Essential Books and Their Authors

1.      “A Farewell to Arms” – Ernest Hemingway

2.      “Pride and Prejudice” – Jane Austen

3.      “India Wins Freedom” – Maulana Abul Kalam Azad

4.      “Nineteen Eighty-Four” – George Orwell

5.      “Gandhi and Stalin” – Louis Fischer

6.      “Sword of Tipu Sultan” – B. S. Gidwani

7.      “War and Peace” – Leo Tolstoy

8.      “The Spirit of Laws” – Montesquieu

9.      “The City of the Saints” – Sir Richard Francis Burton

10.  “The Story of My Experiments with Truth” – M. K. Gandhi

11.  “Crossing the Threshold of Hope” – Pope John Paul II

12.  “Higher than Hopes” (Biography of Nelson Mandela) – Fatima Meer

13.  “Remembering Babylon” – David Malouf

14.  “Daughter of the East” – Benazir Bhutto

15.  “The Bluest Eye” – Toni Morrison

16.  “Glimpses of World History” – Jawaharlal Nehru

17.  “Shahnameh” – Ferdowsi

18.  “The Good Earth” – Pearl S. Buck

19.  “Gulliver’s Travels” – Jonathan Swift

20.  “To Live or Not to Live” – Nirad C. Chaudhuri

21.  “Tahqiq-i-Hind” – Al-Biruni

22.  “Around the World in Eighty Days” – Jules Verne

23.  “The Prince” – Niccolò Machiavelli

24.  “Das Kapital” – Karl Marx

25.  “Mankind and Mother Earth” – Arnold Joseph Toynbee

26.  “A Prisoner’s Scrapbook” – L. K. Advani

27.  “Zulfi, My Friend” – Piloo Mody

28.  “The Power and the Glory” – Graham Greene

29.  “Life Divine” – Sri Aurobindo

30.  “Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own” – Janet Morgan

31.  “The Conquest of Happiness” – Bertrand Russell·  “To Kill a Mockingbird” – Harper Lee

32.  “The Great Gatsby” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

33.  “One Hundred Years of Solitude” – Gabriel García Márquez

34.  “Moby-Dick” – Herman Melville

35.  “The Catcher in the Rye” – J.D. Salinger

36.  “Ulysses” – James Joyce

37.  “Brave New World” – Aldous Huxley

38.  “The Brothers Karamazov” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

39.  “Don Quixote” – Miguel de Cervantes

40.  “The Odyssey” – Homer

41.  “Les Misérables” – Victor Hugo

42.  “Crime and Punishment” – Fyodor Dostoevsky

43.  “The Divine Comedy” – Dante Alighieri

44.  “Anna Karenina” – Leo Tolstoy

45.  “The Count of Monte Cristo” – Alexandre Dumas

46.  “The Iliad” – Homer

47.  “Wuthering Heights” – Emily Brontë

48.  “Frankenstein” – Mary Shelley

49.  “Jane Eyre” – Charlotte Brontë

50.  “The Hobbit” – J.R.R. Tolkien

51.  “The Lord of the Rings” – J.R.R. Tolkien

52.  “The Old Man and the Sea” – Ernest Hemingway

53.  “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – Oscar Wilde

54.  “A Tale of Two Cities” – Charles Dickens

55.  “Madame Bovary” – Gustave Flaubert

56.  “Dracula” – Bram Stoker

57.  “1984” – George Orwell

58.  “Animal Farm” – George Orwell

59.  “The Alchemist” – Paulo Coelho·  “Long Walk to Freedom” (Biography of Nelson Mandela) – Nelson Mandela

60.  “The Diary of a Young Girl” (Anne Frank’s Diary) – Anne Frank

61.  “My Life” (Autobiography of Bill Clinton) – Bill Clinton

62.  “Dreams from My Father” (Autobiography of Barack Obama) – Barack Obama

63.  “The Audacity of Hope” – Barack Obama

64.  “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” – Doris Kearns Goodwin

65.  “The Path to Power” (Biography of Lyndon B. Johnson) – Robert A. Caro

66.  “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers” – Paul Kennedy

67.  “The Guns of August” – Barbara W. Tuchman

68.  “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” – Samuel P. Huntington

69.  “The World Is Flat” – Thomas L. Friedman

70.  “No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt” – Doris Kearns Goodwin

71.  “Kissinger: A Biography” – Walter Isaacson

72.  “The Art of War” – Sun Tzu

73.  “The Prince” – Niccolò Machiavelli

74.  “The Tragedy of Great Power Politics” – John Mearsheimer

75.  “The Making of the Atomic Bomb” – Richard Rhodes

76.  “Madame Curie: A Biography” – Eve Curie

77.  “Einstein: His Life and Universe” – Walter Isaacson

78.  “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar” – Simon Sebag Montefiore

79.  “Churchill: A Life” – Martin Gilbert

80.  “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” – Malcolm X, Alex Haley

81.  “A World Transformed” – George H.W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft

82.  “Ghost Wars” – Steve Coll

83.  “The Cold War: A New History” – John Lewis Gaddis

84.  “All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror” – Stephen Kinzer

85.  “The Road to Serfdom” – Friedrich Hayek

86.  “The End of History and the Last Man” – Francis Fukuyama

87.  “The Secret State: A History of Intelligence and Espionage” – John Hughes-Wilson88.  “The Best and the Brightest” – David Halberstam