AQA A Level English Literature B set texts 2026 to 2027

English Literature B is AQA's genre course. Rather than grouping books by period, it asks what makes a text a tragedy, a comedy, a crime story or a piece of protest writing. For the first paper a school chooses tragedy or comedy and teaches a Shakespeare play with two further texts, one of them a second play and one written before 1900; that paper is sat without the books. For the second paper it chooses crime writing or political and social protest writing and teaches three texts, including a novel from after 2000 and a poem or collection. A non-exam folder of two essays, each reading a text through a different strand of AQA's critical anthology, completes the A level.

Most departments follow a single route for the whole class, so the common shapes are Othello with Death of a Salesman and Tess, or Hamlet with Atonement and Brighton Rock. The list is stable. For exams from 2027 AQA has added two optional recent novels, Colin Walsh's Kala to crime writing and V. V. Ganeshananthan's Brotherless Night to protest writing, without removing anything.

For a collector the crime list is the richest seam. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (Collins, 1926) is among the most sought Christie firsts, and a jacketed copy is a serious purchase. Oliver Twist (Richard Bentley, 1838) came out in three volumes with Cruikshank's plates, and Hard Times (Bradbury and Evans, 1854) in one. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 in both London and New York, and the British first in its jacket is scarce. On the tragedy side, The Great Gatsby (Scribner's, 1925) and Tess (Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891) are blue-chip books, and Death of a Salesman (Viking, 1949) is a desirable American drama first. The modern texts, The Kite Runner (Riverhead, 2003), Small Island (Headline, 2004) and Atonement (Jonathan Cape, 2001), are attainable, and signed first printings carry the premium.

A class set paperback is worth a few pounds at most. Each row links to the book's page, which identifies the true first edition against two sources and shows a value band once we hold recorded sales of that printing.