Books You Must Read Before You Die
Updated: May 18
You've probably already heard of most of the books on this list because they're acclaimed and beloved by so many. From the best fiction books to the best nonfiction books, there are so many excellent titles collected in this list.
1984 by George Orwell
Formats: Kindle Edition / Audiobook / Hardcover / Paperback
Print Length: 304 pages
Language: English
Publisher: Fingerprint Publishing
Genre: Anthropology / Politics / Classic Fiction
Published in the summer of 1949, George Orwell's nineteen Eighty-Four is one of the most definitive texts of modern literature. Set in Oceania, one of the three inter-continental superstate that divided the world among themselves after a global war, Orwell's masterful critique of the political structures of the time, works itself out through the story of Winston Smith, a man caught in the webs of a dystopian future, and his clandestine love affair with Julia, a young woman he meets during the course of his work for the government. As much as it is an entertaining read, nineteen Eighty-Four is also a brilliant, and more importantly, a timeless satirical attack on the social and political structures of the world. George Orwell, born as Eric Arthur Blair on June 25, 1903 in Bihar, India, was a much-respected English novelist, political author, and journalist who wrote some of the finest pieces in literary criticism, poetry, fiction, and polemical journalism. Orwell’s work is known for its simplicity, astuteness, and wit, and he wrote with great cleverness on subjects such as anti-fascism, democratic socialism, totalitarianism, and the anti-Stalinist left. His best works include Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty Four, and Homage to Catalonia. Orwell died at the age of forty-six in 1950.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Formats: Kindle Edition / Audiobook / Hardcover / Paperback Print Length: 448 pages Language: English Publisher: Picador / Pan Macmillan Genre: Family & Relationships / Contemporary Fiction
Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020 An Observer ‘Best Debut Novelist of 2020’ It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth).
But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell. Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, won the Booker Prize and both 'Debut of the Year' and 'Book of The Year' at the British Book Awards.
It was also shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction, among many other awards. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and his essay on gender, anxiety and class was published by Lit Hub. He divides his time between New York and Glasgow. Young Mungo is his second novel.