Honors English 9 Independent Novel List

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. A classic of modern African writing, this is the tale of what happens to tribal customs and old ways when white settlers arrive. 180

Adams, Douglas. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (series) The story of a British earthling plucked from his planet, and his subsequent adventures elsewhere in the universe. 250

Adams, Richard. Watership Down. The quest of a band of Berkshire rabbits for anew home has allegorical overtones but treats the conditions of wildlife with accuracy. 470

Adams, Richard. The Plague Dogs. Two British dogs escape their government-sponsored animal experimentation laboratory home. Rumored to be infected with plague virus, they struggle to escape their human hunters and learn to survive in a hostile environment. 450

Allende, Isabel. Daughter of Fortune. An orphan raised in Chile by a Victorian-era spinster and her brother, young Eliza Sommers follows her outlaw lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849. 400

Allende, Isabel. Portrait in Sepia. Sequel about Eliza’s granddaughter’s search for her roots. 400

Austen, Jane. Emma. Charming, willful Emma Woodehouse amuses herself by planning other people’s lives. When her interfering backfires, she learns a bitter lesson about interference and respect. 350

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. Anne Elliot sent Frederick Wentworth away seven years ago when she was an unhappy girl beset by troubles. Now she regrets it. When he returns, it takes a fortuitous series of accidents to set things right. 350

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. The romances of the Bennett girls and ardent desire of their mother to have them all well married. 350

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. The Dashwood sisters are very different from each other in appearance and temperament; Elinor’s good sense and readiness to observe social rules contrast with Marianne’s impulsive behavior and excessive sensibility. Both struggle to maintain their integrity and find happiness in a competitive marriage market. 350

Bronte, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. An unassuming British orphan becomes a governess and falls in love with her employer. 500

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. A story of intense and frustrated love, hate and revenge, that takes place over two generations in the wild moors of rural England. 350

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. This hilarious and disturbing novel creates an alarming futuristic world vision of violence, high technology and authoritarianism. 350

Camus, Albert. The Plague. Citizens of a French town are cut off from the outside world when rats pass the plague throughout the population. 250

Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. The adventures of an eccentric Spanish country gentleman and his companion who set out as a knight and squire of old to right wrongs and punish evil. Perhaps the first novel ever written. 750

Clavell, James. King Rat. Set against the seething backdrop of a WWII prison camp run by the Japanese, an epic novel of savagery and survival, and of one man’s all-consuming dominance over fellow captives and captors alike. 350

Clavell, James. Shogun. A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of love. All brought together in a might saga of a time and place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, and the struggle for power. 800

Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. His romantic self-image shattered by cowardice, Jim seeks to recoup his lost honor through an act of heroism. 300

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. Based on the true story of Alexander Selkirk’s sea experiences, this novel is about the adventures of a man who spends 24 years on an isolated island. Perhaps the first English-language novel ever written. 300

Delderfield, R.F. God Is an Englishman. Adam Swann returns home in 1858 after service with Her Majesty’s army in the Crimea and India, determined to build his fortune in the dog-eat-dog world of Victorian commerce. Swann is captivated by Henrietta, the high-spirited daughter of a local mill owner. The two share adventures, reversal and fortune. 675

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. The hero, Pip, reared by humble relatives, is informed he is to be made a gentleman of “great expectations” by a mysterious benefactor. 450

Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. A young orphan boy lives in a filthy workhouse until he runs away and is captured by a gang of thieves, and endures much hardship while the truth of his identity is concealed from him. 400

Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. In Paris and London during the French Revolution, a French nobleman renounces his position and leaves his country, then returns to save the life of a servant, putting himself in grave danger. His life crosses paths with a man of strikingly similar appearance, and their fates are intertwined. 475

Dinesen, Issak. Out of Africa. The European narrator reminisces about the years between WWI and WWII spent managing a coffee plantation in Kenya. Evokes the country of Africa as strongly as any character.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Brothers Karamazov. This turbulent story centers on the murder of a corrupt landowner, and the aftermath for his sons: one passionate, one coldly intellectual, one spiritual, and one illegitimate. 875

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. A sensitive intellectual is driven by poverty to believe himself exempt from moral law. 500

