You are here: » Departments » English

Key Stage 4 Reading List

Classic Books

Jane Austen – Emma, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey
Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
Charles Dickens – Great Expectations, Oliver Twist
H.G. Wells – War of the Worlds, The Time Machine
Robert Louis Stevenson – The Strange Case of Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Far From the Madding Crowd
Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher and other stories
Arthur Conan Doyle – any of the Sherlock Holmes Series, eg. The Speckled Band
Henry James – The Turn of the Screw
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
Wilkie Collins – The Woman in White
Bram Stoker – Dracula
George Eliot – The Mill on The Floss

Fiction

J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451
George Orwell – Nineteen Eighty Four, Animal Farm
E.M. Forster – A Room with a View, A Passage to India
William Golding – Lord of the Flies
James Joyce – Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Muriel Spark – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Joseph Heller – Catch 22
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace
Laurie Lee – Cider with Rosie
J.G. Ballard – Empire of the Sun
Ernest Hemingway – A Farewell to Arms, The Old Man and the Sea
Jean-Dominique Bauby – The Diving Bell and The Butterfly
Louis de Bernieres – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Susan Hill – I’m The King of the Castle, The Woman in Black
Barry Hines – A Kestrel for a Knave
Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Love in the Time of Cholera
Phillip Pulman – Northern Lights, The Amber Spyglass, The Subtle Knife
Khalid Hossein – The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns
Ian McEwan – Atonement, Enduring Love
Yann Martel – Life of Pi
Mark Haddon – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Audrey Niffenegger – The Time Traveller’s Wife
Monica Ali – Brick Lane
Andrea Levy – Small Island
Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
Kate Atkinson – Behind The Scenes at the Museum, Human Croquet
Peter Carey – True History of the Kelly Gang, Oscar and Lucinda
Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones
Jean Rhys – Wide Sargasso Sea

Non-Fiction/ Autobiography

Jung Chang – Wild Swans
Frank McCourt – Angela’s Ashes
Stephen Fry – Moab is my Washpot
Bill Bryson – A Short History of Nearly Everything, Shakespeare
Gerald Durrell – My Family and Other Animals

back

Our Sponsors

Click here to view more of our sponsors.

Thank you for your help and support over the past year. WGGS

Lady’s Close House

Having looked carefully at the capital development needs of the school and the level of funding currently available to us, we now intend to focus our energy on restoring Lady's Close House.

This is the most historic building on the school site and is central to every girl's development at WGGS. Lady's Close is the Y7 base, where pupils have their own space and Form Rooms. The girls have special affection for the building because it represents the start of their careers at WGGS. The grand old house is also the home of the English Department.

The building is well over 100 years old and is in dire need of modernisation and refurbishment. We have ambitious plans to recapture the splendour and elegance of its history, while incorporating the technology and physical improvements that will bring Lady's Close House into the 21st century in appropriate WGGS style.

Fuller Life Fitness

Members of the WGGS school can enjoy generous membership discounts. View details...