to ask what book you've read that you'll never forget?

[sunshineNdaisies]

I'm looking for new books to read and I'm trying to find something similar to those I've read over the years that have stuck with me. I'll start:

Of mice and men, the rats of nimh, persuasion, pride and prejudice, nicholas nickleby, oliver twist, little house on the prairie, the help, 12 years a slave, the color purple, the red pony, sunset song, memoirs of a geisha, little women, all the harry potter books, the prime of miss jean brodie,

I'm sure I'll remember more

Please recommend a book that will stick with me! Nothing scary though, I don't like scary. Also I hated Wuthering Heights so that stuck with me for the wrong reasons!

Birdsong - just floored me

The Life of Pi - I literally couldn't put it down. But that was pre-film and it wouldn't have the same impact if you know the spoilers ahead of reading it.

All quiet on the western front - Erich Maria Remarque
One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd

Bloody hell, BubbleGum, 4 of my favourites in one post! We must have similar taste.

I will add:

A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain Fournier
Gone to Earth - Mary Webb
The Tin Drum - Gunther Grass

For lovers of a dystopian novel, Russell Hoban's "Riddley Walker" takes a bit of beating.

Any Philip Pullman fans who haven't read La Belle Sauvage yet are in for a treat (one of the things I love about Philip Pullman's writing is that it's like watching a film in my head, and this one has that filmic quality in spades).

Ian McEwan: any of them, all of them. The man has never written a less than brilliant book. Actually, he's probably never written a less than brilliant sentence.

Really loved the Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I'm currently trying to finish Lincoln in the Bardo for the past year and it's killing me.

River God- Wilbur Smith

All Quiet on the Western Front
Jane Eyre
Catch - 22
The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy
It shouldn't happen to a vet (and all James Herriot books)

Oh and the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 & 3/4 

Perfume
Pride and prejudice
Then she was gone
To kill a mockingbird
Woman in white
Milkman
Bridget Jones
The grand Sophy
Anne of Green Gables
Black beauty

For One More Day - Mitch Albom. If you've lost your mum be prepared to be a sobbing, wailing mess for most of it. I read this over a decade ago and the sadness I felt reading it still sticks with me.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara kingsolver

Tom’s Midnight Garden made a huge impression as a child. I still remember picking it out from the Puffin catalogue.

Cry the Beloved Country Alan Paton
Anything by Thackeray including the Palliser series and Vanity Fair
Pretty much anything by Marcel Pagnol including Chateau de ma mere and Gloire de mon pere
Purple Hibiscus - Adiche
The African Child - Camara Laye
Nada - Carmen Laforet
Animal Vegetable Miracle - Barbara Kingsolver, about becoming a small holding family in Virginia and eating what they grew or raised for a year (apart from coffee and alcohol!) Good recipes, too.
Another book with recipes and stunning humour - Norah Ephron's Heartburn
Two other twin books because they deceive the reader brilliantly - read Brat Farrar by Josephine Tey and then Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree.

Books to go to sleep reading or listening to ....
I capture the Castle
Anything by P G Wodehouse
A Town like Alice, No Highway and Pied Piper by Nevil Shute. The latter features an elderly man caught up on a fishing holiday in southern France by the onset of WW2 and the children he collects on the way back to the UK.

Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Station Eleven - Emily St John Mandel
The Cleft - Doris Lessing

All alternate reality books that made me think and think and think

Also David Mitchell - one story from Cloud Atlas - an Orison of Somni. Same genre!

Following!

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s funny, emotional, sweet and really makes you think about things.

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent. This is the most powerful book I have ever read - it's a fictionalised account of the life and execution, by beheading, of the last woman to be executed in Iceland.

Some of the narrative involves invoices for a suitable axe - the monies they had available wouldn't buy an axe which would behead in one stroke.

Agnes's voice soars and swoops as the ravens' voices do.

This book changed me. Please read.

Woman on the edge of time, Marge Peircy,
Giliad, Marilynne Robinson

Life of Pi, Vernon God Little, Shalimar the Clown, Everything is Illuminated, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Veronika Decides to Die...

The World according to Garp. First time I cried in a book. I was about 20, game changer for me.

Straight jacket, it’s a really interesting book about queer mental health, it made me feel much more normal.

The Art of Racing in the Rain.

I sobbed.

@TheBonyFinger

Totally agree

Lots of great reads here, please may I add
Portrait of the artIst as a young man
The Waves
SS GB
Anything by Miss Read, but especially the Fairacre books.
The Good Companions
Anything by Lissa Evans and Elizabeth Taylor
Rebuilding Coventry
Look Who's Back
Umbrella

And hundreds more, I would be here all day !

To kill a mockingbird.
White teeth by Zadie Smith. It's not ground breaking literary genius but always stuck with me for some reason.

So many wonderful books have already been mentioned. Books that have remained with me and which I absolutely love:
Jane Eyre
Wuthering Heights
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Poisonwood Bible
A Secret History
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Kite Runner
The Miniaturist
On Chesil Beach
Atonement
The Handmaid's Tale
Room
Gone with the Wind (stayed up all night to finish this when I was fifteen and read the last page on the bus on the way to school).

I've read and liked all the books you mentioned.
I have recently read the Tattooist of Auschwitz, an amazing book and everyone should read it. It should be on secondary school curriculum.
Also read Then she was gone by Lisa Jewell which a pp mentioned, great but disturbing.