Victoria Ford for Penguin
For many, it’s a series of books that sparks our lifelong love affair with reading. Part of the appeal, if you love a series, is the hope that it will never run out. Alan Bennett, explaining his early enthusiasm for Hugh Lofting ’s Dr Doolittle stories, once observed: “an important consideration was […] there were always more”.
As adults, some of us return again and again to our favourite series for comfort, because we have a clear idea of what we’ll be getting. Yet, reading a series can also be one of the most emotionally intense of reading experiences, as we become invested in the characters over a long period – sometimes even growing old along with them – and come to know them as well as our very best friends.
From trilogies to twenty-something-volume (and counting) sagas, from crime to comedy by way of fantasy, here are a selection of bingeable series that will take up days, if not weeks, of your life – and not a moment regretted.
Inspired by her anger at the murder of Stephen Lawrence, Malorie Blackman found an unconventional new way to shine light on the iniquity of racism with her 2001 novel Noughts and Crosses Romeo and Juliet -style tale of forbidden love in an alternative Britain, where the privileged dark-skinned Crosses hold sway over the downtrodden light-skinned Noughts.
Bleak but lit up by chinks of hope, that novel has now blossomed into a multi-generational saga (originally intended to be a trilogy, Blackman now describes the six-volume series as “the longest trilogy on the planet”) plus a stage show and a television drama.
The Jack Reacher
“His knuckles were nearly touching the ground. His neck was thick and his hands were the size of dinner plates …” Nobody with any sense would pick a fight with Jack Reacher, Lee Child’s man-mountain 21st-century knight errant. Luckily for those of us who think Child is the modern master of the thrilling fight scene, there are plenty of hoodlums and henchmen foolish enough to try.
It’s not just the fisticuffs that keep us coming back for book after book, however, but our fascination with the mysterious, contradictory character of Reacher (“His gaze was both wise and appealing, both friendly and bleak, both frank and utterly cynical,” Child writes in A Wanted Man
One trilogy to rule them all... This, really, is the trilogy of all trilogies, the series of books that effectively dragged the fantasy genre out of the literary ghetto and into the “mainstream”. Before J. R. R. Tolkien published The Fellowship of the Ring The Two Tower s The Return of the King ( The Lord of the Rings.
Even if you've not seen Peter Jackson's movie, you know the gist – four hobbits, a human, an elf, a dwarf and a wizard go on a perilous mission through “Middle Earth” (loosely based on Wales) to destroy a golden ring with apocalyptic powers, bumping into a phantasmagoria of evil villainy en route. But if you haven't read the book, you don't really know the story. For a start, Frodo is far more heroic in the books. And Golem is far creepier. But it's Tolkien's language (including the ones he made up) that really burns into the brain and keeps the pages turning.
In her novel The Surgeon
That book, The Apprentice
Not many fiction series can claim to have shaped the philosophy of the world’s best-known billionaire. But this space-opera sequence by the much-missed Banks (who died in 2013) has been cited by Elon Musk as an inspiration for his “utopian anarchism”. Musk even named two of his drone ships – Just Read the Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You – after AI ships in Banks’ books.
In Consider Phlebas , the first entry in the series, Banks introduces us to The Culture, a post-scarcity spaceship-centred society whose inhabitants live intellectually fulfilled lives. Many of the stories focus on the Special Circumstances unit’s efforts to export Culture-esque values to less progressive civilisations, giving Banks the opportunity to deploy his unique mixture of cynical satire and utopian optimism.
The Hawthorne
It’s often the case that the lead character in a book series is based closely on the author. Anthony Horowitz has taken this idea to its logical conclusion, and made himself the protagonist in a series of crime novels.
The first book, The Word Is Murder
The Shopaholic
A heroine who makes Bridget Jones look well-adjusted, the disaster-prone Becky Bloomwood – a financial journalist ironically unable to stay out of debt, thanks to her shopping addiction – made her debut in The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic
The barmy but unbowed Becky eventually marries and gives birth to a daughter (while the franchise gave birth to a film starring Isla Fisher), but her life has remained deliciously chaotic. Ironically, fans of good comic fiction will find this series detrimental to their bank balance – if you read one, you have to buy them all.
It was realising that there was a dearth of fiction about contemporary Asia and the consequences of its 21st-century economic boom that, in 2013, prompted Kevin Kwan to embarked on a satirical dissection of Singaporean high society in his debut novel Crazy Rich Asians .
The book sees Chinese-American academic Rachel Chu head to Singapore to meet the family of her boyfriend Nick, only to discover that he is a scion of one of the wealthiest families in Asia – and his mother isn’t too pleased about his dating somebody from outside her social circle. Kwan went on to deploy his hilariously sharp eye for the foibles of the filthy rich in two equally entertaining sequels, China Rich Girlfriend and Rich People Problems .
This is one of the all-time great detective series, providing hard-boiled L.A. noir worthy of Raymond Chandler but also offering an excoriating insight into the racial tensions of mid-century America.
The first volume, Devil in a Blue Dress , kicks the saga off in 1948, when African-American war veteran Ezekiel Rawlins is fired from his job in a factory, by his white supervisor, for being “uppity”. “Easy” becomes a reluctant detective to make ends meet.
Denzel Washington did a fine job of capturing Easy’s harassed nobility in the film version of Devil in a Blue Dress . But a single film won’t be enough to feed your Easy compulsion: you’ll want this superb series to go on forever.
Widely regarded not just as the greatest fantasy work of our age but perhaps the greatest achievement in British fiction over the past few decades, Pullman’s trilogy works on many levels: a trumpet-blast against the power of the Catholic Church (reimagined here in the guise of the sinister Magisterium), a joyful interrogation of many of the classic tropes of children’s fantasy literature, and an ingenious exploration of the notion of parallel worlds and how they interact.
The books have recently been dramatised as an addictive BBC series. But even the most brilliant special effects don’t quite match Pullman’s ability to conjure up his world of bear fights and witch battles through the extraordinary power of his prose.
Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series has gained a rabid cult following since the first came out in 1991. The sweeping time-travelling saga tells the story of British nurse Claire Randall who, while on honeymoon in Scotland in 1946, stumbles across an ancient circle of standing stones that spirit her to 18th-century Scotland. There, she meets, and falls for, the dashing Highland warrior-outlaw Jamie Fraser.
Trouble is, the Scotland of 1743 is riven by tribal tensions, and a bloody war has broken out, and the lovebirds must navigate this quagmire of blood-rivalry, betrayal and violence. But as with all time-travel stories, there comes a point when Claire must return to her world.
Only now she's pregnant, which rather complicates matters. As the books progress, Claire time-hops between the 20th and 18th centuries, always in search of her old love, from England to Scotland to the American Revolution and beyond in a rollicking mash-up of past and almost-present, soaked in sex, swordplay and no small amount of Scottish charm.
Weaver’s debut novel Chasing the Dead
This smashing series has become progressively more ambitious – in No One Home (2019) Raker probes the disappearance of not just one person but the entire population of a village – and all the novels are informed by Weaver’s fascination with the psychology of people who disappear, as explored in his acclaimed podcast Missing .
What makes these books so compulsive is that we’re all intrigued by what makes people vanish. And we all hope that if someone we loved disappeared there would be a David Raker – steely but kind, relatable but formidable – on their trail.
