I’ve always been a fan of lists of things and finding out which really are the best novels ever written. Each list I came across has its critics, they are often biased to the language of the compiler or limited to a certain time period. My own list merges entries from four sources to create a more complete list of novels you should read.

Thanks to Time, Le Monde and The Guardian for their work (I have also added the top ten best-selling novels of all time, because popularity matters).

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The List

So, without further ado, here’s my list (in alphabetical order). I’ll add links to my reviews as they’re published. If there’s a book you’d like me to review next, get in touch and let me know.

A

• The Abyss by Marguerite Yourcenar
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
• Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carol
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth
• Amers by Saint-John Perse
• Amongst Women by John McGahern
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra by John O’Hara
• Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
• Asterix the Gaul by Rene Goscinny
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• Aurelien by Louis Aragon

B

• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco
• Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt
• The Beginning of Spring by Penelope Fitzgerald
• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• Belle du Seigneur by Albert Cohen
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
• The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Blake and Mortimer by Edgar P Jacobs
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
• The Blue Lotus by Herge
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
• Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

C

• Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• Capital of Pain by Paul Eluard
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
• Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
• The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
• Confusion of Feelings by Stefan Zweig
• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
• The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
• The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon

D

• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
• A Death in the Family by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
• Disgrace by JM Coetzee
• Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin

E

• Ecrits by Jacques Lacan
• Emma by Jane Austen
• The End of the Affair by Graham Greene

F

• Falconer by John Cheever
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
• Friday by Michel Tournier
• Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian
• Furor and Mystery by Rene Char

G

• Gaston by Andre Franquin
• The General of the Dead Army by Ismail Kadare
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
• A Ghost at Noon by Alberto Moravia
• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
• Le Grand Meaulnes by Henri Alain-Fournier
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
• Gypsy Ballads by Federico Garcia Lorca

H

• Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
• The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
• Herzog by Saul Bellow
• The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells
• The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
• The Horseman on the Roof by Jean Giono
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas by VS Naipaul

I

• I, Claudius by Robert Graves
• If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
• The Interrogation by Jean-Marie G. Le Clezio
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

J

• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• The Joke by Milan Kundera
• Journal, 1887-1910 by Jules Renard
• Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Celine
• Joy in the Morning by P.G. Wodehouse
• Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

K

• Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling
• King Solomon’s Mines by H Rider Haggard

L

• Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence
• The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne
• Life: A User’s Manual by Georges Perec
• Light in August by William Faulkner
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis
• The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
• The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll
• Loving by Henry Green
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

M

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
• Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux
• The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
• The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
• Martin Eden by Jack London
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
• Moby Dick by Herman Melville
• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
• Money by Martin Amis
• Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
• The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
• Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
• Murphy by Samuel Beckett

N

• Nadja by Andre Breton
• Naked Lunch by William S Burroughs
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Neuromancer by William Gibson
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• New Grub Street by George Gissing
• Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock
• 1984 by George Orwell
• Nineteen Nineteen by John Dos Passos
• No Orchids For Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase
• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

O

• Of Human Bondage by William Somerset Maugham
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq
• The Order of Things by Michel Foucault
• The Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt Hannah
• Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

P

• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• Paroles by Jacques Prevert
• Party Going by Henry Green
• A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
• Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
• Possession by A S Byatt
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

R

• Rabbit Redux by John Updike
• Rabbit, Run by John Updike
• Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow
• The Rainbow by D H Lawrence
• The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis
• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
• The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui by Bertolt Brecht
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
• A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
• The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

S

• The Satin Slipper by Paul Claudel
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• Second Thoughts by Michel Butor
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
• Le Silence de la Mer by Vercors
• The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
• Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
• Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
• Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré
• The Strange Case of Peter the Lett by Georges Simenon
• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
• Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli

T

• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati
• The Theatre and its Double by Antonin Artaud
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• Thérèse Desqueyroux by Francois Mauriac
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan
• Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality by Sigmund Freud
• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• The Trial by Franz Kafka
• Tristes Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
• Tropisms by Nathalie Sarraute
• The True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

U

• Ubik by Philip K. Dick
• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• Under the Sun of Satan by Georges Bernanos
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Underworld by Don DeLillo

V

• Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
• V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
• Voss by Patrick White
• Les Vrilles de la Vigne by Colette

W

• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
• The War of the Worlds by H.G Wells
• Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
• The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
• The Wonderful Adventures of Nils by Selma Lagerlöf
• Writing Degree Zero by Roland Barthes
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Z

• Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm