To ask what are your top ten favourite books?

James Herbert - secret of crickley hall.
Stephen king - Mr Mercedes/holly.
JD Kirk - DCI Logan series
Gabby Hutchinson crouch - wish you weren't here series.
Virginia Andrews - flowers in the attic series.
Dean Koontz - odd Thomas series.
Stephen king - the long walk
Stephen king - the institute
Stephen king - fairytale.
Dan brown - all of them.

In no particular order:

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Tracks by Robin Davidson
Crooked heart by Lissa Evans
V for Victory by Lissa Evans
Never Let me Go by kazuo Ishiguro
Memorial by Alice Oswald
The remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald

I've already posted my list but have just realised I'm on my third copy of The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill . . . the previous 2 copies fell apart through constant re-reading, so this definitely should have been on my list!

Hurray for another fan of The Real Charlotte! I must reread. The Death of the Heart rather than The House in Paris or The Heat of the Day.

@FallingSlower
I wish Somerville & Ross had written a sequel to The Real Charlotte!
25 years later the Troubles broke out and I don’t think Charlotte would’ve got off lightly - if she was still alive.

I love all those E Bowens you mention - maybe The House in Paris is the best of her novels, but I love the study of the outsider Portia coming into the Quaynes’ lives - and also Major Brutt, one of the most tragic characters in 20th century lit.

1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover-DH Lawrence
2. Lolita- Nabokov
3. Laughter in the Dark - Nabokov
4. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
5. How I live Now - Meg Rosoff
6. The Graduate - Charles Webb
7. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
8. The Collector - John Fowles
9. The Quiet American- G Greene
10. We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver

I narrowed mine down by cutting out a couple that had been mentioned a lot already.

In no particular order but these are ten books that I recommend to everyone

1. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
2. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - Anne Brontë
3. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy
4. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
7. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
8. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
9. The Master and Margarita- Mikhail Bulgakov
10. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

I also love the Jeeves and Wooster series. At the risk of being banished from the thread, I cannot get on with Jane Austen and the Thursday Murder Club books are my literary guilty pleasure.

Oh and I meant to put David Copperfield too!

the Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
North and South - Elizabeth Gaskell
Middlemarch - George Eliot
1984 - George Orwell
Americanah - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie..
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Choice - Edith Eger
Candide - Voltaire
Lost and Found - Oliver Jeffers

Rebecca

The Miss Buncle series

Helen Forrester series ~ Twopence to cross the Mersey etc

Laura Ingalls Wilder series

Sense & Sensibility

Round about a pound a week

Rosanna of the Amish

Howard's End is on the landing

All the Miss Read books particularly the ones about Miss Clare & Emily Davis

The Diary of a Provincial Lady

And I love reading all the recipe books by Nigella Lawson, Nigel Slater and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall !!!

Hurray for another fan of The Real Charlotte! I must reread. The Death of the Heart rather than The House in Paris or The Heat of the Day?

@MerchWill
i completely agree. I adore Barbara Pym. I’d personally also add Crampton Hodnet to your list

Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Song of Achilles - Madeleine Miller
Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
Enlightenment - Sarah Perry
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The House of the Spirits - Isabelle Allende
The Outcast - Sadie Jones
The Subtle Knife - Phillip Pulman

You’ll need to prepare yourself for a key plot point being entirely different in the novel Rebecca, because the Hays Code wouldn’t let a film show something that happens in the novel!

1. The Real Charlotte Somerville & Ross
2. The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen
3. The Go-Between L.P. Hartley.
4. Fools of Fortune William Trevor.
5. A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh.
6. Quicksands. Sybille Bedford.
7. The Letters of Dora Carrington
8. My Grandmothers and I Diana Holman-Hunt.
9. The Curse of the Wise Woman Edwin Dunsany
10. Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee
11. Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
12. The Leopard Guiseppe di Lampedusa,

Great Expectations
Rebecca
Black Butterflies
The Hearts Invisible Furies
Ann Cleeves Vera series
Strike series
Jeeves - just so funny
Foster - Claire Keegan

I am heartened to see so many of my favourites here (especially Jane Austen's Persuasion) so I must add :
Barbara Pym – often compared to Miss Austen.

Hard to single out one, so I’ll mention three (which would probably make my top ten anyway):

Excellent Women
A Glass of Blessings
Some Tame Gazelle

Ohhh great thread!

Vanity Fair (Thackeray)
Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)
Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver)
Half Of A Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
The Night Watch (Terry Pratchett)
Little Women/Good Wives (Louisa May Alcott)
The Convenient Marriage (Georgette Heyer)
I Capture The Castle (Dodie Smith)
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet (David Mitchell)

But tbh if you asked me on another day it could be a completely different list!

We need to talk about Kevin

Elenor oliphant is completely fine

The secret dreamworld of a shopaholic

The Shining

This is going to hurt

I'll be gone in the dark

Memoirs of a Geisha

Life of Pie

The boy who was raised as a dog

Maybe you should talk to someone : a therapist, her therapist, and our lives revealed

Oh god yes.

I was halfway through Fingersmith & since it was getting late & I had work in the morning, I decided to finish my chapter & go to sleep.

Only it was the chapter that ended in the big twist, so I ended up staying up all night & drinking a lot of coffee the next day.

Dammit I need everything Sarah Waters has ever done as well.

I don’t believe the film or TV adaptations are ever as good as the books.

While half of me would love to see my favourite books on the screen, the other half knows it would probably be a bad idea. Although the Strike adaptations aren’t bad.

Love loads of those ones too! Persuasion is my favourite Austen novel, the tine is so different her other works.

I also love No Name - risqué subject back then and very inventive for its time! The Tenant of Wildfell Hall also gets far too little recognition. The only other book around that time that covers domestic abuse that I can think of is, Daniel Derronda, but it's not as explicit as Bronte depicted.

Too many books to choose from!!

Definitely going to check out some things on other people's lists! Good to see the love for Pratchett (especially Night Watch!) Wodehouse and Diana Wynne Jones. Fantast fans, if you haven't read Patrick Rothfuss I'd seriously recommend The Name of the Wind and a Wise Man's Fear, even if he's still nit produced the 3rd in the trilogy!

Aargh I need to add more sorry.
The Last Unicorn, Peter S Beagle
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
Lark Rise to Candle ford, Flora Thompson

All or most of the Abbey books (I think it’s all) are transcribed on https://www.fadedpage.com/csearch.php?author=Dunkerley,%20Elsie%20Jeanette 😀