For the first time ever, we have a British prime minister who studied for an English degree. Not all of his 58 predecessors went to university, but those who did favoured subjects such as history and classics and, more recently, philosophy, politics and economics. Yet reading fiction is a fantastic preparation for life, for understanding people and the times through which we live. Novels encourage empathy, they help you to stand in other people’s shoes, to navigate complicated, sometimes conflicting emotions, they entertain and bring joy. The creative industries contribute some £145.8bn each year to the UK economy; it is our soft superpower.
In other words, books matter. Reading matters.
However, there has been a marked decline over recent years in the numbers of children reading for pleasure. It’s why the National Literacy Trust designated 2026 the National Year of Reading. Already there has been a shift from a 20-year low in 2025 of 32.7% of eight-to-18-year-olds saying they enjoy reading in their free time up to 36.1%. It’s a start.
We are also in a long-overdue moment of curriculum renewal for GCSE English, so when better to ask if what’s studied in school helps young people fall in love with reading – or possibly puts them off for life?
Since GCSEs were first introduced in 1986, we’ve seen the establishment of four main examination boards in England and Wales and surprising unanimity in the choice of books most schools choose to teach. In 2025, the educational charity End Sexism in Schools released a report – Manopolies – revealing that 76% of students study An Inspector Calls by JB Priestley for their modern text from a possible 21 modern texts (a play, wonderful as it is, that’s been on one board’s set text list for 39 years). Then a whopping 93% of students study either A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens or The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson for their 19th-century novel from nine possible texts (including Charlotte Brontë, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen). Only 5% of students in England and Wales study a female-authored text at GCSE.
It’s true that there are diverse modern works by inspirational women on the lists of the four exam boards – Kit de Waal, Tanika Gupta, Jeanette Winterson, Malorie Blackman are all offered. The problem is that schools are disincentivised to change the texts they teach as this would involve costs and additional work. And no exam board wants to be the one to remove popular texts because that would bring commercial disadvantage and developmental costs. This is why it’s essential the Department for Education, as part of this review, mandates the regular changing of set-text lists and stipulates that students study works that reflect the gender balance and diversity of our society. Schools can’t do it on their own.
Here, to get the conversation started, are suggestions of texts to inspire a passion for fiction in young readers. And, from me, a plea for the government to support teachers who want to better reflect the gender balance and diversity of their classrooms.
This is the way to encourage a lifelong love of reading.
Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see a blisteringly funny novel on the syllabus? The Trees is a daring satire on racism, generational guilt and cultural complicity, inspired by the lynching of Emmett Till. Genre-bending and gloriously inventive, it finds morbid delight in the absurdities of American racial violence without ever trivialising its victims. With characters such as Dr Reverend Fondle, Junior Junior and Hot Mama Yeller, Everett exposes the grotesque stupidity of white supremacy through comedy that is as vicious as it is exhilarating. What better way to show teenagers that literature can be genuinely enjoyable, even laugh-out-loud funny, while remaining intellectually and morally serious.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
A great short story hits you like a left hook or an unexpected kiss – coming out of nowhere and leaving you gasping, what just happened? Which is the perfect state for learning, of course. Short stories work really well in the classroom because reading is best when it’s shared. I would, therefore, strongly suggest Ted Chiang’s astonishing science fiction collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Each story takes on a big idea – language, love, intelligence, the collateral damage to real estate that angels might cause when intervening in human affairs, that sort of thing. They go off in your head like bombs. The most famous is the title story, which was made into the movie Arrival . Teenagers love ideas. They’re about to go into a world that their grownups are viewing as some kind of sci-fi nightmare. Here’s a bold, brilliant, thrilling set of thought experiments about how it could be OK after all. It’s a science fiction collection that opens with a story set in Old Testament Babylon. What else do you need to know?
I recommend this play. For a Black working-class London family, it’s a normal weekday – until the teenage son is senselessly stabbed and killed.
The work is performed by one actor, from the point of view of the sister. The dialogue is funny, tenderly painting the warm family relationships until that one moment destroys everything. Then follows grief, fury, helplessness and despair.
