Anne of Green Gables

Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908, and the book has been continuously in print ever since. Set on Prince Edward Island in Canada around the 1880s, it opens with an elderly brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, sending to a Nova Scotia orphan asylum for a boy to help on their farm. The orphanage sends an eleven-year-old girl by mistake. Her name is Anne Shirley, with an e on the end of Anne, which she will insist on for the rest of the series.

Montgomery built her career on this character. Anne is talkative, romantic, hot-tempered, and incapable of staying out of trouble. She turns Marilla’s quiet farmhouse upside down within a week. She accidentally dyes her hair green. She gets her best friend Diana drunk on what she thought was raspberry cordial. She breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head for calling her Carrots, and the feud that follows runs for several books before turning into something else. Underneath the comic surface, Montgomery wrote a book about belonging, about an orphan finding her place in a family and a community, and it has spoken to several generations of readers across multiple countries, most famously Japan. Start the series here, ideally before you are an adult, though it works either way.