Novelists book series in reading order

by L C Tyler

by Gill Hornby

by Agatha Christie

Ellery Queen is both the detective and the name on the books, an American mystery catalogue of 148 titles. The Roman Hat Mystery (1929) opens a run of titles built to the same pattern, among them The French Powder Mystery, The Dutch Shoe Mystery and The Greek Coffin Mystery. The Drury Lane novels published as Barnaby Ross, the Tim Corrigan and Mike McCall series and a junior line sit beside them, with New York, police work and fathers and sons recurring as subjects. The catalogue has been dormant since 2022.

Isaac Asimov

553 books• 31 series

Isaac Asimov (c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American writer who also taught biochemistry at Boston University. Hard science fiction is the core of Asimov's reputation, and the Foundation series about a fallen space empire is the most famous work; Asimov ranked with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke as one of the "Big Three" of the genre. The output also covers mysteries, fantasy and popular science, with non-fiction lines such as How Did We Find Out and the Library of the Universe. Asimov wrote or edited more than 500 books. This catalogue opens with the story Marooned Off Vesta (1939) and names Asimov on 400 of the listed books.

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.

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.

Philip Roth

38 books• 3 series

Philip Roth wrote American fiction about Jewish men, academics and the country they lived in. The Conversion of the Jews (1958) opens the catalogue, Goodbye, Columbus followed in 1959, and Portnoy's Complaint arrived in 1969. Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh and the American Trilogy are the recurring structures. Thirty-eight titles are catalogued, ending with Why Write? in 2017.

Anne Lamott

23 books

Faith, family and the writing life are Anne Lamott's recurring subjects. Hard Laughter (1979) is the earliest of 23 catalogued titles, which include Operating Instructions (1993), Bird by Bird (1994) and Traveling Mercies (1999) and reach Good Writing in 2026. Christian biography, spirituality and mothers and sons fill the subject tags.

Anthony Dymoke Powell (1905-2000) was an English novelist. A Dance to the Music of Time, his twelve-volume sequence published between 1951 and 1975, is the central work and ranks among the longest novels in English; A Question of Upbringing (1951) opens it. Powell had already published Afternoon Men (1931), Venusberg (1932), From a View to a Death (1933) and Agents and Patients (1936) in the 1930s. The catalogue of 37 books also holds the memoir To Keep The Ball Rolling and the biography John Aubrey and His Friends (1948). The Times placed Powell among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945 in its 2008 list.

Stephen King

223 books• 25 series

Horror fiction is the field most closely tied to Stephen King, an American author born on September 21, 1947, and nicknamed the "King of Horror". King's work also reaches into suspense, crime, science fiction, fantasy and mystery, and includes roughly 200 short stories, most later gathered in collections. Carrie (1974) was the debut that set King in horror; Different Seasons (1982), four novellas in one volume, marked the first major step outside it. The catalogue lists 223 books from 1971 to 2026, starting with The Blue Air Compressor, a short story, and reaching Other Worlds Than These (2026). Series on file include Holly Gibney, the Bill Hodges Trilogy, Green Mile, Shining and Talisman.

Kurt Vonnegut

66 books• 11 series

Kurt Vonnegut (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American novelist known for satire and dark humour. Over fifty years Vonnegut published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays and five nonfiction works, and more writing appeared after 2007. The catalogue begins with the story Report on the Barnhouse Effect (1950) and includes Player Piano (1952), The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Cat's Cradle (1960), running to Love, Kurt: The Vonnegut Love Letters, 1941-1945 (2020). Raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut left Cornell University in January 1943 to join the U.S. Army, and Army training included mechanical engineering studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee.

H.G. Wells

152 books• 8 series

H.G. Wells, born Herbert George Wells (21 September 1866 – 13 August 1946), was an English writer of more than forty novels and dozens of short stories. Science fiction novels are the work Wells is most known for today, and Wells shares the title of father of science fiction with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback. The non-fiction covers social commentary, politics, history, popular science, satire, biography and autobiography. The catalogue opens with The Chronic Argonauts (1888) and includes The Time Machine (1895), The Wonderful Visit (1895) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896). Utopias, civilization and philosophy appear among the subjects.

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.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

93 books• 1 series

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Hathorne, July 4, 1804 to May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer from Salem, Massachusetts, where the family had deep roots. History, morality and religion are frequent concerns. Hawthorne graduated from Bowdoin College in 1825 and published the novel Fanshawe (1828), later trying to suppress it. Magazine stories were gathered as Twice-Told Tales (1837). The catalogue lists 93 titles, including Young Goodman Brown (1835) and The Minister's Black Veil (1836), and subjects include Puritans and the supernatural.

L. C. Tyler, known as Len and born in 1951, is a British author of comic crime novels. The Elsie and Ethelred mysteries pair crime writer Ethelred Tressider with Elsie Thirkettle, the literary agent who represents Ethelred. The John Grey Historical Mystery series follows a lawyer named John Grey in Restoration England. Tyler's 19 catalogued books run from The Herring Seller's Apprentice (2007) to A Well-Earned Death (2023), and include Ten Little Herrings (2009) and A Cruel Necessity (2014).

