30 Books Every Adult Should Read Before They Die
This list of 30 books recommended by Britain's librarians as must-reads before one dies was compiled in 2006 by the "Museum, Libraries and Archives Council" (MLA) in 2006. The Council was closed in 2012 by the British Government in order to simplify its bureaucracy.
- 1
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 36 lists
- 2
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960 · 33 lists
- 3
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
- 4
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
- 5
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
- 6
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
- 7
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
- 8
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954 · 23 lists
- 9
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · 22 lists
- 10
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
- 11
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
- 12
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov · 1967 · 18 lists
- 13
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962 · 17 lists
- 14
- 15
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954 · 14 lists
- 16
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame · 1908 · 12 lists
- 17
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque · 1929 · 11 lists
- 18
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891 · 10 lists
- 19
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman · 2000 · 8 lists
- 20
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon · 2003 · 8 lists
- 21
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver · 1998 · 8 lists
- 22
Winnie-the-Pooh
Christina Milner · 1926 · 7 lists
- 23
A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens · 1843 · 6 lists
- 24
Life of Pi
Yann Martel · 2001 · 6 lists
- 25
The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho · 1988 · 6 lists
- 26
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold · 2002 · 5 lists
- 27
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran · 1923 · 5 lists
- 28
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks · 1993 · 3 lists
- 29
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · 1962 · 3 lists
