The 100 Greatest Novels Of All Time
1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes - The
story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers
for centuries.
2. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan - The one with the Slough of Despond and
Vanity Fair.
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe - The first English novel.
4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift - A
wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's
vision.
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding - The
adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex
ending in a blissful marriage.
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson - One of the
longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne- One of
the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own
good.
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De
Laclos - An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and
ferocious.
9. Emma - Jane Austen - Near impossible
choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate
and annoy.
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley - Inspired by
spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock - A
classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
12. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac - Two
rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal -
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in
post-Napoleonic France.
14. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre
Dumas - A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of
adventure writing.
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli - Apart from
Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens -
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to
ignore.
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Obsessive
emotional grip and haunting narrative.
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
- A classic investigation of the American mind.
21. Moby-Dick - Herman Melville - 'Call me
Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - You
could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the
point entirely.
23. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental
cruelty.
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis
Carroll - A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that
still baffles most kids.
25. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott -
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope -
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - The supreme
novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot - A
passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor
Dostoevsky - Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James - The story of Isabel Archer shows
James at his witty and polished best.
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain - Twain was a humorist, but this picture
of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson – A brilliantly
suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome - One of the funniest English
books ever written.
34. The Picture of Dorian - Gray Oscar Wilde- A coded and epigrammatic melodrama
inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith - This classic of Victorian
suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - Its savage bleakness makes it one of the
first twentieth-century novels.
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers - A pre war invasion-scare spy
thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican
rising.
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London - The story of a dog who joins a pack of
wolves after his master's death.
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad - Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love
and revolutionary politics.
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - This children's classic was
inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust - An unforgettable portrait of
Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence - Novels seized by the police, like this
one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford - This account of the adulterous
lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan - A classic adventure story for
boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
45. Ulysses - James Joyce - Also pursued by the British police, this is a
novel more discussed than read.
46. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf - Secures Woolf's position as one of the great
twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster - The great novel of the British Raj, it
remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald - The quintessential Jazz Age
novel.
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka - The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway - He is remembered for his novels,
but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Celine - The experiences
of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of
linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner - A strange black comedy by an
American master.
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Dystopian fantasy about the world of
the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh - The supreme Fleet Street novel.
55. USA - John Dos Passos - An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of
narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler - Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool,
sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford - An exquisite comedy of manners
with countless fans.
58. The Plague - Albert Camus - A mysterious plague sweeps through the
Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - This tale of one man's struggle
against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett - Part of a trilogy of astonishing
monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger - A week in the life of Holden
Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor - A disturbing novel of religious
extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte's Web - E. B. White - How Wilbur the pig was saved by the
literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis - An astonishing debut: the painfully funny
English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Schoolboys become savages: a bleak
vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene - Prophetic novel set in 1950s
Vietnam.
68 On the Road - Jack Kerouac - The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a
tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass - Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of
Hitler's Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe - Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism.
A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark - A writer who made her
debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling
story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller - [He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane
if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was
crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow – Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A postmodern masterpiece.
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor - A haunting, understated study of old age.
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre – A thrilling elegy for post-imperial
Britain.
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison - The definitive novelist of the
African-American experience.
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge - Macabre comedy of
provincial life.
81. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer - This quasi-documentary account
of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino - A strange, compelling story about the pleasures
of reading.
83. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul - The finest living writer of
English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of
Darkness.
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee - Bleak but haunting allegory
of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson - Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water
and light, about three generations of women.
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray - Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish
classic.
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster - Dazzling metaphysical thriller set
in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl – A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer
for children of all ages.
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi – A prose poem about the delights of
chemistry.
90. Money - Martin Amis - The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro - A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly
discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
92. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey - A great contemporary love story set in
nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera - Inspired by the
Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history,
autobiography and ideas.
94. Haroun and the Sea of Stories - Salman Rushdie - In this entrancing story
Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.
95. La Confidential - James Ellroy - Three LAPD detectives are brought face
to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.
96. Wise Children - Angela Carter - A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant
exponent of magic realism.
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan - Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a
contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman - Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror
and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth - For years, Roth was famous for
Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
100. Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald - Posthumously published volume in a sequence
of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.