English
Español
DeutschThe most popular books in English
from 20001 to 20200
What books are currently the most popular and which are the all time classics? Here we present you with a mixture of those two criteria. We update this list once a month.
Marguerite Yourcenar
These three tales are set in the Renaissance. Nathanael, the protagonist of "An Obscure Man" is innocent and shaped by his suffering. In "A Lovely Morning" Nathanael's son Lazarus escapes his tutelage to join a group of actors. The final story, "Anna, Soror" in an account of …
Annie Ernaux
A Frozen Woman charts Ernaux's teenage awakening, and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is thirty years old, a teacher married to …
Joann Sfar
Little Vampire has decided that despite his ability to fly, freedom to turn himself into a rat, a wolf, or a bat--even his unquestioned right to "bite little girls till they bleed, without ever getting into trouble"--that what he really wants to do is go to school. The kind with …
Prosper Mérimée
Carmen, Merimee's classic tale of passion and power, provided the inspiration for one of the world's most enduringly popular operas, and numerous films. Like Carmen, the other stories in this book, including Mateo Falcone, The Etruscan Vase, and The Venus of Ille, explore the …
Lewis Trondheim
Lewis Trondheim McConey's excitable pal Richie suffers a string of bad luck and believes he's been cursed by an ancient artifact — but is it all in his head? Or is the lack of concrete evidence all part of the curse? "Better to have doggy-doo on the sole of my foot than pigeon …
Alistair MacLean
Reissue of the tense tale of a deadly terrorist plot set Holland, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense.AMSTERDAM AIRPORT HAS DISAPPEAREDBLACKMAIL The mass of water in its place is the work of the FFF - an Irish terrorist group who want to force Britain’s …
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who …
George Sand
A Winter in Majorca is an autobiographical travel novel written by George Sand, at the time in a relationship with Frédéric Chopin. Although published in 1842, it appeared for the first time in 1841 in the Revue des deux Mondes. In the novel, Sand relates the details of her trip …
Agatha Christie
While the Light Lasts and Other Stories is a short story collection by Agatha Christie first published in the UK on 4 August 1997 by HarperCollins. It contains nine short stories.
Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar
A Mind at Peace is an iconic Turkish novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, one of the pioneers of literary modernism in Turkey. Tanpınar was a poet, novelist, and critic who worked as a professor of Ottoman and Turkish literature at Istanbul University. Though he was known in his …
Anatole France
Thaïs is a novel by Anatole France published in 1890. It is based on events in the life of Saint Thaïs of Egypt, a legendary convert to Christianity who is said to have lived in the 4th century. It was the inspiration for the opera of the same name by Jules Massenet.
Evelyn Waugh
When The Going Was Good is an anthology of four travel books written by English author Evelyn Waugh. The book consists of fragments from the travel books Labels, Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Waugh In Abyssinia. The author writes that these pages are all that he wishes to …
Maurice Leblanc
The Crystal Stopper is a mystery novel by Maurice Leblanc featuring the adventures of the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin. The novel appeared in serial form in the French newspaper Le Journal from September to November 1912 and was released as a novel subsequently. Maurice Leblanc …
Walter Block
Defending the Undefendable is a book by Walter Block originally published in 1976. Marcus Epstein describes the book as defending "pimps, drug dealers, blackmailers, corrupt policemen, and loan sharks as 'economic heroes'." It has been translated into ten foreign languages. …
Qian Zhongshu
Fortress Besieged was written by Qian Zhongshu, published in 1947, and is widely considered one of the masterpieces of twentieth century Chinese literature. The novel is a humorous tale about middle-class Chinese society in the late 1930s. It was made into a popular television …
Charles Brockden Brown
Edgar Huntly, Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker is a 1799 novel by the American author Charles Brockden Brown.
Stanisław Lem
The Astronauts is the first science fiction novel by Polish writer Stanisław Lem published as a book, in 1951. To write the novel, Lem received advance payment from publishing house Czytelnik. The book became an instant success and was translated into several languages. This …
Robert Silverberg
Gilgamesh the King is a 1984 historical novel by Robert Silverberg presenting the Epic of Gilgamesh as a novel. In afterword author say "at all times I have attempted to interpret the fanciful and fantastic events of these poems in a realistic way, that is, to tell the story of …
Gianluca Morozzi
“A spine-tingling novel that keeps you mesmerized from beginning to end.”—InfiniteStorie“Morozzi has a light touch. He has an uncanny ability to convey mood swings, excitement and plot twists with ever increasing velocity.”—Gazzetta di Parma“A chilling and claustrophobic …
G. K. Chesterton
Heretics is a collection of 20 essays originally published by G.K. Chesterton in 1905.
