Muriel Spark at work in Edinburgh, 1960Credit: Getty
100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein (1954-55)
Hairy-toed hobbit Frodo leaves home to defend the world from dark forces by destroying a cursed ring, in Tolkein's epic trilogy. WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
This child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama was the only novel Lee published in her lifetime – until an early draft of it was released as a "new" book in 2015.
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore (1916)
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears, in this Bengali tale of clashing cultures from the Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist.
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)
Extra-terrestrial travel meets very English humour, as Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic!
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, c.1988Credit: Rex
96 One Thousand and One Nights (anonymous) A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution, in a tangled collection of Middle Eastern folk stories first translated into English in 1706.
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he! Goethe was inspired by his own obsessive romance with a married woman to write this epistolary novel, which made him famous overnight.
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1980)
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth in this Booker Prize winner, which uses magical realism to question the legacy of Indian partition.
93 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré (1974)
The pseudonymous le Carré drew on his own work in the secret service to create fictional spymaster George Smiley. In his finest adventure, a nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)
Hilarious satire on bleak rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed, and elderly Ada Doom is perturbed.
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki (11th century)
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
Writer Anna scribbles in her notebooks about communism and women’s liberation, in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin (1825-32) Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love, which inspired an opera by Tchaikovsky.
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”, in a semi-autobiographical picaresque. Kerouac typed out the first draft in three near-sleepless weeks, on a single 120-foot scroll of paper.
The 120-foot scroll Kerouac used for his first complete draft of On the RoadCredit: AP
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac (1835) A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism, following three characters: retired pasta-maker Goriot, mysterious felon Vautrin and ambitious student Rastingnac, an anti-hero whose name became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830)
A plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady in 17th century France.
83 Germinal by Emile Zola (1885)
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942)
A Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world” in an existentialist fable championed by Sartre.
81 The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (1980)
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastery. Eco, previously an obscure semantics professor, was baffled when his book became a bestseller.
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (1988)
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km, in a shaggy dog story that won Carey the first of his three Man Booker Prizes.
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966) Rhys's post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre gives moving, human voice to the mad woman in attic (Mr Rochester's first wife).
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
The ludic logic of "Carroll" (the pen-name of mathematician Charles Dodgeson) makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as young Alice slips down the rabbit-hole into a bonkers world of talking animals.
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
US Air Force pilot Yossarian drives himself crazy trying get out of active service in the Second World War. But trying to get out of a war is clear-cut proof of sanity, surely? So he's stuck. The title of Heller's satirical epic is still shorthand for inescapable lose-lose loopholes.
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka (1925)
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”? We never find out, but this posthumously published nightmare made "Kafkaesque" the go-to label for any instance of hellish bureaucracy.
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee (1959) The first part of a trilogy inspired by by Lee's Gloucester childhood, here the protagonist's first romantic encounter with the titular Rosie (that “first long secret drink of golden fire”) is under a hay wagon.
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan (1955)
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque (1929)
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage German soldier. It became an Oscar-winning film in 1930, and was later banned – and burned – in Hitler's Germany.
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler (1982)
Three Baltimore siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant author Anne Tyler in London, 2012Credit: Clara Molden
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin (18th century) Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
In a historical page-turner, Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino (1979)
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68 Crash by JG Ballard (1973)
A former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology” – more specifically, getting your kicks from car-crashes.
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979) East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is", in Nobel-winner Naipaul's most lauded work.
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957)
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the 1965 film adaptation of Dr ZhivagoCredit: Rex
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz (1956-57) Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” of a scientist who tries (unsuccessfully) to banish his dark side came to him in a dream.
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (1726)
A scribulous riff on travellers’ tall tales. The Brobdingnag giants and Lilliput midgets Gulliver meets may seem far-fetched, but Swift's satirical targets were closer to home (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk (1998)
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59 London Fields by Martin Amis (1989) A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
Martin Amis at home in London, 1987Credit: Getty
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño (1998) Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse (1943)
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules in an ivory tower, in this futuristic coming-of-age parable.
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass (1951)
Madhouse memories of the Second World War, narrated by a drum-playing adult in a child's body with a super-human shriek. A key text of European magical realism.
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald (2001)
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
A scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him. The narrator may be a loathsome paedophile, but his gift for language is irresistible. First published in Paris, Nabokov's darkly comic novel caused a scandal; the Home Office ordered customs guards to seize any copy entering the UK.
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
After nuclear war has rendered most of the United States sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding in a close-to-the-bone sci-fi tale. As Atwood has pointed out, every act of cruelty inflicted on women in this book has already happened somewhere in the world.
