Lists

Seven novels on the American West and the hard country along the Texas-Mexico border, from two of its greatest chroniclers. Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy follows young cowboys riding south into Mexico as the old range life fades, told in spare, haunting prose. Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove quartet sweeps from the Rio Grande to Montana across cattle drives, Comanche raids, and the long friendship of two ageing Rangers. Together they trace the myth and the reality of the frontier as it slips into memory - violent, elegiac, and unforgettable.

7 books

Five centuries of England, told through the people who shaped it. This list runs from the turn of the last millennium, where Ken Follett's The Evening and the Morning builds Kingsbridge out of a lawless, Viking-haunted Anglo-Saxon world, through the plague years and soaring ambition of the 14th century in World Without End, and on to Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy and the sharp, dangerous heart of Henry VIII's court, seen through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. Cathedrals and coronations, the Black Death and betrayal, ordinary lives caught up in the making of a nation. Epic historical fiction for readers who like their past vivid, human, and hard to put down.

5 books

12 books