Here’s an attempt to write an English Literature Canon which is a list of the most famous novels in the English speaking world. Some of them are old classics and some of them are modern popular novels.
Great Britain
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales
Jane Austen, Emma, Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
J.G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol
John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Graham Greene, Our Man in Havanna, The Quiet American, The Third Man, Travels with My Aunt…
Nick Hornby, About A Boy
W. Somerset Maugham, Collected Short Stories, The Cosmopolitan
Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
Ian McEwan, The Cement Garden, The Atonement
George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl
Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
Virginia Wolf, To the Lighthouse
Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
Iris Murdock, Under the Net, The Sandcastle
Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Bram Stoker, Dracula
George Orwell, 1984
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
The USA
Douglas Coupland, Girlfriend in a Coma, Miss Wyoming
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, The Crack-up
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, A Farewell to Arms
Joyce Carol Oates, Black Water, White Girl, Black Girl, Blonde, Foxfire
- D. Salinger, A Catcher in the Rye
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Tony Morrison, The Bluest Eyes, Beloved
Alex Haley, Roots, Queen, Malcolm X
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders in Rue Morgue
Canada
Margaret, Atwood, Cat´s Eye, Robber Bride, The Handmaid’s Tale
Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, Running in the Family
Ireland
Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal
G.B. Shaw, Pygmalion
James Joyce, Ulysses
Roddy Doyle, The Barrytown Triology, Walking in to doors
Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes, Teacher
South Africa
J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing, The Fifth Child
Nadime Gordimer, Jump
André Brink, A Dry White Season
India
VS Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
Bali Ray, (Un)arranged Marriage
Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses
Australia
Nevil Shute, A Town Called Alice
Colleen McCough, The Thorn Birds
New Zealand
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Janet Frame, An Angel at My Table
Mr Smedjeback's English Class 