Leaving Certificate English prescribed texts 2027

The 2027 Leaving Certificate English list (Circular 0021/2025, issued 27 February 2025) is the one fifth-years began in September 2025. The headline change is that Macbeth leaves the single-text list, where it had sat for years, and survives only as a comparative drama option; in its place Othello and The Great Gatsby arrive as single texts for Higher and Ordinary Level, and Wuthering Heights, Nineteen Eighty-Four, A Doll's House, The Spinning Heart and Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? join the comparative lists. Films and the eight Higher Level poets (Bishop, Dickinson, Donne, Kavanagh, Mahon, Meehan, Rich and Yeats) are prescribed as well but are not books we catalogue.

For a collector the 2027 single texts are a remarkable group. The Great Gatsby (Scribner's, 1925) in its first-issue jacket is among the most valuable American books of the century, and even jacketless firsts are expensive; Dracula (Constable, 1897) is the same for Victorian fiction; Wuthering Heights (Newby, 1847, as the first two volumes of a three-volume set with Agnes Grey) is rarer than either. Nineteen Eighty-Four (Secker and Warburg, 1949) exists in red and green jackets and is the first edition most often found at home. Hamnet and Small Things Like These are modern firsts still available at cover price.

Each row links to the book's page with the first edition identified against two sources, its points where known and a value band once we hold recorded sales. A school copy of any of these is a reprint worth a few euro; the pages show what the first printing looks like instead.