Ranking Author Daphne du Maurier’s Best Books (A Bibliography Countdown)
“What are Daphne du Maurier’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Maurier’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!
We took all of the books written by Daphne du Maurier and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.
The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.
Happy Scrolling!
The Top Book’s Of Daphne du Maurier
42 ) Castle Dor
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 38
- Amazon: 36
- LibraryThing: 34
Both a spellbinding love story and a superb evocation of Cornwall’s mythic past, Castle Dor is a book with unique and fascinating origins. It began life as the unfinished last novel of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the celebrated ‘Q’, and was passed by his daughter to Daphne du Maurier whose storytellin…
41 ) I’ll Never Be Young Again
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 37
- Amazon: 35
- LibraryThing: 33
The iron of the bridge felt hot under my hand. The sun had been upon it all day. Gripping hard with my hands I lifted myself on to the bar and gazed down steadily on the water passing under … I thought of places I would never see, and women I should never love. A white sea breaking on a beach, the…
40 ) The Flight of the Falcon
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 40
- Amazon: 34
- LibraryThing: 30
As a young guide for Sunshine Tours, Armino Fabbio leads a pleasant, if humdrum life — until he becomes circumstantially involved in the murder of an old peasant woman in Rome. The woman, he gradually comes to realise, was his family’s beloved servant many years ago, in his native town of Ruffano. …
39 ) Golden Lads
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 39
- Amazon: 28
- LibraryThing: 36
Anthony Bacon – elder brother of Francis, philosopher, essayist and statesman – is a mysterious figure in history. He was a contemporary of the brilliant band of gallants who clustered round the court of Elizabeth I, the ‘golden lads’ of Daphne du Maurier’s title….
38 ) The Infernal World of Branwell Bronte
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 40
- Amazon: 30
- LibraryThing: 29
In this book one of England’s most perceptive and popular authors has found a subject exactly suited to her taste for the romantically macabre. Here is Daphne du Maurier’s fascinating biography of the tormented poet Branwell Bronte, whose remarkable sisters wrote JANE EYRE and WUTHERING HEIGHTS….
37 ) Mary Anne
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 40
- Amazon: 24
- LibraryThing: 32
In Regency London, the only way for a woman to succeed is to beat men at their own game. So when Mary Anne Clarke seeks an escape from her squalid surroundings in Bowling Inn Alley, she ventures first into the scurrilous world of the pamphleteers. Her personal charms are such, however, that before l…
36 ) Rule Britannia
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 36
- Amazon: 30
- LibraryThing: 28
It is rather awful, Emma thought as she walked across the fields down to the farm, how this business is leading us all into subterfuge and deception, and we can’t really tell who is friend and who is enemy . . . ‘ Emma wakes up one morning to an apocalyptic world. The cosy existence she shares with …
35 ) The Doll
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 27
- Amazon: 37
- LibraryThing: 30
A collection of 13 stories written by Dame Daphne du Maurier before she was 23 years old, The Doll is a valuable part of the author’s body of work. It is comprised of eight stories that were published in a small UK volume called Early Stories that is now out of print and five stories that were publi…
34 ) The Winding Stair
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 35
- Amazon: 19
- LibraryThing: 37
Many accounts of the life of Francis Bacon have been written for scholars. But du Maurier’s aim in this biography was to illuminate the many facets of Bacon’s remarkable personality for the common reader. To her book she brought the same gifts of imagination and perception that made her earlier biog…
33 ) The Breakthrough
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 29
- Amazon: 39
- LibraryThing: 19
Dispatch the maimed, the old, the weak, destroy the very world itself, for what is the point of life if the promise of fulfilment lies elsewhere? On the windswept coast of rural Suffolk, a deranged scientist attempts to extract the essence of life itself. Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating …
32 ) The Parasites
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 26
- Amazon: 33
- LibraryThing: 26
When people play the game: Name three or four persons whom you would choose to have with you on a desert island — they never choose the Delaneys. They don’t even choose us one by one as individuals. We have earned, not always fairly we consider, the reputation of being difficult guests . . .’ Maria…
31 ) Split Second
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 5
- Amazon: 39
- LibraryThing: 38
…
30 ) The Du Mauriers
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 33
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 35
Spanning nearly three quarters of a century, THE DU MAURIERS is the enthralling saga of a family of artists and speculators, courtesans and military men. From England to Paris and back again their fortunes vacilated as wildly as did their ambitions. Mary Anne Clarke, a fading beauty with a scandalou…
29 ) Birds of Prey
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 1
- Amazon: 39
- LibraryThing: 38
…
28 ) The Loving Spirit
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 24
- Amazon: 39
- LibraryThing: 14
Cornwall, 1900s. Plyn Boat Yard is a hive of activity, and Janet Coombe longs to share in the excitement of seafaring: to travel, to have adventures, to know freedom. But constrained by the times, instead she marries her cousin Thomas, a boat builder, and settles down to raise a family. Janet’s lovi…
27 ) The Progress of Julius
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 28
- Amazon: 24
- LibraryThing: 22
His first instinct was to stretch out his hands to the sky. The white clouds seemed so near to him, surely they were easy to hold and to caress, strange-moving things belonging to the wide blue space of heaven . . . ‘ Julius Levy grows up in a peasant family in a village on the banks of the Seine. A…
26 ) Happy Christmas
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 34
- Amazon: 37
- LibraryThing: 1
This is one of the most touching Christmas stories ever written. Daphne du Maurier’s small masterpiece had been out of print since 1943, when it first appeared as a private press book….
