Drama book series in reading order

William Shakespeare

49 books• 5 series

William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet and actor, born around 23 April 1564 and died on 23 April 1616. Shakespeare is widely ranked as the greatest writer in English and the leading dramatist in the world, and is called England's national poet and the Bard of Avon. The surviving works, collaborations included, number about 39 plays, 154 sonnets and 3 long narrative poems. The plays exist in every major living language and are staged more often than those of any other playwright. The catalogue sorts the plays into Comedy Plays, Tragedy Plays and History Plays, with titles such as King John, Richard II, Henry V, The Tempest and The Comedy of Errors.

Terry Pratchett

148 books• 18 series

Terry Pratchett (28 April 1948 to 12 March 2015) was an English author, humorist and satirist. Discworld, a run of 41 comic fantasy novels published from 1983 to 2015, is the work most associated with Pratchett, together with Good Omens (1990), written with Neil Gaiman. The Carpet People (1971) was the first Pratchett novel, and The Colour of Magic (1983) opened Discworld. The Shepherd's Crown, the last Discworld novel, came out in August 2015, five months after Pratchett's death. The catalogue also lists the Long Earth, Bromeliad Trilogy and Johnny Maxwell series, with The Discworld Bestiary dated 2026.

Karen Kingsbury is an American Christian novelist, born in Fairfax, Virginia, on June 8, 1963. Kingsbury worked as a sports writer for the Los Angeles Times and later wrote for the Los Angeles Daily News. Missy's Murder (1991), Kingsbury's first book, grew out of a murder story covered as a reporter in Los Angeles. Kingsbury is a #1 New York Times and USA Today bestselling novelist. The catalogue holds 115 titles, running to The Christmas Ring (2025), and the series include Firstborn, Sunrise, Above the Line, Bailey Flanigan, Red Gloves and Forever Faithful. Christian fiction and family life recur among the subjects.

Graham Greene

80 books• 3 series

Graham Greene (Henry Graham Greene, 2 October 1904 to 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and journalist. Greene gained an early reputation for two kinds of book: serious Catholic novels and thrillers, which Greene called entertainments. Across 67 years of writing, including more than 25 novels, the work examined the conflicting moral and political questions of the modern world. The catalogue begins with Babbling April (1925), then The Man Within (1929), Stamboul Train (1932), It's a Battlefield (1934) and A Gun for Sale (1936). Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Subjects include travel, drama, England and Catholics.

Sebastian Barry, born 1955, is an Irish novelist, playwright and poet who served as Laureate for Irish Fiction from 2018 to 2021 and became a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in 2024. A Long Long Way (2005) made the Booker Prize shortlist. The Secret Scripture (2008) won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Costa Book of the Year and was also Booker shortlisted, and On Canaan's Side (2011) was longlisted. The 30 catalogued books run from Macker's Garden (1982) to The Newer World (2026), with McNulty Family and Days Without End as series.

J.M. Barrie

43 books• 3 series

Sir James Matthew Barrie, born in 1860 and died in 1937, was a British novelist and playwright, born and educated in Scotland before moving to London. There Barrie met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who prompted him to invent a baby boy having magical adventures in Kensington Gardens, first in the 1902 adult novel The Little White Bird and then in the 1904 West End fairy play Peter Pan, about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy in Neverland. The Thrums books and Sentimental Tommy account for much of the rest; 43 catalogued titles run from Better Dead (1887) onward.

Ben Elton is a British comedian and writer whose 22 catalogued books run from Bachelor Boys (1984) to What Have I Done? (2025). The novels turn satirical, comic, dystopian and criminal by turns: Stark (1989), Gridlock (1991), This Other Eden (1993), Popcorn (1996), Blast from the Past (1998) and Inconceivable (1999) among them, with plays including Gasping (1990) and Silly Cow (1998) beside them. Elton co-wrote the sitcoms The Young Ones, Blackadder and Mr. Bean, and wrote Filthy, Rich & Catflap, The Thin Blue Line and Upstart Crow alone. Left-wing political satire marked his stand-up during the alternative comedy movement of the 1980s. Elton was born in 1959, and had sixteen novels and an autobiography in print as of 2025.