Valerio Massimo Manfredi
From the pen of the international bestselling author of The Last Legion comes a new political thriller set during the tempestuous final days of Julius Caesar's Imperial Rome. It is March in the year 44 BC. The Roman Empire stretches from modern-day Syria in the east to the …
Lee Smolin
Lee Smolin offers a new theory of the universe that is at once elegant comprehensive and radically different from anything proposed before Smolin posits that a process of self organization like that of biological evolution shapes the universe as it develops and eventually …
Ron Suskind
The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism is a 2008 non-fiction book by Ron Suskind, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, describing various actions and policies of the George W. Bush administration. Most notably, it alleges that the Bush administration …
Ellen Raskin
Figgs & Phantoms is a 1974 young adult novel written by Ellen Raskin. It won the Newbery Honor award.
Cordelia Fine
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference is a 2010 book by Cordelia Fine, written to debunk the idea that men and women are hardwired with different interests. The author criticizes claimed evidence of the existence of innate biological …
Billy Hayes
Midnight Express is a 1977 non-fiction book by Billy Hayes and William Hoffer about Billy's experience as a young American who was sent to a Turkish prison for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey to the US. An adaptation of the book was made into an American film of the same …
James Luceno
Millennium Falcon is a novel by James Luceno about the history of the Millennium Falcon. It was originally set to be released on December 30, 2008, but was pushed up to October 21, 2008. At the end of the book is an introduction to the upcoming novel Outcast, the first novel in …
Shelley Jackson
Half Life is the 2006 debut novel of American writer and artist Shelley Jackson. The novel presupposes an alternate history in which the atomic bomb resulted in a genetic preponderance of conjoined twins, who eventually become a minority subculture.
Gillian Slovo
Red Dust is a novel written by South African-born Gillian Slovo that is structured around the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the fictional town Smitsrivier and also addresses the question of truth. In post-apartheid South Africa, retired anti-apartheid …
Samuel Beckett
Stories and Texts for Nothing is a collection of stories by Samuel Beckett. It gathers three of Beckett's short stories and the thirteen short prose pieces he named "Texts for Nothing". All of these works are collected in the Grove Press edition of Beckett's complete short prose.
V.S. Naipaul
A Way in the World is a 1994 book by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul. Although it was marketed as a novel in America, A Way in the World which consists of linked narratives, is arguably something different.
Ted Mooney
Easy Travel to Other Planets is a novel written by Ted Mooney.
Pierre Louys
The Songs of Bilitis is a collection of erotic, essentially lesbian, poetry by Pierre Louÿs published in Paris in 1894. The poems are in the manner of Sappho; the collection's introduction claims they were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus, written by a woman of Ancient …
John Clute
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is an English language reference work on science fiction, first published in 1979. In October 2011, the third edition was made available for free online.
Robert Silverberg
Who knoweth the spirit of men that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth? –Ecclesiastes 3:21 Okay, they did resemble elephants, it can't be denied. That led many people to underestimate the Nildoror and their obviously more fearsome …
Margaret Weis
The Doom Brigade is the first book in the Kang's Regiment series/The Chaos War series of the Dragonlance novels, written by Margaret Weis and Don Perrin, and is published by Wizards of the Coast. The next book in the series is Draconian Measures.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Tarzan the Untamed is a book written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the seventh in his series of books about the title character Tarzan. It was originally published as two separate stories serialized in different pulp magazines; "Tarzan the Untamed" in Redbook from March to August, …
Wisława Szymborska
Sounds, Feelings, Thoughts is a book of poems by Wisława Szymborska.
Louis Althusser
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays is one of the chief works of Louis Althusser. First published in 1968, it was published in English translation in 1971.