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. The Hound of the Baskervilles. Sherlock Holmes is asked to investigate the tale of a hound that haunts the moors around the Baskervilles’ ancestral home. 300

Dumas, Alexander. The Count of Monte Cristo. An adventure story of a man’s unjust imprisonment, escape, and return to a new life motivated by revenge against his betrayers. 550

Dumas, Alexander. The Man in the Iron Mask. The adventures of d’Artagnon, who battles political intrigues in the service of King Louis XIV in 17 th-century France. 550

Dumas, Alexander. The Three Musketeers. During the reign of France’s King Louis XIV, d’Artagnon and the three musketeers unite to defend the honor of Anne of Austria against the plots of evil Cardinal Richeliu. 550

DuMaurier, Daphne. Rebecca. The timid new mistress of Manderley is haunted by the shadow of her new husband’s first wife, the vibrant Rebecca. 350

Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Impulsive, loving Maggie and her plodding brother Tom find in death the solution to their emotional conflicts. 350

Eliot, George. Silas Marner. Embittered by a false accusation and disappointed in friendship and love, the weaver Silas Marner retreats into a life alone with his loom and his gold. Fate steals his gold and replaces it with a golden-haired orphan child. 200

Forster, E.M. A Room with a View. A classic tale of British middle-class love, this novel displays Forster’s skill in contrasting British sensibilities with those of foreign cultures, as he portrays the love of a British woman for an expatriate living in Italy. 300

Forster, E.M. A Passage to India. East and West clash in India when an Englishwoman accuses an Indian man of attacking her. 300

Fowles, John. The Collector. Miranda, a beautiful young art student, is the object of obsession and kidnapping victim of the psychopathic Frederick, the butterfly collector who has watched her for years. 300

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. A love story set in 1800's England. A young gentleman of tradition and social standing is engaged to a proper, wealthy girl. His destiny is haunted, however, by the scandalous and mysterious presence of another woman. 450

Fowles, John. The Magus. Nicholas Urfe, an evasive young Englishman, accepts a teaching position on a remote Greek island, where his friendship with a reclusive, demonic millionaire lures him into an elaborate series of staged hallucinations, riddles, and psychological traps meant to test his concept of reality. 450

Frank, Anne. The Diary of Anne Frank. The diary of a 13-year-old Jewish girl, \written in an Amsterdam warehouse attic where she and her family hid from the Germans during WWII. 300

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. The Latin American novel portrays seven generations in the lives of the Buendia family. The author uses a technique called magic realism: the use of magic, myth, and religion to intensify reality. 400

Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. In a drunken rage, Micheal Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a visiting sailor at a local bar. When they return to Casterbridge 19 years later, he has gained power and success as the town’s mayor, but finds that he cannot erase the past or the guilt that consumes him. 350

Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the d’Urbervilles. A Victorian novel in which the happiness and marriage of Tess and her husband are destroyed because she confesses to him that she bore a child as the result of a rape by her employer’s son. 450

Hesse, Herman. Steppenwolf. An experimental combination of symbolism, realism, and fantasy, this is the story of the conflict between the spirit and the flesh inherent in human nature and a searing critique of Western civilization of the early 20 th century. 240

Hilton, James. Lost Horizon. On the northwestern frontier of India, Conway is a passenger on a plane that disappears in the Tibetan mountain wilderness. He and his fellow survivors discover ShangriLa, paradise on earth. But will they give up the hope of returning home for the chance to enjoy it forever? 400

Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Set in 1482, this novel relates the tragic life of the deformed Quasimodo and his hopeless love for the gypsy dancer Esmerelda. 500

Hugo, Victor. Les Miserables. Traces the life of Jean Valjean, a peasant who steals a loaf of bread to feed his starving children and thereby becomes a convict. 500

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. In this chilling vision of the future, babies are produced in bottles and citizens exist in a mechanized, sanitized world with no soul. 250

Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. The life of Stevens, an aging English butler, changes after three decades of service to the same employer. 250

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A young Irish student struggles to become a writer. Joyce pioneered the modern novel, partly through his use of stream-of consciousness narration. 250

Kafka, Franz. The Trial. Joseph K., a bank official, is arrested, tried, and convicted of an unnamed crime of which he knows nothing. 300

