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We placed an unbeatable 44 books in the Big Read top 100, a superstar 9 books in the top 21 and you voted for Pride and Prejudice to receive a whopping 135000 votes to get to second place!
 
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Penguin publishes forty-four of the nation's top 100 favourite titles split into Contemporary and Modern Classics, Black Classics and Children's titles, browse through our Big Reads at your leisure ...
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As a salute to these special favourites, we asked a selection of authors to write about their favourite nominated Penguin Big Read title, read on to find out more …
And if you haven't tried it yet, then get your literary juices flowing with our Penguin Big Read Quizes and see if you're a scholar or a philistine. |
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Elizabeth Buchan is the author of Secrets of the Heart (2000)
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2002) and The Good Wife (2003)
In the end, Jane Austen's novels elude the final analysis. Despite realms of paper being covered by critics - including this one - who labour to dissect this and that element in the texts, the mysterious, protean qualities of sensibility and feeling, and that inner life which makes her novels great and enduring, ultimately escape definition. They just are, and so it should be. Read More ... |
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Re-reading Pride and Prejudice as I have just done, I was struck by
how effortless a read it is, how fresh and lively and beautifully structured.
It draws you in with such confidence, introduces the characters with such elegant strokes and puts a smile on your face. It is a story full of humour, intrigue, quiet cynicism and genuine depth of feeling and deals at its heart with a great British injustice, the archaic inheritance law that can see five girls made homeless in favour of a male relative, a law that in some families still exists today. |
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A curious thing happened to me while I was writing my second novel,
Affinity. The novel is set in the 1860s, partly in a women's prison, partly
in an upper-middle-class home. It's a rather gothic novel, full of twists and reversals,
and for the purposes of theme and plot there's a foregrounding at certain moments of hands - the drawing of attention, for example, to the strong, possibly sinister, hands of at least two female characters. As I was putting the book together, I was dimly aware that the hands I was describing were recalling some other hands to me; and at last I realised whose those were. They were the scarred and powerful hands of Jaggers's housekeeper, Molly, in Great Expectations - that 'wild beast tamed,' as Wemmick dubs her. Read More ... |
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The year 1848, as Peter Ackroyd has pointed out, was a remarkable
one in the annals of literature, for it saw the publication of Jane Eyre,
Wuthering Heights and Vanity Fair within a matter of months. Each was set in the past, with a nostalgia edged with bitterness and disapproval. It was as if, in a year of revolution on the Continent and Chartist agitation at home, the nation's writers sought to remind their public how much they had to be grateful for in John Bull's England. The generation liberated by the Great Reform Act of 1832 had come of age. Read More ... |
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