Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray
- Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book
- Nam Le, The Boat
- Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman
- Sarah Waters, Fingersmith
- Keith Devlin, The Math Gene
- Jacqueline Winspear, An Incomplete Revenge
- Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England
- Edith Wharton, The Glimpses of the Moon
- Charlotte Jay, Beat Not the Bones
- Virginia Rowans, The Loving Couple
- L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables
- Catherine O’Flynn, What Was Lost
- George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
- Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford
- Eric Wilson, Against Happiness
- Rosy Thornton, Hearts and Minds
- Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban
- Margery Allingham, Sweet Danger
- Georgette Heyer, Venetia
- Rosamund Lehmann, The Echoing Grove
- Alan Lightman, A Sense of the Mysterious
- Alan Bennett, The Uncommon Reader
- Anne Enright, The Gathering
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Benjamin Black, The Silver Swan
- Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key
- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
- Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel
- Virginia Woolf, Night and Day
- Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
- Mavis Gallant, Paris Stories
- Cormac Mccarthy, The Road
- Nicholson Baker, Room Temperature
- James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner
- Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
Of Books and Bicycles 