Year 11 English Literature Enrichment Activities
- Read Making the Leap: Moving from GCSE to A Level Literature Study
- Read The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood.
- Read Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy.
- Read or watch Othello by Shakespeare.
Year 12 Wider Reading List: Fiction and Literary Texts
Anything in bold can be downloaded without a charge because it is pre-copyright. Anything with an * is on the A Level syllabus for AQA (Literature or the combined Language and Literature, but this doesn’t mean that you will study all those with a *).
Prose Pre-1900:
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
- Pride and Prejudice*/ Sense and Sensibility / Persuasion / Emma – Jane Austen
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë *
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles * /Far from the Madding Crown – Thomas Hardy
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley *
- Dracula – Bram Stoker *
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- The Count of Monte Cristo / The Man in the Iron Mask – Alexandre Dumas
Prose Post-1900:
- Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys *
- Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- Perfume – Patrick Süskind
- Regeneration – Pat Barker
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafón
- A Passage to India / A Room with a View – E.M.Forster *
- The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- The Go-Between – L.P. Hartley *
- Brick Lane – Monica Ali
- The Blind Assassin / The Handmaid’s Tale*/ The Testaments – Margaret Atwood
- Possession – A S Byatt
- Rebecca – Daphne DeMaurier *
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks *
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey *
- Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini *
- The Historian – Julia Kostova
- Sons and Lovers / Lady Chatterley’s Lover – DH Lawrence
- Atonement */ Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
- Beloved – Toni Morrison
- Labyrinth – Kate Mosse
- Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- Remains of the Day / Never Let me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Small Island – Andrea Levy
- Wolf Hall / Bring up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel
- The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy *
- The Help – Kathryn Stockett *
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker *
- Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson *
- White Teeth – Zadie Smith
- Mrs Dalloway / To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
- Revolutionary Road – Richard Yates *
Drama Pre and Post -1900:
Some of these are on English Literature courses. Anyone considering Drama A Level – any number of these may come up! These are also excellent background reading for the course. Plus, a lot of these also have full length stage performances, or extended extracts on YouTube.
- Ghosts – Henrik Ibsen *
- Miss Julie – Auguste Strindberg
- Waiting for Godot – Samuel Beckett
- The History Boys – Alan Bennett *
- Mother Courage – Bertolt Brecht
- The Cherry Orchard – Anton Chekhov
- Vinegar Tom – Caryl Churchill
- A Taste of Honey – Shelagh Delaney *
- Translations – Brian Friel
- Dr Faustus – Christopher Marlowe *
- The Crucible / Death of a Salesman / A View from a Bridge / All my Sons – Arthur Miller *
- The Caretaker – Harold Pinter
- Kinder Transport – Diane Samuels *
- Any! – William Shakespeare * I recommend: Othello, The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III – all favourites.
- Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
- Journey’s End – R.C. Sherriff *
- Rosencrantz and Gildenstern are Dead – Tom Stoppard
- The Duchess of Malfi / The White Devil – John Webster
- A Streetcar Named Desire / Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams *
- Our Country’s Good – Timberlake Wertenbaker *
- The Importance of Being Earnest / Lady Windermere’s Fan – Oscar Wilde *
Poetry Collections: You may be able to access older collections, or you can research poems by these people on www.poemhunter.com
Simon Armitage, John Donne *, WH Auden, William Blake *, Evan Boland, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning *, Lord Byron, Geoffrey Chaucer *, ST Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, Carol Ann Duffy *, TS Eliot *, Owen Sheers *, Tony Harrison *, Seamus Heaney * Ted Hughes (Birthday Letters), John Keats *, Philip Larkin *, John Milton, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath (Ariel) *, Christina Rossetti, Jacob Sam-La Rose, Siegfried Sassoon, Percy Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Wordsworth
Literary Non Fiction:
Search for these – a range will be available online.
Anon: I Am The Secret Footballer, Maya Angelou: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Allie Brosh: Hyperbole and a Half, Bill Bryson: The Lost Continent, Notes from a Small Island, Alan Bennett: Writing Home, Vera Brittain: Testament of Youth, Truman Capote: In Cold Blood, Jung Chang: Wild Swans, Jenny Diski: Skating to Antarctica, Anna Funder: Stasiland, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Robert Graves: Goodbye To All That, Stephen Grosz: The Examined Life, George Orwell: Down and Out in Paris and London , Alexander Masters: Stuart: A Life Backwards, Helen Macdonald: H is for Hawk, Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Solomon Northrop: Twelve Years a Slave , Art Spiegelman: Maus, Jeannette Winterson: Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal?, Xinran: What the Chinese Don’t Eat
