Penguin's Must-Read Classics

Updated 18 days ago
64 Books

They broke boundaries and challenged conceptions. We asked you for your must-read classics; from iconic bestsellers to lesser-known gems, these are your essential recommends.

Position	Details	Rating	Readers Count
#1	Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen	4.17	1,735 reads
#2	To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee	4.15	2,613 reads
#3	The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald	3.73	2,495 reads
#4	One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez Gregory Rabassa (Translator)	4.09	757 reads
#5	In Cold Blood Truman Capote	4.11	413 reads
#6	Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys	3.37	123 reads
#7	Brave New World Aldous Huxley	3.88	1,917 reads
#8	I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith	3.7	76 reads
#9	Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë	4	1,064 reads
#10	Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky Richard Pevear (Translator) Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)	4.26	868 reads
#11	The Secret History Donna Tartt	4.05	843 reads
#12	The Call of the Wild Jack London	3.63	401 reads
#13	Persuasion Jane Austen	4.08	441 reads
#14	Les Miserables Victor Hugo	4.34	26 reads
#15	Moby-Dick Herman Melville	3.56	481 reads
#16	To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf	3.74	217 reads
#17	The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen	3.75	6 reads
#18	Frankenstein Mary Shelley	3.85	1,636 reads
#19	The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov Katherine Tiernan O'Connor (Translator) Diana Lewis Burgin (Translator)	4.15	381 reads
#20	The Go-Between L.P. Hartley	4.09	12 reads
#21	The Iliad Homer	3.91	73 reads
#22	One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey	4.05	461 reads
#23	1984 George Orwell	4.21	4,002 reads
#24	The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger	3.61	2,038 reads
#25	Beloved Toni Morrison	3.93	340 reads
#26	The Code of the Woosters P.G. Wodehouse	4	6 reads
#27	Dracula Bram Stoker	3.86	1,226 reads
#28	The Outsiders S.E. Hinton	3.95	836 reads
#29	The Chrysalids John Wyndham	3.68	88 reads
#30	War and Peace Leo Tolstoy	4	256 reads
#31	Great Expectations Charles Dickens	3.54	536 reads
#32	Another Country James Baldwin	4.02	32 reads
#33	Catch-22 Joseph Heller	3.98	713 reads
#34	The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton	4.03	110 reads
#35	Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe	3.65	395 reads
#36	Middlemarch George Eliot	4.16	125 reads
#37	Rebecca Daphne du Maurier	4.15	304 reads
#38	Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy	3.69	172 reads
#39	Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray	3.56	54 reads
#40	Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh	3.83	89 reads
#41	Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert Alan Russell (Translator)	3.6	248 reads
#42	The Mill on the Floss George Eliot	3.87	41 reads
#43	Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope	4	16 reads
#44	Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence	3.3	43 reads
#45	The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas	4.3	756 reads
#46	The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck	3.78	595 reads
#47	Ulysses James Joyce	5	4 reads
#48	East of Eden John Steinbeck	4.5	466 reads
#49	The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien	4.53	1,076 reads
#50	The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky Andrew H. MacAndrew (Translator)	4.38	355 reads
#51	Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann	4	22 reads
#52	Lolita Vladimir Nabokov Giulia Arborio Mella (Translator)	3.9	799 reads
#53	The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett	4.02	635 reads
#54	Scoop Evelyn Waugh	3.65	22 reads
#55	Love in a Cold Climate Nancy Mitford	4	10 reads
#56	A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens	3.61	554 reads
#57	The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith Weedon Grossmith	3.5	19 reads
#58	Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy Richard Pevear (Translator) Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)	3.98	505 reads
#59	The betrothed Alessandro Manzoni	3.2	13 reads
#60	Orlando: A Biography Virginia Woolf	3.75	109 reads
#61	Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand	3.18	325 reads
#62	The Time Machine H. G. Wells	3.68	711 reads
#63	The Art of War Sun Tzu Thomas Cleary (Translator)	3.69	381 reads
#64	The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy	4	15 reads