Nalo Hopkinson
World Fantasy Award Winner: Fiction that “combines a richly textured multicultural background with incisive storytelling,” by the author of The Salt Roads (Library Journal). In Skin Folk, with works ranging from science fiction to Caribbean folklore, passionate love to chilling …
Rupert Smith
The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World is a treatise on modern warfare written by General Sir Rupert Smith and published in 2005. Smith is a retired general who spent 40 years in the British Army; he commanded the 1st Armoured Division in the First Gulf War and …
Saul Friedländer
The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945 is the second volume of Saul Friedländer's history of Nazi Germany and the Jews. It describes the German extermination policies that resulted in the murder of six million European Jews. The book presents a detailed …
Joan London
The Good Parents is the second full-length novel written by Joan London. It was first published in 2008. The book concerns an eighteen-year-old girl, Maya de Jong, who moves to Melbourne and becomes involved in a relationship with her boss. When Maya's parents come to Melbourne …
Catharine Sedgwick
Hope Leslie or Early Times in the Massachusetts is a novel written by Catharine Maria Sedgwick. The book is considered significant because of its strong feminist overtones and ideas of equity and fairness toward Native Americans, both of which were rare at the time the book was …
Alan Dean Foster
The Howling Stones is a science fiction novel written by Alan Dean Foster.
Primo Levi
The Sixth Day and Other Tales, written by Primo Levi, is a collection of short stories, originally published in Storie naturali and Vizio di forma. Unlike the author's earlier and better-known works, these stories may be considered science fiction.
David D. Friedman
The Machinery of Freedom is a nonfiction book by David D. Friedman which advocates Friedman's vision of an anarcho-capitalist society. The book was published in 1973, with a second edition in 1989 and a third edition in 2014.
Daniel Tammet
Daniel's internationally bestselling memoir of living with Asperger's Syndrome and Savant Syndrome, Born on a Blue Day established him as one of the most original talents in contemporary non-fiction.Now, in his new book, Embracing the Wide Sky, he combines meticulous scientific …
Judith Reeves-Stevens
Memory Prime is a Star Trek: The Original Series novel written by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. It was their first work in the Star Trek universe.
Harry Harrison
The Hammer and the Cross is the first part in a trilogy written by Harry Harrison and John Holm, a pseudonym for the Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey. The book chronicles the rise of the protagonist Shef, bastard son of a Viking and an English lady. The book is set in the 9th century …
Farley Mowat
People of the Deer is Canadian author Farley Mowat's first book, and brought him literary recognition. The book is based upon a series of travels the author undertook in the Canadian barren lands, of Keewatin Region, west of Hudson Bay. The most important of these expeditions …
Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison's Watching is a 1989 compilation of 25 years worth of essays and film reviews written by Harlan Ellison for Cinema magazine, the Los Angeles Free Press, Starlog magazine, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction among others. In the book, Ellison explains, …
James White
Star Surgeon is a 1963 science-fiction book by author James White, and it is part of the Sector General series.
Karrine Steffans
Part tell-all, part cautionary tale, this emotionally charged memoir from a former video vixen nicknamed 'Superhead' goes beyond the glamour of celebrity to reveal the inner workings of the hip-hop dancer industry—from the physical and emotional abuse that's rampant in the …
Stendhal
Vie de Henri Brulard is an unfinished autobiography by Stendhal. It was begun on November 23, 1835 and abandoned March 26, 1836 while the author was serving as the French Consul in Civitavecchia. Stendhal had severe doubts about contemporary interest in his autobiography, so he …
Audrey Couloumbis
Getting Near to Baby is a 1999 children's novel by Audrey Couloumbis. It was awarded a Newbery Honor in 2000 and is an ALA Notable Children's Book. The book's target age range is for readers between the ages of 10 to 14. Getting Near to Baby, was influenced through the authors …
Wendelin Van Draanen
Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief is a book by Wendelin Van Draanen.
Tyler Perry
View our feature on Tyler Perry's Don't Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings.In 2005, Tyler Perry took Hollywood by storm. The movie he wrote, produced, and starred in, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, opened number one at the box office and went on to gross more than $50 …
Ted Chiang
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate is a fantasy novelette by Ted Chiang originally published in 2007 by Subterranean Press and reprinted in the September 2007 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction. It won the 2008 Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the 2008 Nebula Award for …
Dave Duncan
Sir Stalwart is a book published in 1999 that was written by Dave Duncan.
Maya Angelou
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography about the early years of African-American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help overcome …
James Barclay
Noonshade is a fantasy novel by James Barclay. It was first published in the UK in 2000. This is the second book in the Chronicles of The Raven. "An apocalyptic spell has been cast, an ancient evil banished. And now the land of Balaia, still riven with war, must live with the …
Piers Anthony
Chaining the Lady is the 2nd book of the Cluster Series published in 1978 that was written by Piers Anthony.
James Alan Gardner
Radiant is a science fiction novel by the Canadian author James Alan Gardner. It was published in 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers under their Eos Books imprint. It is the seventh novel in Gardner's "League of Peoples" series. Like the six preceding novels, Radiant is set in the …
