The Final Forty:

The Bible

The Book of Common Prayer (1662)

Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

The Mayor of Casterbridge, Thomas Hardy

Macbeth, Shakespeare

The Ballad of the Sad Café, Carson McCullers

A House for Mr Biswas, VS Naipaul

The Last September, Elizabeth Bowen

Middlemarch, George Eliot

The Way we Live Now, Anthony Trollope

The Last Chronicle of Barset, Anthony Trollope

The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald

To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

A Passage to India, EM Forster

Washington Square, Henry James

Troylus and Criseyde, Chaucer

The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene

The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton

The Rector’s Daughter, FM Mayor

On the Black Hill, Bruce Chatwin

The Diary of Francis Kilvert

The Mating Season, PG Wodehouse

Galahad at Blandings, PG Wodehouse

The Pursuit of Love, Nancy Mitford

The Bell, Iris Murdoch

The Complete Poems of WH Auden

The Rattle Bag, Edited by Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes

Learning to Dance, Michael Mayne

Flaubert’s Parrot, Julian Barnes

A Time to Keep Silence, Patrick Leigh Fermor

The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

Family and Friends, Anita Brookner

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

The Journals of Sir Walter Scott

Halfway to Heaven, Robin Bruce Lockhart

The Finn Family Moomintroll,  Tove Jansson

Clayhanger, Arnold Bennett

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

Amongst Women, John McGahern

The Four Quartets, TS Eliot