24 ) Vanishing Cornwall
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 22
- Amazon: 24
- LibraryThing: 25
With her son, Christian Browning, Daphne du Maurier, who lived in Cornwall for most of her life and used her knowledge of the county in her novels “Rebecca”, “Frenchman’s Creek” and “Jamaica Inn”, chronicles all aspects of this part of England, fusing history, anecdote and travelogue in a plea for C…
24 ) Hungry Hill
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 29
- Amazon: 24
- LibraryThing: 18
Maureen O’Brien’s warm, lilting voice enchants in this early Daphne du Maurier. The fortunes and fates of five generations of an Anglo-Irish family are bound to their copper mine on Hungry Hill. Beginning with the first stubborn patriarch, O’Brien brings each of the many characters vividly to life–…
22 ) Gerald
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 31
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 38
Sir Gerald du Maurier was the most celebrated actor-manager of his day, knighted for his services to the theatre in 1922. Published within six months of her father’s death, this frank biography was considered shocking by many of his admirers – but it was a huge success, winning Daphne du Maurier cri…
22 ) The Glass Blowers
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 32
- Amazon: 19
- LibraryThing: 19
Perhaps we shall not see each other again. I will write to you, though, and tell you, as best I can, the story of your family. A glass-blower, remember, breathes life into a vessel, giving it shape and form and sometimes beauty; but he can with that same breath, shatter and destroy it’ Faithful to h…
21 ) Rebecca Notebook
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 25
- Amazon: 22
- LibraryThing: 22
This book of occasional pieces from Daphne du Maurier’s workshop is good to have: it is something of a continuation of her autobiography MYSELF WHEN YOUNG. The title piece is the remarkable Notebook she kept when REBECCA was forming itself in her mind — the book that made her a worldwide bestseller…
20 ) Don’t Look Now and Other Echoes from the Macabre
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 17
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 38
…
19 ) Myself When Young
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 17
- Amazon: 28
- LibraryThing: 10
Both in her novels and her memoirs, Daphne du Maurier revealed an ardent desire to explore her family’s history. In Myself When Young, based on diaries she kept between 1920 and 1932, du Maurier probes her own past, beginning with her earliest memories and encompassing the publication of her first b…
18 ) The Rendezvous
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 23
- Amazon: 18
- LibraryThing: 11
The stories in this collection, some written before du Maurier published her first novel, reflect many human emotions: romance, disenchantment, fantasy, nostalgia, ambition, irony, the longing for adventure. Each of them is based on something observed, something overheard, and all will provide pleas…
16 ) Jamaica Inn
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 14
- Amazon: 19
- LibraryThing: 17
On a bitter November evening, young Mary Yellan journeys across the rainswept moors to Jamaica Inn in honour of her mother’s dying request. When she arrives, the warning of the coachman begins to echo in her memory, for her aunt Patience cowers before hulking Uncle Joss Merlyn. Terrified of the inn’…
16 ) The Breaking Point
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 21
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 21
The apathy of Sunday lay upon the streets. Houses were closed, withdrawn. They don’t know, he thought, those people inside, how one gesture of mine, now, at this minute, might alter their world. A knock on the door, and someone answers – a woman yawning, an old man in carpet slippers, a child sent b…
15 ) My Cousin Rachel
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 10
- Amazon: 30
- LibraryThing: 8
I threw the piece of paper on the fire. She saw it burn . . . Orphaned at an early age, Philip Ashley is raised by his benevolent older cousin, Ambrose. Resolutely single, Ambrose delights in Philip as his heir, a man who will love his grand home as much as he does himself. But the cosy world the tw…
14 ) Don’t Look Now and Other Stories
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 17
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 22
The title novella of this collection features John and Laura who are on holiday in Venice. But it is a dangerous place for them as they are being followed by two old sisters and there is a killer on the loose….
