England in fiction book series in reading order

Anthony Horowitz

106 books• 23 series

Anthony Horowitz is an English novelist and screenwriter, born 5 April 1955, who specialises in mystery and suspense. For children and young adults Horowitz created Alex Rider, a 14-year-old British boy who spies for MI6, along with The Power of Five (titled The Gatekeepers in the US) and The Diamond Brothers. The catalogue holds 106 Horowitz books from Enter Frederick K. Bower (1978) to A Deadly Episode (2026). Other listed series include Detective Daniel Hawthorne, Susan Ryeland, Groosham Grange and the Pentagram Chronicles. Horowitz is still publishing.

Dame Catherine Cookson (born Catherine Ann McMullen, 20 June 1906 to 11 June 1998) was a British novelist. A hard childhood in South Shields, North East England, shaped the novels and supplied their setting. By 2003 Cookson's books had sold an estimated 100 million copies, and 104 titles appeared under the Cookson name and two pen names. The catalogue records 112 books, from Kate Hannigan (1950) to The Rag Maid (2017). Series include Mary Ann Shaughnessy, the Bailey Chronicles, the Mallen Trilogy and the Hamilton Trilogy. Working-class life, family sagas and historical romance appear among the subject tags.

Wilkie Collins

88 books

Wilkie Collins, born William Wilkie Collins on 8 January 1824 and died on 23 September 1889, was an English novelist and playwright. The Woman in White (1860) is an early sensation novel; The Moonstone (1868) set out much of what the modern detective novel came to do, and stands as an early example of the police procedural. Collins was the son of the London painter William Collins and Harriet Geddes, spent two years in Italy and France from the age of twelve, learned Italian and French there, and worked at first as a tea merchant. The catalogue holds 88 titles, from Iolani; Or, Tahiti as It Was (1840) onward, with the 1850s the heaviest decade.

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.

Virginia Woolf

74 books• 6 series

Modernist writing in English owes a great deal to Virginia Woolf, who lived from 1882 to 1941 and did more than most to establish stream-of-consciousness narration as a working technique. Woolf was born in South Kensington, the seventh child of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson, and grew up among eight siblings, the painter Vanessa Bell among them. The catalogue collects her diaries, journals, letters and Collected Essays, together with biography and criticism of Woolf herself.

George Eliot

12 books

George Eliot was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880), an English novelist, poet, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Seven novels stand at the centre of the catalogue: Adam Bede arrived in 1859, The Mill on the Floss in 1860 and Silas Marner in 1861, with Romola, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda following between 1863 and 1876. Scenes of Clerical Life (1857) opens the run, and The Lifted Veil (1859) sits among the shorter work. The fiction is marked by realism, psychological insight and close attention to English country life. Twelve items are catalogued in all, the last a collected edition issued in 2018.

D.H. Lawrence

146 books• 3 series

David Herbert Lawrence, 11 September 1885 to 2 March 1930, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, travel writer, literary critic and painter. Lawrence's modernist writing examines modernity, social alienation and industrialisation while arguing for sexuality, vitality and instinct. Four novels went through censorship trials over their treatment of sex and their explicit language: The Rainbow (1915), Sons and Lovers (1913), Women in Love (1920) and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). The catalogue lists 146 entries, among them The White Peacock (1911), The Trespasser (1912) and the story collection The Prussian Officer (1914), and groups some of them under Sons and Lovers and the Brangwen Family.

Kasey Michaels is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author credited with more than 110 books, and the catalogue lists 123 from The Belligerent Miss Boynton (1982) to Her Royal Pain-In-The-Highness (2023). Early titles include The Tenacious Miss Tamerlane (1982), The Rambunctious Lady Royston (1983), The Savage Miss Saxon (1985) and Compliments of the Groom (1987). Michaels has received a RITA, four Publishers Weekly starred reviews and a Romantic Times Career Achievement award for Regency historical romance, and is on the Romance Writers of America Honor Roll. Series include Maggie Kelly, Romney Marsh, Redgraves, Daughtry Family, Crown Family and Sunshine Girls.