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. More non-fiction than fiction, a Chinese American woman recalls the Chinese myths, family stories and events of her California childhood that have shaped her identity. 250

Lewis, C.S. The Chronicles of Narnia. (You must read three consecutive books in the series.) Enter the magical world of Narnia where enchanted creatures live and fierce battles are fought between good and evil. Can be read as religious allegory. 350

Lewis, C.S. ‘Til We Have Faces. Suggested by the myth of Cupid and Psyche, this novel tells of the struggle between unselfish faith and selfish pride, of the conflict between the spirit and the flesh. Can be read as religious allegory. 300

Markandaya, Kamala. Nectar in a Sieve. In a small village in India, a simple peasant woman recalls her life as a child bride, a farmer’s wife, and a devoted mother amid fights to meet changing times, poverty, and disaster. 200

Orwell, George. 1984. In a society of the future, individual privacy is invaded as the “Thought Police:” persuade the people that “Was is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.” 300

Pasternak, Boris. Dr. Zhivago. One of the most powerful books published in the 20 th century, it not only brings the Russian Revolution and the early Soviet era to life; it also tells the stories of some of the most memorable characters in literature. 500

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. The story of a gifted young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a beautiful woman who struggles to defeat him. 600

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. A satire on the follies and dangers of collectivism in which the U.S. is faced with the prospect of economic collapse when the country’s leading innovators and industrialists go into hiding. 600

Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front. Through the eyes and mind of a German WWI private, the reader shares life on the battlefield at its least romantic. 200

Rolvaag, O.E. Giants in the Earth. A vast and rich account of the Scandinavian peasant immigrants who settled throughout America. 450

Scott, Sir Walter. Ivanhoe. Relates the adventures of the Saxon knight Ivanhoe in 1194, the year of Richard the Lionhearted’s return from the Third Crusade. 400

Shelly, Mary. Frankenstein. A gothic tale of terror in which Frankenstein creates a monster from corpses. Because everyone who sees him fears him, the monster despairs and turns on his creator. 300

Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. The last generation, innocent victims of an accidental nuclear war, live out their last days, make plans that will never be carried out, and hope for a miracle that will not come. 300

Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. While going through the possessions of a deceased guest who owed them money, the mistress of the inn and her young son find a treasure map that leads them to a pirate’s fortune. The origin of the pirate Long John Silver. 250

Stewart, Mary. The Crystal Cave. (series)This telling of the Arthurian legend brings to life one of the world’s greatest legends and mysteries, shedding a fascinating new light on the turbulence of 5 th-century Britain. 500

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Count Dracula’s nasty practice of drinking the blood of his victims is finally ended by a brave band of English men and women. The story is told from varying points of view, mostly in letters and diary entries. 400

Swift, Jonathon. Gulliver’s Travels. A satire on mankind in which an 18 th century gentleman visits foreign lands populated by bizarre creatures who illuminate many of the vices and weaknesses of the author’s society. 300

Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair. Becky Sharp is an ambitious social climber in Victorian London. 550

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins reluctantly commits himself to saving Middle Earth from destruction, and begins an epic battle of good against evil. 300

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Fellowship of the Ring. Young Frodo Baggins inherits Bilbo’s magic ring and the responsibility of destroying it. 300

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Two Towers. The trilogy continues. 300

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Return of the King. The trilogy concludes. 300

Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. When Napoleon invades Russia, characters both real and fictional find their lives changed. 1,400

Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons. A straightforward novel that dramatizes the conflict and differences between generations in Russia. 200

Verne, Jules. The Mysterious Island. Based on the true-life survival of Alexander Selkirk for five years on an uninhabited island, this is the tale of five men and a dog who escape Civil War Virginia in a balloon during a storm. Landing on an uncharted island, they overcome nature’s violence to create a new civilization. Mystery, suspense, and science fiction combine as the men ultimately learn the island’s secret. 600

White, T.H. The Once and Future King. The magical epic of King Arthur and his shining Camelot; of Merlin and Owl and Guinevere; of beasts who talk and men who fly; of wizardry and war. The fantasy masterpiece by which all others are judged. 625

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. An incredibly handsome young man in Victorian England retains his youthful appearance over the years while his portrait reflects both his age and evil soul as he pursues a life of decadence and corruption. 200