YEAR 8 RECOMMENDED READING LIST
Books underlined are class readers and will be studied in English lessons: they are
required reading. Other books can be read in any order, but have been divided into terms
to draw links between other books and topics on the curriculum. Some of the books (not all)
in each term link with the period being studied in History.
MICHAELMAS TERM
Historical theme: The Tudors
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As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee
(Penguin)
The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain (Puffin)
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (Puffin)
The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle (Puffin)
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth, Jules Verne (Oxford)
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (Puffin)
The Count of Monte Christo, Alexander Dumas (Puffin)
The Red Pony and The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, John Steinbeck
(Penguin)
Lord of the Flies, William Golding (Faber)
Animal Farm, George Orwell (Penguin)
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley (Vintage)
Night and Twilight, Elie Wiesel (Penguin)
War of the Worlds, H G Wells
Cosmic Trilogy, C S Lewis (Harper Collins)
LENT TERM
Historical theme: The Stuarts
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Scoop, Evelyn Waugh (Penguin)
Decline and Fall, Evelyn Waugh (Penguin)
Friends Though Divided: a tale of the Civil War,
G A Henty (out of print; free on Kindle)
The Confidential Agent, Graham Greene (Penguin)
The Code of the Woosters, French Leave, Heavy Weather, Laughing Gas, P G
Wodehouse (Hutchinson)
Goodbye To All That, Robert Graves (Penguin)
A Farewell To Arms, Ernest Hemingway (Vintage)
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (Vintage)
Version 2, 2014-15
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Strange Meeting, Susan Hill (Penguin)
The Princess and Curdie, George Macdonald (Puffin)
Tales of Mystery and Terror, Edgar Allen Poe (Puffin)
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens (Puffin abridged or
Penguin unabridged)
The Man Who Would Be King and other stories, Rudyard
Kipling (Penguin)
Three Men in a Boat, Jerome Jerome (Puffin)
TRINITY TERM
Historical theme: The Modern Age
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Catcher in the Rye, J D Salinger (Penguin)
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (Puffin)
The Twelfth Day of July, Joan Lingard (Puffin)
The Screwtape Letters, C S Lewis (William Collins)
Roald Dahl’s Book of Ghost Stories, Roald Dahl (ed.)
(Penguin)
The Man Who Was Thursday, G K Chesterton (Penguin)
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (Puffin)
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (Puffin)
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte (Puffin)
The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux (Puffin)
Murder on the Orient Express, Murder of Roger Ackroyd, And
Then There Were None, Agatha Christie (Harper)
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake (Vintage)
Version 2, 2014-15