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Wellington City Libraries
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A Book That is Considered to be in the "Classic" Literary Canon
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These books fulfill this category for UBN 2025.
Updated January 28, 2025
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Concord Public Library
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The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paper Book
The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald's family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author's own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book...
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Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft
Paper Book
No-one in the grip of Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, with its mythic-minded hero and its highly sympathetic monster who reads Goethe and longs to be at peace with himself, can fail to notice how much more excellent the original is than all the adaptations, imitations and outright...
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The catcher in the rye
Salinger, J. D.
Paper Book
The "brilliant, funny, meaningful novel" (The New Yorker) that established J. D. Salinger as a leading voice in American literature--and that has instilled in millions of readers around the world a lifelong love of books. "If you really...
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One hundred years of solitude
García Márquez, Gabriel
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
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Things fall apart
Achebe, Chinua.
Paper Book
The most widely read book in modern African literature, presented here in stunning hardcover, tells two overlapping, intertwining stories, both of which center around a fearless Igbo warrior in Nigeria in the late 1800s, before and after the European colonization of the continent. ...
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Their eyes were watching God
Hurston, Zora Neale
Ebook
"A deeply soulful novel that comprehends love and cruelty, and separates the big people from the small of heart, without ever losing sympathy for those unfortunates who don't know how to live properly." --Zadie Smith One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century,...
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The alchemist
Coelho, Paulo
Paper Book
An international bestseller Over 80 million copies sold worldwide A PBS Great American Read Top 100 pick A special 25th anniversary edition of the extraordinary international bestseller, including a new Foreword by Paulo Coelho. Combining magic, mysticism...
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The color purple
Walker, Alice
Paper Book
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that tells the story of two sisters through their correspondence. With a new Preface by the author.
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Night
Wiesel, Elie
Paper Book
A new translation from the French by Marion Wiesel. Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent...
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The haunting of Hill House
Jackson, Shirley
Paper Book
First published in 1959, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House has been hailed as a perfect work of unnerving terror. It is the story of four seekers who arrive at a notoriously unfriendly pile called Hill House- Dr. Montague, an occult scholar looking for solid evidence of a 'haunting...
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1984
Orwell, George
Paper Book
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One flew over the cuckoo's nest
Kesey, Ken
Paper Book
Ken Kesey's bracing, inslightful novel about the meaning of madness and the value of self-reliance, and the inspiration for the new Netflix original series Ratched One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Boisterous,...
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The Odyssey
Homer
Paper Book
A lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer's "nimble gallop" and brings an ancient epic to new life. The first great adventure story in the Western canon, the Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about...
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