Random is gripping and short. It’s a springboard for many different conversations, from topics such as the impact of race in the criminal justice system and the representation of working-class families, to the benefits and challenges of performing such an emotional piece in a stripped-back set.
The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness
This wise, chaotic, gentle, painful, funny, superb novel follows five teens trying to navigate the most difficult year of their lives, while the town’s cool indie kids are battling Stranger Things-sized perils in vignettes at the start of each chapter. It contains some of the truest (and helpful) lines about social anxiety I’ve ever read. For reluctant readers, The Rest of Us Just Live Here proves that great fiction is as compelling as a great video game; and unlike social media, it leaves you feeling nourished, smarter, and not wanting back the time you just spent on it. I was asked to provide one title only, but hey: class, now turn to that blast of medieval Tarantino, The Pardoner’s Tale. Chaucer, Patrick Ness and the language we’re using right now cohabit the same glorious entangled continuum. Compare and contrast Henry IV Part 2 Act 3 Scene 1, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” with the lyrics to Stormzy’s song Crown. Art is made of art. It speaks across centuries. Now it’s your turn.
After spending many evenings this spring testing my daughter on her GCSE English Literature quotes, I felt ready to vomit. Three set texts: Lord of the Flies, Macbeth and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Shared themes of blood, death, murder, violence, the evil of boys and men. Then, if you’re tired of revising prose, a little war poetry for a breather. Lovely. More death.
In those two exam years, my daughter studied not one female prose writer, not one writer of colour, only four female characters in the entire trio of set texts (if you count Macbeth’s witches as individual characters, which is debatable, oh and a female pig, according to one teacher). Nearly 30 years ago, my experience was almost exactly the same.
What a way to teach a love of literature; what a way to normalise only reading books by men about men, and only if violence is centre stage of the men’s worlds. English literature is an amazing opportunity to nurture a joy of reading, to open minds to other cultures and worlds and wonders. So why is every single text soaked in bloodshed? If I were to pick a text for young people to study, I’d suggest anything but more violence . Something loving, anything funny; just one book teenagers could smile at, laugh with even. Perhaps Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Sadness, a gorgeous story between a young man and an elderly woman. Or maybe on the poetry curriculum, Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. Something that has helped people the world over to feel more joy.
One of the weaknesses of the literary education of this country is that students are not exposed early in life to the valuable literatures of non-European people, particularly Africans.
This Everyman African Stories anthology brings together 36 classical African stories written in, or translated into, English. It tracks nearly 100 years and observes every aspect of life, from the domestic to the political, from the romantic to the existential.
An average Briton could go through a whole lifetime of wide reading without ever reading any classic African text. These stories would not only provide entertaining and enlightening reading, they could serve as a gateway to discovering the rich literature of a much-overlooked continent.
Sm all Things Like These by Claire Keegan
If you look at the most often assigned GCSE texts, the common denominator is a word count under 30,000. That factor knocks a great many wonderful books off the list, but it does also allow space for the brilliance of Claire Keegan. I’d choose Small Things Like These, a novel of remarkable depth within its brevity. “How does she do it?” is a question for any reader of the book – but there are plenty of other questions in it for students. The novel’s story within a story, its use of memory, the character of Bill Furlong, the internal and external landscapes, and the history of the Magdalene laundries are all rich ground for thought and discussion. No harm either in letting young readers recognise that what appears small and quiet is actually taut and fierce.
100 Queer Poems edited by Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan
There has never been a more important time to ensure that our school libraries and our class curricula contain plenty of books by, about and for LGBTQ+ people. When Mary Jean Chan and I were co-editing 100 Queer Poems, it felt like making something that I needed to read when I was in secondary school. Anthologies are great to study because they allow for the necessity of not liking something. With 100 poets published by more than 45 different presses, a reader won’t enjoy all the different styles and schools of poetry on offer, but they might find some that strike a spark of recognition. There might be one poem that helps a student in developing their own individual language for articulating who they are, and who they might become, in the world.
Set in 1982, Fallout is a fictionalised account of the Greenham Common protest as seen through the eyes of a rebellious 15-year-old girl. Non-preachy, funny and sharp, it’s about family secrets, female empowerment and an important time in British history that we are in danger of forgetting.
