The Guardian: The Greatest Literature Ever Published In English

“As Stephen King points out, compiling a list of the greatest novels of all time is an impossible task. King is one of more than 170 novelists, critics and academics the Guardian polled for their top 10, ranked in order, which we tallied to compile an overall 100. But, as he argued, 10 books is “not enough!” On King’s list there is, he’s sorry to say, “not a single Dickens”; he wishes he’d found space for David Copperfield or Oliver Twist.

Our list includes any book published in English, but originally written in any language. It is still partial – all lists are. Neither can we make a claim to being definitive – this is literature, not science. Is the best novel one that changes the genre, society or the individual? One that captures the zeitgeist, or has an afterlife far beyond its pages. Or a novel that scorches itself so deeply into your soul you can remember exactly when and where you were when you first read it? None of these criteria on their own is enough. My Proustian madeleine will be your raw potato. My Mrs Dalloway your Mrs Bridge. But we hope that in asking those who devote their days to the craft and understanding of fiction from around the globe, the result is as authoritative, ambitious and far-reaching as possible.”

See the original list here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time

Position	Title	Author	Own	Read
1	Middlemarch	George Eliot	Yes
2	Beloved	Toni Morrison	Yes
3	Ulysses	James Joyce	Yes
4	To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf
5	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust
6	Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	Yes
7	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	Yes
8	Jane Eyre	Charlotte Bronte	Yes
9	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	Yes
10	Madame Bovary	Gustav Flaubert	Yes
11	The Great Gatsby	F Scott Fitzgerald	Yes
12	Bleak House	Charles Dickens	Yes
13	Emma	Jane Austen	Yes
14	Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	Yes
15	Moby Dick	Herman Melville	Yes
16	Nineteen Eighty Four	George Orwell	Yes
17	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel Garcia Marquez	Yes
18	Persuasion	Jane Austen	Yes
19	The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman	Laurence Sterne
20	Wuthering Heights	Emily Bronte	Yes	Yes
21	The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James
22	Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe
23	Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie	Yes
24	The Remains of the Day	Kazuo Ishiguro	Yes
25	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	Yes
26	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	Yes
27	The Trial	Frank Kafka
28	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky
29	Pale Fire	Vladimir Nabokov
30	Frankenstein	Mary Shelley	Yes	Yes
31	The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie	Muriel Spark
32	The God of Small Things	Arundhati Roy	Yes
33	David Copperfield	Charles Dickens	Yes
34	Wolf Hall	Hilary Mantel	Yes
35	Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	Yes
36	The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Yes
37	Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
38	The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton	Yes
39	Their Eyes Were Watching God	Zora Neale Hurston
40	Song of Solomon	Toni Morrison
41	Heart of Darkness	Joseph Conrad
42	The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann
43	Housekeeping	Marilynne Robinson
44	Giovanni’s Room	James Baldwin	Yes
45	The Golden Notebook	Doris Lessing
46	The Leopard	Giuseppe di Lampedusa
47	Vanity Fair	William Makepeace Thackery	Yes
48	The Metamorphosis	Frank Kapra
49	A Fine Balance	Rohinton Mistry
50	Wide Sargasso Sea	Jean Rhys
51	My Brilliant Friend	Elena Ferrante
52	The Golden Bowl	Henry James
53	The Transit of Venus	Shirley Hazzard
54	Orlando	Virginia Woolf
55	The Waves	Virginia Woolf
56	Mansfield Park	Jane Austen	Yes
57	The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner
58	Disgrace	J.M Coetzee
59	Never Let Me Go	Kazuo Ishiguro	Yes
60	Howards End	E.M Forster
61	The Rings of Saturn	W.G Sebald
62	Half of a Yellow Sun	Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
63	White Teeth	Zadie Smith	Yes
64	The Good Soldier	Ford Madox Ford
65	The Color Purple	Alice Walker	Yes
66	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	Yes
67	The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil
68	Blood Meridian	Cormac McCarthy
69	Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoevsky
70	Jude the Obscure	Thomas Hardy
71	Kindred	Octavia E Butler	Yes
72	Our Mutual Friend	Charles Dickens	Yes
73	Austerlitz	W.G Sebald
74	Nervous Conditions	Tsitsi Dangarembga
75	The Bluest Eye	Toni Morrison
76	Dracula	Bram Stoker	Yes
77	The Rainbow	D.H Lawrence
78	A House For Mr Biswas	V.S Naipaul
79	Go Tell It On the Mountain	James Baldwin
80	Rebecca	Daphne du Maurier	Yes
81	Buddenbrooks	Thomas Mann
82	The End of the Affair	Graham Greene
83	A Farewell to Arms	Ernest Hemingway	Yes
84	The Talented Mr Ripley	Patricia Highsmith	Yes
85	The Vegetarian	Han Kang
86	The Turn of the Screw	Henry James
87	The Line of Beauty	Alan Hollinghurst
88	Ragtime	E.L Doctorow
89	The Left Hand of Darkness	Ursula K Le Guin	Yes
90	Jacob’s Room	Virginia Wool
91	Life and Fate	Vasily Grossman
92	Sentimental Education	Gustave Flaubert
93	Invisible Cities	Italo Calvino	Yes
94	The Known World	Edward P Jones
95	The Return of the Native	Thomas Hardy	Yes
96	Pedro Paramo	Juan Rulfo
97	Catch 22	Joseph Heller
98	The Road	Cormac McCarthy
99	The Go Between	L.P Hartley
100	My Antonia	Willa Cather