Thomas Wolfe

30 books• 1 series

Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is the first novel of Thomas Wolfe (Thomas Clayton Wolfe, October 3, 1900 to September 15, 1938), an American novelist and short story writer. Wolfe was an early practitioner of autobiographical fiction and ranks with William Faulkner among the key authors of the Southern Renaissance, earning the label North Carolina's most famous writer. Wolfe wrote four long novels plus short stories, novellas and dramatic works. The catalogue holds 30 books, including Of Time and the River (1935) and You Can't Go Home Again (1940), with posthumous editions through 2021.

Henry James

131 books• 1 series

Henry James was an American-British author, placed between literary realism and literary modernism. Americans abroad, social life and manners, and the friction between Europe and the United States are the standing subjects of the fiction, and James's correspondence and travel writing are catalogued alongside it. The catalogue lists 131 titles with publication dates from 1866 to 2016, opening with Selected Tales and The Novels of George Eliot, both 1866. The 1870s were the heaviest decade, holding A Passionate Pilgrim, At Isella and Watch and Ward, all published in 1871.

John Updike

83 books• 8 series

John Updike, born March 18, 1932, was an American novelist, short-story writer, poet and critic of art and literature who died on January 27, 2009. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction twice, one of only four writers to do so, and the output spans over twenty novels and more than twelve short-story collections, plus poetry, children's books and criticism of art and literature. The New Yorker printed hundreds of Updike stories, reviews and poems from 1954 on, and Updike wrote regularly for The New York Review of Books. The catalogue lists 83 books from The Poorhouse Fair (1958) to Hoping for a Hoopoe (2020), including Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963). Series include Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, Henry Bech, Maples Stories and Eastwick.

Doris Lessing

66 books• 6 series

Doris Lessing, born Doris May Tayler on 22 October 1919 and died on 17 November 2013, was a British novelist and the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Iran to British parents, Lessing lived there until 1925, grew up in Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - and moved to London in 1949, which is why the early career is sometimes labelled Rhodesian. The catalogue holds 66 titles from The Grass Is Singing (1950) to An Old Woman and Her Cat (2013). Children of Violence and Canopus in Argos are the two five-novel sequences; the Diaries of Jane Somers, The Fifth Child, Mara and Dann and the Collected African Stories follow. Africa, women and British social life recur as subjects.

Walker Percy

14 books• 3 series

Walker Percy (May 28, 1916 to May 10, 1990) was an American novelist and a Southern Catholic literary figure. Alienation, existentialism, faith and the limits of science run through the Percy novels, several of them set in New Orleans. The Moviegoer (1961), the first, won the National Book Award for Fiction. Will Barrett and Dr. Tom More are the two series, and The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot and The Second Coming are among the novels. Percy earned an M.D. from Columbia University in 1941 after studying chemistry at Chapel Hill.

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.

Nicolas Freeling (1927–2003) was a British crime novelist best known for Van der Valk, a series of Dutch police procedurals set largely in Amsterdam. Love in Amsterdam (1962) opened the catalogue, and Thames Television made Van der Valk for ITV in the 1970s, revived it in 1991 and remade it in 2020. Henri Castang, a policeman working in Belgium and France, carries Freeling's second series. 41 books are catalogued, ending with The Janeites (2002).

Jeffrey Archer

63 books• 11 series

Jeffrey Archer's 63 catalogued books cover novels, short stories, plays, children's books and prison diaries. The list opens with Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less (1976) and reaches Adam and Eve in 2026. The Clifton Chronicles, Kane and Abel and the Detective William Warwick novels are the main series; families, social class and English history supply the material.

Larry McMurtry

48 books• 10 series

Larry McMurtry (Larry Jeff McMurtry, June 3, 1936 to March 25, 2021) was an American novelist, essayist and screenwriter. Most of McMurtry's fiction takes place in the Old West or in contemporary Texas, and the early novels Horseman, Pass By (1961), The Last Picture Show (1966) and Terms of Endearment (1975) trace the decline of small-town Texas life. Screen adaptations of McMurtry's work received 34 Oscar nominations and 13 wins. The catalogue lists 48 books from 1961 to Thalia (2017), including the Lonesome Dove and Berrybender Narratives series and non-fiction.

Two cozy mystery series account for most of Cleo Coyle's work: the Coffeehouse Mysteries, in which the coffeehouse manager Clare Cosi investigates murders, and the Haunted Bookshop Mysteries, which put a bookseller alongside a ghost. On What Grounds (2003) opens the catalogue of 32 titles, which reaches Eat, Drink, and Get Buried. Coyle titles run to coffee puns, among them Through the Grinder, Latte Trouble and Murder Most Frothy.

Louise Erdrich

37 books• 3 series

Louise Erdrich (Karen Louise Erdrich, born June 7, 1954) is an American writer of novels, short stories, poetry and children's books with Native American characters and settings. Erdrich is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota. The Plague of Doves was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The catalogue lists 37 books from Imagination (1982) to Python's Kiss (2026), with the Love Medicine and Birchbark House series among them. Ojibwa life, Indian reservations and poetry feature in the subjects.