I’d also suggest Every Man for Himself by Beryl Bainbridge, which is as much about class as it is about the sinking of the Titanic. It’s a sort of whodunnit seen through the eyes of a young man who falls in love with an unobtainable young woman shortly before disaster strikes. It mixes fact with fiction, and the way it’s structured means you have to read it right to the end.
Two things are of the utmost importance. To adhere to quality as the criterion of, well, of the utmost importance! And to give a sense of the evolving tradition of literature, rather than catering to a preference for the contemporary. The problem is that some things formerly deemed of high quality – crucial components of that tradition – now seem of dubious quality.
The good news is that the reputations of plenty of female writers from the interwar period continue to soar. And many of the themes and concerns that preoccupy us now were being addressed by these writers almost a century ago. No one exemplifies this more than Jean Rhys, a writer of genius whose four novels, from 1928 and into the 1930s, were so far ahead of their time that they were doomed, like her heroines, to failure and obscurity. They also have the appealing virtue of extreme brevity, weighing in at about 150 pages apiece.
If obliged to select just one of these, I would go for the third, Voyage in the Dark (1934), her devastating and funny account of 18-year-old Anna, who comes from the West Indies and finds herself alone and helpless in London. The perfect introduction to that sought after but mysterious ideal of a writer’s “voice”, it will leave new readers wanting to venture further into Rhys’s strangely defamiliarised world. Which means, in turn, that they will be drawn to her final masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, and from there, inevitably, to Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Moon Tiger is a life story and a love story, the story of a woman called Claudia who, we learn on page one, is on her deathbed, ransacking her memories in order to give an account of herself. “Shake the tube and see what comes out,” she says. “Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head.” The story she tells is seductive, searching, confronting and compressed; scenes are played and differently replayed, truth is questioned, the idea of selfhood is dismantled.
Although it’s the retrospection of an older woman, there’s something in this exploded, chaotic rendition of self that would have struck me hard in my teens – the self as a beautiful, dangerous, vulnerable mess. It’s about the harm we do and suffer, and about the possibility of happiness. The whole novel is hot to the touch. It pushes at what a novel can do. It’s experimental in the best, most necessary of ways and a perfect study of how narrative works. Nearly 40 years on, the writing is still fresh, gorgeous and daring. And, admittedly, quite sexy. English teachers up and down the country might be less enthusiastic about it being on the curriculum than I am.
Address Unknown by Kathrine Kressmann Taylor
This epistolary novel is told via a series of letters between two business partners from 1932 to 1934 – Max is an art gallerist in the US while Martin has returned to their fatherland, where he is immediately energised by a bold new leader. But soon the hatred seeps in, and Martin asks his friend to cease communication lest he himself be mistakenly identified as a collaborator. Little more need be said about the plot, other than that it is a one-sitting/one‑lesson/one-hour read that challenges notions of friendship, loyalty, antisemitism and the sheer insidiousness of totalitarian regimes. Trump, Farage, Musk, Putin – all are reflected in Kressmann Taylor’s powerfully concise prose, perfectly constructed for the permanently distracted. Pair with Fred Uhlman’s equally economical 1932-set novel Reunion for a “compare and contrast” discussion -starter.
Few contemporary novels manage to be this urgent and playful at once, which is exactly why it belongs in a classroom: it proves seriousness and playfulness aren’t opposites. At its centre are two estranged sisters, Petra and Patricia, grieving their mother and reckoning with childhood trauma. Smith threads their story through three wars: a horse blinded in the first world war; a flattened body found in the second; and the present-day war in Gaza. The novel asks what it means to watch history repeat itself while insisting it won’t. A ghost horse, conjured by the sisters as children, returns decades later to disturb the present, blurring memory, myth and reality in ways that reward close, repeated reading. Throughout, Smith’s inventive wordplay, puns, homophones – and the title, which mirrors its companion novel Gliff – make language itself a subject, not just a vehicle. Students would leave Glyph asking what stories are for , and whether imagination is escapism or the most soulful technology we have for facing a broken, divided society.
In other words, books matter. Reading matters.
This report is published with credit to The Guardian. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on The Guardian →
Source: The Guardian · Kate Mosse. Published 5 Sept 2026, 08:00 am.
