Politics
Biographies of American Presidents - The lives of various American presidents including Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - Colonial times in the Belgian Congo as white men enforce slavery and murderous behaviour on the natives. Loved by many, it is despised by Chinua Achebe who wrote Things Fall Apart as a defence against Conrad's vision of a primitive African people. Decide for yourself.
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad - Conrad imagines the political machinations of a fictional South American state called Costaguana and asks us to consider the relative values of local democrats and dictators, American capitalists and government by greed.
The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper - Native Americans and colonials come to blows in a tale of intrigue and the dying of a way of life.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens - A vivid representation of Paris and London at the time of the French Revolution, exposing the politics of class.
Oliver Twist, Hard Times, Bleak House, Great Expectations etc. by Charles Dickens - Dickens' unhappy vision of the grimy city, the woeful and unjust educational system, and the idiotic machinations of the legal system emerge in these books which are some of his most overtly political in tone and subject.
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - The politics of murder and guilt as one man tries to evade retribution.
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy - We witness the symbolic death of the old rural age of traditional technology as a man called Farfrae arrives with new technology and attitudes and brings old timer Henchard to ruin.
The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley - Although this is a children's book, it is profoundly political in its aims, particularly in the reader's disgust at the class divide between Ellie the rich girl and Tom the chimney sweep.
Sons and Lovers, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence - The politics of love, work and the family, not to mention being the first truly northern working-class English novels.
The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli - The source of the term "Machiavellian", this book is a political treatise on keeping power through the most underhand means.
Das Kapital by Karl Marx - The founding father of Communism outlines his beliefs in extraordinary detail.
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - A deeply controversial book which questioned the nature of creation and of human responsibility. A political book in the sense that Shelley was castigated for writing it because she was a woman, and was forced to edit her book severely for the second edition.
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe - The politics of race are central to this abolitionist volume that stirred up anti-racist feeling through its sympathetic vision of black men but was so exaggerated that it actually provoked some racist attitudes.
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy - The different fates of two families at the time of the Napoleonic Wars.
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