Rumer Godden

69 books

Rumer Godden was a British author with more than 60 fiction and non-fiction books to her name. Black Narcissus opened the catalogue in 1939 and reached the screen in 1947; The River followed in 1946 and was filmed in 1951; nine of Godden's works were adapted for film in all. India, nuns, family life and children's stories about dolls and mice, The Mousewife (1951), Mouse House (1952), Impunity Jane (1954), run through the work. Godden wrote a few books with her elder sister, the novelist Jon Godden, among them Two Under the Indian Sun, a memoir of a childhood spent in a part of India now inside Bangladesh. The catalogue holds 69 entries reaching 2012.

E.M. Forster

29 books

E.M. Forster wrote novels of English manners, class difference and hypocrisy, with humanism at the heart of the work. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905) opens the catalogue, then The Longest Journey in 1907, A Room with a View in 1908, Howards End in 1910 and A Passage to India in 1924. Forster, born in 1879, died in 1970. Short stories, essays, speeches, broadcasts, biographies and pageant plays sit beside the novels, and Forster co-wrote the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera Billy Budd (1951). The Machine Stops (1909) is taken as the start of technological dystopian fiction. 29 catalogued titles reach to 1989.

Gaelen Foley

28 books• 7 series

Gaelen Foley writes romance set in the Regency era, with aristocrats, princesses, veterans and secret societies filling the plots. Her 28 catalogued books run from The Pirate Prince (1998) to Duke of Shadows (2019), at a median of 407 pages, and group into the Knight Miscellany, Inferno Club, Moonlight Square, Ascension Trilogy, Spice Trilogy, Age of Heroes and Harmony Falls series. Foley is American, born in 1973, and has self-published middle grade fantasy as E.G. Foley since 2012. Her novels have appeared on the USA Today bestseller list since 2000 and the New York Times list since 2008, in more than twenty languages.

Louise Rennison (1951–2016) was an English comedian who wrote comic fiction for teenage girls. The Confessions of Georgia Nicolson sets down the diary of a teenager and her friends, the Ace Gang, starting with Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging (1999); the first two books became the film Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging. The Misadventures of Tallulah Casey follows Georgia's younger cousin. The catalogue holds 17 titles, ending with The Taming of the Tights (2013).

Peter Ackroyd

70 books• 4 series

Peter Ackroyd is an English novelist, biographer and critic, born in 1949, whose standing subject is the history and culture of London. Seventy books are catalogued from London Lickpenny (1973) to Forgotten London (2025). Biography fills much of the list, in Chaucer (1980), Ezra Pound and His World (1980), T.S. Eliot (1984) and later lives of William Blake, Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin and Sir Thomas More; the novels include The Great Fire of London (1982), The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) and Hawksmoor (1985). Ackroyd's Brief Lives, Voyages Through Time, a History of England and Shakespeare: the Biography are the series. The Somerset Maugham Award and two Whitbread Awards followed.

Michael Bond, an English author born on 13 January 1926 who died on 27 June 2017, is best known for children's books about Paddington Bear. Sales of the Paddington books passed 35 million worldwide, and the characters moved into animated television, a film series and a stage musical. The catalogue records 217 books under the name, including A Bear Called Paddington, More About Paddington (1959) and Paddington Helps Out (1960). Olga Da Polga, Monsieur Pamplemousse, Parsley and Mouse Called Thursday are further series, and guinea pigs and private investigators appear among the subjects.

W. Somerset Maugham

89 books• 1 series

W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was an English novelist, playwright and short story writer. Born in Paris and schooled in England, Maugham qualified as a physician in London in 1897 and never practised, publishing Liza of Lambeth the same year - a novel of slum life. The stage brought fame first: by 1908 four Maugham plays ran at once in the West End. The catalogue records 89 titles dated 1897 to 2009, averaging 235 pages, with the 1930s the busiest decade. Travel writing and biography sit beside the fiction, and a Collected Short Stories line gathers the shorter work.