READING LISTS

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The Observer’s 100 Greatest Novels

  1. Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes
  2. Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan
  3. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
  4. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift
  5. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
  6. Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
  7. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
  8. Dangerous Liaisons, Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
  9. Emma, Jane Austen
  10. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  11. Nightmare Abbey, Thomas Love Peacock
  12. The Black Sheep, Honore De Balzac
  13. The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal
  14. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
  15. Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli
  16. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
  17. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
  18. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
  19. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
  20. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  21. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
  22. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  23. The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins
  24. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
  25. Little Women, Louisa M. Alcott
  26. The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope
  27. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  28. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot
  29. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
  30. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
  31. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
  32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
  33. Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
  34. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
  35. The Diary of a Nobody, George Grossmith
  36. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
  37. The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
  38. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  39. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  40. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
  41. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
  42. The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence
  43. The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford
  44. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
  45. Ulysses, James Joyce
  46. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
  47. A Passage to India, E. M. Forster
  48. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  49. The Trial, Franz Kafka
  50. Men Without Women, Ernest Hemingway
  51. Journey to the End of the Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
  52. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  53. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  54. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
  55. USA, John Dos Passos
  56. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
  57. The Pursuit Of Love, Nancy Mitford
  58. The Plague, Albert Camus
  59. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
  60. Malone Dies, Samuel Beckett
  61. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  62. Wise Blood, Flannery O’Connor
  63. Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White
  64. The Lord Of The Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
  65. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
  66. Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  67. The Quiet American, Graham Greene
  68. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  69. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  70. The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass
  71. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
  72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
  73. To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  74. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  75. Herzog, Saul Bellow
  76. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor
  78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John Le Carre
  79. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
  80. The Bottle Factory Outing, Beryl Bainbridge
  81. The Executioner’s Song, Norman Mailer
  82. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino
  83. A Bend in the River, V. S. Naipaul
  84. Waiting for the Barbarians, J.M. Coetzee
  85. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
  86. Lanark, Alasdair Gray
  87. The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
  88. The BFG, Roald Dahl
  89. The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
  90. Money, Martin Amis
  91. An Artist of the Floating World, Kazuo Ishiguro
  92. Oscar And Lucinda, Peter Carey
  93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera
  94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories, Salman Rushdie
  95. La Confidential, James Ellroy
  96. Wise Children, Angela Carter
  97. Atonement, Ian McEwan
  98. Northern Lights, Philip Pullman
  99. American Pastoral, Philip Roth
  100. Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald

The Modern Library 100 Best Novels

  1. Ulysses, James Joyce
  2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyces Joyce
  4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
  6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
  7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
  8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
  9. Sons and Lover, D.H. Lawrence
  10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
  12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
  13. 1984, George Orwell
  14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  17. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  18. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  20. Native Son, Richard Wright
  21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
  22. Appointment in Samarra, John O’ Hara
  23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
  24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
  25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
  27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
  28. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
  30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
  33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
  34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
  35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  36. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
  38. Howards End, E.M. Forster
  39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  41. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  42. Deliverance, James Dickey
  43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series) Anthony Powell
  44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
  45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
  47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
  49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  52. Portnoy’s Complaint, Phillip Roth
  53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
  54. Light in August, William Faulkner
  55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet
  57. Parade’s End, Ford Maddox Ford
  58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
  60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
  63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
  64. The Cather in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
  67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
  69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durell
  71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
  72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
  73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
  74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
  76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
  77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
  78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
  80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
  82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
  83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
  84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
  85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
  86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
  87. The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett
  88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  89. Loving, Henry Green
  90. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
  92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
  93. The Magus, John Fowles
  94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
  96. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
  97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
  98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
  99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
  100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington

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