Espionage, terrorism and the Second World War supply Jack Higgins with his material. Higgins published the earliest of 76 catalogued books as Harry Patterson, among them Sad Wind from the Sea (1959), Cry of the Hunter (1960) and Hell Is Too Crowded (1962). Sean Dillon, Paul Chavasse, Liam Devlin and Martin Fallon head series of their own, alongside standalone thrillers. The Midnight Bell, published in 2016, closes the catalogue.

Ian McEwan

33 books• 2 series

Ian McEwan writes British literary fiction, alongside drama, librettos and short stories. Thirty-nine catalogued titles start with the story collection First Love, Last Rites (1975) and run through The Cement Garden (1978), In Between the Sheets (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) as far as 2025. England, man-woman relationships and social life recur as subjects, at a median length of 193 pages.

Albert Camus

37 books• 2 series

Albert Camus wrote novels, plays and philosophy in French. L'envers et l'endroit (1937) is the earliest of 37 catalogued entries, which include The Outsider / The Stranger (1942), Caligula (1944), The Plague (1947), The Myth of Sisyphus (1955) and The Fall (1957). Existentialism, Algeria and French drama fill the subject tags, and much of the listing is English translation.

Upton Sinclair

116 books• 5 series

Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) was an American novelist, muckraking journalist and political activist, and the Democratic nominee for governor of California in 1934. The Jungle (1906) exposed labour and sanitary conditions in the United States meatpacking industry, and the uproar fed into the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act passed months later. Sinclair took the 1943 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The catalogue holds 116 titles from 1900 onward, including boys' adventure series set at West Point and Annapolis and the Lanny Budd novels.

Anthony Burgess

63 books• 3 series

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) was an English novelist, screenwriter and composer. A Clockwork Orange (1962), a dystopian satire, is the novel he is known for, though Burgess wrote mainly comic fiction, the Enderby quartet and Earthly Powers among it, alongside the Malayan Trilogy that opens with Time for a Tiger (1956). Burgess also wrote librettos and screenplays, including the 1977 television mini-series Jesus of Nazareth, reviewed for The Observer and The Guardian, and published studies of James Joyce. The catalogue holds 63 titles, reaching One Man's Chorus (1998).

Edna O’Brien

47 books• 3 series

Edna O'Brien was an Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. The Country Girls (1960) opens the catalogue and was banned and denounced from the pulpit for breaking the silence around sexual and social matters in post-war Ireland. Forty-five titles are catalogued to 2022, among them Girl with Green Eyes (1962), Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964), August Is A Wicked Month (1965) and Night (1973). The inner lives of women, Ireland, and mothers and daughters are the constant subjects.

Dorothy L. Sayers

68 books• 8 series

Lord Peter Wimsey, a private investigator, is the figure Dorothy L. Sayers is known for. Whose Body? (1923) opens the series, followed by Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), Strong Poison (1930) and Five Red Herrings (1931). Sayers wrote English detective fiction, short stories and non-fiction; the catalogue holds 68 titles, with collections dated as late as 2024.

Cormac McCarthy

17 books• 3 series

Cormac McCarthy's fiction moves from Tennessee to the ranch country of the American West, with fathers and sons, brothers and sisters, and psychological pressure as its material. The Orchard Keeper (1965) opens the catalogue, followed by Outer Dark (1968), Child of God (1973), Suttree (1979), Blood Meridian (1985), All the Pretty Horses (1992) and The Crossing (1994). Plays and screenplays are catalogued beside the novels, and the listing reaches a graphic novel adaptation of The Road in 2024.

James Baldwin

40 books• 4 series

James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 - December 1, 1987), born James Arthur Jones, was an American writer and civil rights activist whose essays, novels, plays and poems drew wide acclaim. Time magazine ranked Go Tell It on the Mountain among the top 100 English-language novels. The essay collection Notes of a Native Son (1955) established Baldwin as a voice for human equality, and a 1965 debate with William Buckley became a landmark on race in the United States. Catalogued works include Giovanni's Room (1956), Another Country (1962) and The Fire Next Time (1963), with race relations and African American life as recurring subjects.

