Our critics choose the best novels ever written, from Tolkien to Proust
Hairy-toed hobbit Frodo leaves home to defend the world from dark forces by destroying a cursed ring, in Tolkien'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.
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.
Extra-terrestrial travel meets very English humour, as Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic!
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.
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.
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.
Hilarious satire on bleak rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed, and elderly Ada Doom is perturbed.
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
Writer Anna scribbles in her notebooks about communism and women’s liberation, in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love, which inspired an opera by Tchaikovsky.
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.
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.
A plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady in 17th century France.
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
A Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world” in an existentialist fable championed by Sartre.
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastery. Eco, previously an obscure semantics professor, was baffled when his book became a bestseller.
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 two Man Booker Prizes (he scooped the award again in 2001 with True History of the Kelly Gang).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
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.
Three Baltimore siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
In a historical page-turner, Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
A former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology” – more specifically, getting your kicks from car-crashes.
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.
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
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.
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).
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules in an ivory tower, in this futuristic coming-of-age parable.
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.
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
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.
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.
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, an adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
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.
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.
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity in this realist masterpiece.
Baldwin's semi-autobiographical novel explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
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?
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on, in Sartre's first novel – an existentialist touchstone.
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs, in four comic novels (and a later novella).
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
"Consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
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".
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
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.
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.
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in a hardboiled crime noir with a plot so convoluted even Chandler claimed not to understand it.
One of the first English novels, an epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
Twelve-book saga about upper-class life whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
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.
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.
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sowing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
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.
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
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.
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.
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.
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).
A totalitarian dystopia in which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
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.
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.
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter hero of this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy, which carries the subtitle "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented".
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
Scrape-prone toff Bertie Wooster and his pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman, Jeeves.
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.
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
A slave trader is shipwrecked, but finds God – and a native to convert – on a desert island.
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?
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).
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.
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student, in this Man Booker-winning political allegory.
Poor and obscure and plain as Jane is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally. (He's already married – see Wide Sargasso Sea, above).
Seven-volume autobiographical meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
“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.
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
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.
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.
“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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