The Good Clean Fiction bookshelf
A little room for a good book.
Classics
by Louisa May Alcott
The March sisters — Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy — grow up together through poverty, ambition, and loss. Alcott's classic is warm, funny, and honest about what it costs to become yourself. Still the standard for wholesome family fiction that never talks down to you.
Before you read
Read our approach to language, romance, and difficult subjects before choosing your next book.
How we choose our booksFind your copy
Retailer links may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. Read our disclosure.
ClassicsLiterary
Helene Hanff
In 1949 Helene Hanff, a New York writer with more taste than money, posts a list of out-of-print books to a shop at 84, Charing Cross Road in London. What comes back is twenty years of letters between her and a reserved bookseller named Frank Doel, trading rare editions, food parcels through the rationing years, and a friendship neither of them ever quite names. All true, and barely a hundred pages.
Classics
R.C. Sherriff
Every September the Stevens family of Dulwich takes the train to Bognor for two weeks at the same guesthouse by the sea. Nothing dramatic happens, and that is the point: Sherriff's 1931 novel finds quiet grandeur in an ordinary family's holiday. A gentle, much-loved classic.
ClassicsHistorical
J.L. Carr
In the summer of 1920, Tom Birkin, a survivor of the trenches, arrives in a Yorkshire village to uncover a medieval wall painting in its church. Over a few golden weeks the work, and the people around him, begin to heal him. A short, luminous classic.