Elisabeth Moss in the 2017 TV adaptation of The Handmaid's TaleCredit: AP
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, an adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here, in this non-linear epic narrated by a businessman in jail for murder.
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery. In Virginia controversy over its graphic content led to the so-called "Beloved bill" – a draft law giving parents the right to ban books from schools – though the bill was vetoed by the state's governor in 2016.
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1962)
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity in this realist masterpiece.
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
Baldwin's semi-autobiographical novel explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera (1983)
Against the backdrop of the 1968 Prague Spring, A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, Kundera muses, surely it can’t matter?
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1961)
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
Keira Knightley in a 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina: Tolstoy's classic features in our top 10
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet (1955)
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre (1938)
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on, in Sartre's first novel – an existentialist touchstone.
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike (1960-2000)
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs, in four comic novels (and a later novella).
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle (1902)
"Consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue, in what one critic called a savage attack on "an irresponsible, grasping and morally corrupt upper class".
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope (1855)
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (1862) An ex-convict (locked up for stealing a loaf of bread) struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly. Better than the musical.
The West End cast of the musical adaptation of Les Miserables
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954) An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl. The roguish anti-hero was modelled on the poet Philip Larkin.
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in a hardboiled crime noir with a plot so convoluted even Chandler claimed not to understand it.
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson (1748)
One of the first English novels, an epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951-1975)
Twelve-book saga about upper-class life whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky (2004)
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
McEwan put the “c” word in the classic English country house novel, following a lovelorn student from a stately home to prison to the Second World War.
Keira Knightley and James McAvoy in the 2007 film adaptation of Atonement
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec (1978)
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block, in a playful postmodern classic; each chapter is set in a different room of the building.
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sowing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences, as a scientist assembles a new body bits of corpses – and brings it to life. Shelley was still a teenager when she wrote it, after Lord Byron challenged her to come up with a ghost story.
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (1868)
Hailed by TS Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”, it retells the hunt for a missing jewel through a series of letters.
24 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
Modernist masterpiece, reworking Homer with humour. Following a bored student and a middle-aged advertising salesman as they wander across Dublin, it contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end. Julian Barnes has called it "the greatest novel" ever written.
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India (inspired by English Forster's own time on the subcontinent, working as a secretary to a Maharajah).
21 1984 by George Orwell (1949)
A totalitarian dystopia in which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
A statue of George Orwell, erected outside the BBC Broadcasting House building in 2017Credit: John Nguyen/JNVisuals
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne (1759) Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah! Centuries later, Tristram's failed attempt to tell his life story (he keeps getting distracted mid-sentence) still has readers cackling with laughter.
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells (1897)
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles. A radio adaptation by Orson Welles was so successful that (so the story goes) American listeners really thought aliens were invading.
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter hero of this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1892)
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy, which carries the subtitle "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented".
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (1938) A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse (1938)
Scrape-prone toff Bertie Wooster and his pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman, Jeeves.
Hugh Laurie (left) as Bertie, with Stephen Fry as Jeeves in a TV adaptation of Wodehouse's novelsCredit: ITV
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847) Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off. Published under a pseudonym, it was Emily Brontë's only novel; she died a year later.
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
A slave trader is shipwrecked, but finds God – and a native to convert – on a desert island.
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
Spiky Elizabeth can't stand aloof Mr Darcy, and he's not too keen on her either. Sure enough, they're soon in love – but how will they deal with her ghastly family?
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
Picaresque tale about elderly gent who decides to become a knight in shining armour (he's read too many romantic novels). It's given us the word "quixotic" (for any over-idealistic boondoggle).
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
While holding a party, our heroine hears about a stranger's suicide – and finds it oddly inspirational – in a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness modernism.
Mrs Dalloway author Virginia Woolf, c.1920Credit: Getty
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999) An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student, in this Man Booker-winning political allegory.
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
Poor and obscure and plain as Jane is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally. (He's already married – see Wide Sargasso Sea, above).
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
Seven-volume autobiographical meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1902)
“The conquest of the earth,” writes Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.” Steamboat captain Marlowe discovers that himself, when he travels up the Congo for a rendezvous with a deranged ivory trader. Francis Ford Coppola shifted the plot to Sixties Vietnam for his film Apocalypse Now.
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1878)
Tolstoy’s idea for this tale of a doomed adulteress's affair with a rich count grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”. William Faulkner thought it was the finest novel ever written – and so did the none-too-modest Tolstoy.
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851) Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale that ate his leg, in a 900-page epic narrated by a sailor who calls himself Ishmael. The insights into human nature more than make up for the lengthy descriptions of harpooning.
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871-72)
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf, praising this richly detailed portrait of overlapping lives in a fictional Midlands town.
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