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Meg Rosoff's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Meg Rosoff recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Meg Rosoff's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Tess of the D'Urbervilles

An alternate cover edition for this ISBN can be found here.

'How could I be expected to know? I was a child when I left this house four months ago. Why didn't you tell me there was danger in men-folk? Why didn't you warn me? '

When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love...
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Recommended by Meg Rosoff, and 1 others.

Meg RosoffIt’s very much about trying to find a place of happiness for yourself in a world full of obstacles, in a terrible maze of social change and convention at the end of the industrial revolution. (Source)

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2

Henry IV, Part I

During Shakespeare's lifetime, Henry IV was his most popular play. Today, Sir John Falstaff still towers above Shakespeare's other comic inventions. This edition considers the play in the context of various critical approaches, offers a history of the play in performance from Shakespeare's time to ours, and provides useful information on its historical background. Readers will also find detailed commentary on individual words and phrases, and selections from Shakespeare's sources.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics...
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Recommended by Meg Rosoff, and 1 others.

Meg RosoffShakespeare’s version of a coming of age story. (Source)

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3

Pride and Prejudice

Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780679783268

Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work "her own darling child" and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, "as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print." The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen's radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and...
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Recommended by Meg Rosoff, and 1 others.

Meg RosoffIt’s a coming-of-age story, because she throws aside her prejudices but also sees the house and realises that she could be quite comfortable and maybe realises how important that is. (Source)

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4

A Separate Peace

An American classic and great bestseller for over thirty years, A Separate Peace is timeless in its description of adolescence during a period when the entire country was losing its innocence to the second world war.

Set at a boys boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the...
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Recommended by Bill Gates, Meg Rosoff, and 2 others.

Bill Gates[On Bill Gates's reading list in 2011.] (Source)

Meg RosoffWhat I really love about it is that it’s one of the very few novels that I read as a kid that deal with that really intense kind of friendship between boys, a kind of presexual love story that grows up at boarding schools when there are no women around. I became very affected by it because of the subtlety of the psychological portrait of the two. (Source)

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5
All the Pretty Horses tells of young John Grady Cole, the last of a long line of Texas ranchers. Across the border Mexico beckons—beautiful and desolate, rugged and cruelly civilized. With two companions, he sets off on an idyllic, sometimes comic adventure, to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. less

Meg RosoffA book that explores that whole subject of finding out where you belong in the world, which is not a search that starts and ends between 18 and 21. (Source)

Devon SawaThis is the best book I’ve ever read. https://t.co/AUJLuRAadm (Source)

Daniel ButtnerCormac McCarthy is one of my favorite authors, specifically The Border Trilogy. (Source)

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