What Should I Read Next? A chronological list of novels in English recommended by Robert Bell
- Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders
- Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews
- Samuel Richardson, Clarissa
- Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Persuasion
- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
- Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
- George Eliot, Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda
- Charles Dickens, Bleak House; David Copperfield; Little Dorrit
- Henry James, Portrait of a Lady; The Europeans; The Ambassadors
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- Mark Twain, Huck Finn
- Edith Wharton, House of Mirth
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
- D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; Under Western Eyes; Heart of Darkness
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Mrs. Dalloway
- E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
- William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom; As I Lay Dying; Light in August
- James Joyce, Ulysses
- Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night
- Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
- J. R. R. Tolkein, The Lord of the Rings
- C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia
- Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood
- Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
- Saul Bellow, Herzog; Humboldt’s Gift
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
- John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera (translated from Spanish, but amazing)
- Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song
- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
- Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint; The Ghost Writer; A Counter Life; American Pastoral; Sabbath’s Theater
- John Updike, Rabbit is Rich; Rabbit at Rest
- William Styron, Sophie’s Choice; The Confessions of Nat Turner
- Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
- Martin Amis, Money; London Fields
- A. S. Byatt, Possession
- Thomas Pynchon, V., Gravity’s Rainbow; Mason & Dixon
- Don DeLillo, White Noise; Libra; Underworld
- Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
- J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
- Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient
- David Lodge, Small World; Nice Work
- Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
- Ian McEwan, Atonement; Saturday
- Andrea Barrett, The Voyage of the Narwhal
- Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
- Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn
- Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections
- Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
- Jim Shepard, Flight; Nosferatu; Project X
- Michael Chabon, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
- Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Karen Shepard, The Bad Boy’s Wife
- Zadie Smith, White Teeth; On Beauty
- Nicole Krause, The History of Love
Etc.,