A full reading list will be provided. Students should already be hearty readers with a genuine interest in literature. The following website lists a huge range of books students can read as a supplement to the course reading:
http://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/as-and-a-level/english-literature-a-2740/subject-content/unit-5
In addition, students should be prepared to research literary criticism and theory. There are lots of articles and summaries online. Starting places might be:
Shmoop does a good summary of literary criticism in a very accessible style. You can access the feminist criticism from here: http://www.shmoop.com/feminist-theory/ but the site contains other theories too.
The ‘Universal Teacher’ website includes a number of tutorials and summaries relating to literary texts. It can be accessed here: http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/contents.htm#lita
Reading list
War
Sebastian Faulks
Birdsong, Charlotte Gray
Louis de Bernieres
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Ian McEwan
Atonement
Mal Peet
Tamar
Linda Newberry
Sisterland, The Shell House
Aidan Chambers
Postcards from No Man’s Land
Joseph Heller
Catch 22
E M Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front
Lloyd Jones
Mr Pip
DM Thomas
The White Hotel
Science Fiction
Aldous Huxley
Brave New World
Isaac Asimov
I, Robot
John Wyndham
Day of the Triffids
Ray Bradbury
Farenheit 451
George Orwell
1984
Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blind Assassin
HG Wells
The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Kashuo Ishiguro
Never Let Me Go
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
Modern Life
Lionel Shriver
We need to talk about Kevin
Jodi Piccoult
My Sister’s Keeper, Nineteen Minutes
Nick Hornby
High Fidelity, Fever Pitch, A Long Way Down, Slam
Alice Sebold
Lovely Bones
Mohsin Hamid
The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Nicole Krauss
The History of Love
Jonathan Safran Foer
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Khaled Hosseini
The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Comedy
Marc Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time
Tom Sharpe
Wilt, Blott on the Landscape
Douglas Adams
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Zadie Smith
White Teeth
Alexander McCall Smith
No 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Jasper Fforde
The Eyre Affair/ The Big Over Easy
Thrillers
Frederick Forsyth
The Day of the Jackal
John Grisham
The Client, The Chamber, The Firm
Iain Banks
The Wasp Factory
Ian McEwan
Enduring Love
Sarah Waters
Fingersmith
Robert Ludlum
The Bourne Trilogy
Jed Rubenfeld
The Interpretation of Murder
Non Fiction
Julian Barnes
A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
Joe Simpson
Touching the Void
Bill Bryson
Notes from a Small Island
George Orwell
Down and Out in Paris and London
Jung Chang
Wild Swans
Adeline Yen Mah
Falling Leaves, Chinese Cinderella
Fantasy
Lian Hearn
Across the Nightingale Floor
Phillip Pullman
His Dark Materials Trilogy
Terry Pratchett
Discworld Series
JRR Tolkien
The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings
Yann Martel
The Life of Pi
Historical/Adventure
Tracey Chevalier
Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Virgin Blue, Falling Angels,The Lion and the Unicorn, Burning Bright
Kate Mosse
Labrynthe, Sepulchre
Jennifer Donnolly
A Gathering Light
Bernard Cornwell
The Sharpe novels
C.S. Forester
Hornblower
Margaret Atwood
Alias Grace
Stef Penney
TheTenderness of Wolves
Classics
EM Forster
Room with a View, Howard’s End, A Passage to India
Wilkie Collins
The Moonstone, The Woman in White
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre, Villette
Emily Bronte
Wuthering Heights
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey etc
George Eliot
The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch
Alexander Dumas
The Man in the Iron Mask
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’ubervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd etc
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mocking Bird
Cult Fiction
Anthony Burgess
A Clockwork Orange
Jack Kerouac
On the Road
R M Pirsig
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Douglas Coupland
Generation X
Ken Kesey
One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest
Albert Camus
The Outsider
JD Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
F Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
Sylvia Plath
The Bell Jar
Useful websites
https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/e-magazine/emag-login/ English and Media magazine
https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/english/as-and-a-level/english-literature-a-7711-7712 AQA Literature exam board site
https://www.bl.uk/discovering-literature British Library
https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/ The Globe
http://www.gutenberg.org/ Project Guttenberg online books
http://www.universalteacher.org.uk/prose/greatexpectations.pdf Great Expectations
http://vos.ucsb.edu/browse.asp?id=3 Voice of the Shuttle- a literature gateway maintained by the Uni of California