by Robert McCrum
The Observer, 12 October 2003
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 prewar 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
Enough said!
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 af 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.