13 ) The Apple Tree
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 6
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 38
A collection of sinister and macabre short stories by Daphne du Maurier, including “The Birds” on which Hitchcock famously based his film of the same name….
11 ) The King’s General
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 13
- Amazon: 22
- LibraryThing: 7
Inspired by a grisly discovery in the nineteenth century, The King’s General was the first of du Maurier’s novels to be written at Menabilly, the model for Manderley in Rebecca. Set in the seventeenth century, it tells the story of a country and a family riven by war, and features one of fiction’s m…
11 ) Enchanted Cornwall
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 14
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 27
Publisher’s Weekly In a memoir that appealingly unites text and photographs of her much-loved Cornwall, British author du Maurier, who recently died at age 82, writes in the richly imaginative style that has distinguished her novels: Frenchmen’s Creek , Rebecca , Jamaica Inn et al. Heightening du Ma…
10 ) Frenchman’s Creek
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 11
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 16
The Restoration Court knows Lady Dona St Columb to be ripe for any folly, any outrage that will alter the tedium of her days. But there is another, secret Dona who longs for a life of honest love — and sweetness, even if it is spiced with danger. It is this Dona who flees the stews of London for re…
8 ) The House on the Strand
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 14
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 12
Dick Young is lent a house in Cornwall by his friend Professor Magnus Lane. During his stay he agrees to serve as a guinea pig for a new drug that Magnus has discovered in his biochemical researches. The effect of this drug is to transport Dick from the house at Kilmarth to the Cornwall of the 14th …
8 ) Don’t Look Now
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 17
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 14
John and Laura are on holiday in Venice, but it is a dangerous place for them as they are being followed by two old sisters and there is a killer on the loose. “Penguin Readers” is a series of simplified novels, film novelizations and original titles that introduce students at all levels to the plea…
7 ) The Scapegoat
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 9
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 9
By chance, two men – one English, the other French – meet in a provincial railway station. Their physical resemblance is uncanny, and they spend the next few hours talking and drinking – until at last John, the Englishman, falls into a drunken stupour. It’s to be his last carefree moment, for when h…
6 ) The Birds
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 6
- Amazon: 8
- LibraryThing: 12
How long he fought with them in the darkness he could not tell, but at last the beating of the wings about him lessened and then withdrew . . . ‘ A classic of alienation and horror, ‘The Birds’ was immortalised by Hitchcock in his celebrated film. The five other chilling stories in this collection e…
4 ) Rebecca
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 2
- Amazon: 13
- LibraryThing: 4
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . Working as a lady’s companion, the heroine of Rebecca learns her place. Life begins to look very bleak until, on a trip to the South of France, she meets Maxim de Winter, a handsome widower whose sudden proposal of marriage takes her by surprise. S…
4 ) Echoes from the Macabre
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 12
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 6
A collection of 9 stories: “Don’t Look Now;” “The Apple Tree;” “The Pool;” “The Blue Lenses;” “Kiss Me again Stranger;” “The Chamois;” “Not After Midnight;” “The Old Man;” “The Birds.”…
3 ) Daphne Du Maurier’s Classics of the Macabre
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 4
- Amazon: 7
- LibraryThing: 2
A collection of six chilling short stories and augmented by Foreman’s vivid illustrations. The volume was put together to commemorate du Maurier’s 80th birthday. The stories are: Don’t Look Now The Apple Tree The Blue Lenses The Birds The Apple Tree and Not After Midnight….
2 ) Kiss Me Again, Stranger
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 6
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 5
…
1 ) Letters from Menabilly
Review Website Ranks:
- Goodreads: 3
- Amazon: 1
- LibraryThing: 3
Menabilly was the du Maurier house in Cornwall. Oriel Malet has published the letters she received from Daphne over a 30-year span with links of her own thoughts….