Alexandre Dumas

82 books• 12 series

Historical fiction set in France is what Alexandre Dumas is catalogued for. The Three Musketeers and d'Artagnan Romances, the Monte Cristo books, the Marie Antoinette Romances, the Last Valois and the Sainte-Hermine Cycle are the series, with Celebrated Crimes and travel writing among the non-fiction. Eighty-three entries are dated from Antony (1831) onward, several of them in English translation.

William Boyd

33 books• 2 series

Born on 7 March 1952, William Boyd is a Scottish writer who works as a novelist, short story author, screenwriter and film director. The catalogue holds 33 books from A Good Man in Africa (1981) to Cold Sunset (2026), with An Ice-Cream War (1982), Brazzaville Beach (1990), Any Human Heart (2002) and Restless (2006) among them. Boyd scripted the film Chaplin (1992) and directed The Trench (1999), a drama of the First World War. Prizes include the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Costa Book Award. Gabriel Dax is a Boyd series, and subjects include Africa, artists and both world wars.

Ray Bradbury

132 books• 13 series

Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the novel Ray Bradbury is best known for, alongside the short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951) and The October Country (1955). Bradbury (22 August 1920 – 5 June 2012) was an American author and screenwriter whose work covered fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and realistic fiction. Dandelion Wine (1957) is a coming-of-age novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) a dark fantasy, and Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) a fictionalized memoir. The catalogue reaches back to Kaleidoscope (1940) and Dark Carnival (1947), and Green Town and Crumley Mysteries are among the series.

Oscar Wilde

57 books

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish author, poet and playwright. Wilde worked through several literary styles in the 1880s before becoming one of London's most popular and influential dramatists of the early 1890s, and stood as a central figure in the Aestheticism movement of the late nineteenth century. The Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), the epigrams, the plays and the bedtime stories for children form the best-known work, alongside a criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency. The catalogue holds 57 titles from Ravenna (1878) onward, spanning poetry, drama, fairy tales, short stories and correspondence.

Zora Neale Hurston

50 books• 1 series

Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 to January 28, 1960) was an American writer, anthropologist, folklorist and documentary filmmaker. Hurston depicted racial struggle in the early 20th-century American South and published research on Hoodoo and Caribbean Vodou. Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is the most popular of the four novels. Hurston also wrote more than 50 short stories, plays, the autobiography, ethnographies and essays. Catalogued titles include Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), Tell My Horse and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), among 50 books.

Philosophy and fiction sit side by side in Iris Murdoch's catalogue of 43 titles. The run opens with Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), a study rather than a novel, and Under the Net follows. Good and evil, morality and the unconscious recur across the novels. Murdoch lived from 1919 to 1999, and collections such as Poems from an Attic continue to appear.

Don DeLillo

23 books• 2 series

Don DeLillo is an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright and essayist whose subjects reach across consumerism, nuclear war, language, art, television, mathematics, politics and sport. White Noise (1985) brought wide recognition and the National Book Award for fiction, and Libra (1988) followed, a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Twenty-two books are catalogued between Americana (1971) and The Silence (2020), taking in End Zone (1972), Ratner's Star (1976), Players (1978) and The Names (1982). New York settings and psychological fiction recur as subjects.

Fay Weldon

59 books• 9 series

Fay Weldon (1931-2023), born Franklin Birkinshaw, was a British novelist, essayist and playwright whose career ran fifty-five years and produced 31 novels. The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (1983) is the best known, televised by the BBC in 1986. The Bulgari Connection (2000), Puffball (1980), Wicked Women (1995) and The Cloning of Joanna May (1989) sit alongside it. Weldon was a feminist and described her subject as overweight, plain women. Fifty-nine catalogued titles, taking in novels, plays, short stories and nonfiction, run from 1967 to 2019.