All of the extracts in this document are free from copyright restrictions. This is either because of when they were written (and so now fall out of copyright statutes), have no copyright restrictions and/or were originally published under a Creative Commons license. They have been carefully collated to ensure that a wide range of voices can be heard by students studying towards their GCSE English. We have not overlooked famous authors by any means but a pivotal reason for putting these core texts together was to counter the inherent Eurocentricity of past and current curricula. Although there are no associated tasks included here (they are on the VLE) we are happy to make these texts available to anyone who cares to read them. They were chosen for their engaging content and so even if you do not use these as specific tasks, we hope that you will find them collectively an enjoyable and thought-provoking read. If you love to dip in and out of literature, you have come to the right place! When substantial additions are made (this is an ongoing project) we will update the document available online.