The Guardian's "100 Best Books of All Time"

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Full list of the 100 best works of fiction, alphabetically by author, as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided.

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  1. 1.
    Don Quixote de La Mancha (Modern Library)
    by Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

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  2. 2.
    Things Fall Apart
    by Chinua Achebe

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  4. 4.
    Pride and Prejudice (Modern Library Classics)
    by Jane Austen

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  5. 5.
    Old Goriot (Penguin Classics)
    by Honore de Balzac; Introduction-Marion Ayton Crawford

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  7. 7.
    The Decameron (Signet Classics)
    by Giovanni Boccaccio

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  8. 8.
    Borges: Collected Fictions
    by Jorge Luis Borges

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  9. 9.
    Wuthering Heights (Bantam Classics)
    by Emily Brontë

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  10. 10.
    The Stranger
    by Albert Camus

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  11. 11.
    Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan
    by Paul Celan

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  12. 12.
    Journey to the End of the Night
    by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

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  13. 13.
    Canterbury Tales (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Geoffrey Chaucer

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  14. 14.
    Selected Stories (Signet Classics)
    by Anton Chekhov

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  15. 15.
    Nostromo (Dover Thrift Editions)
    by Joseph Conrad

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  17. 17.
    Great Expectations (Penguin Classics)
    by Charles Dickens

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  18. 18.
    Jacques the Fatalist (Oxford World's Classics)
    by Denis Diderot

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  19. 19.
    Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf
    by Alfred Doblin

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  20. 20.
    Crime and Punishment (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  21. 21.
    The Idiot (Modern Library Classics)
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  22. 22.
    The Devils : The Possessed
    by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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  23. 23.
    The Brothers Karamazov
    by Fyodor Dostoevsky

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  24. 24.
    Middlemarch (Penguin Classics)
    by George Eliot

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  25. 25.
    Invisible Man
    by Ralph Ellison

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  26. 26.
    Medea and Other Plays (Penguin Classics)
    by Euripides

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  27. 27.
    Absalom, Absalom! (Vintage International)
    by WILLIAM FAULKNER

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  28. 28.
    The Sound and the Fury
    by William Faulkner

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  29. 29.
    Madame Bovary (Bantam Classics)
    by GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

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  30. 30.
    Sentimental Education (Classics S.)
    by Gustave Flaubert

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  31. 31.
    ?
    Gypsy Ballads of Garcia Lorca
    by Federico Garcia Lorca

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  32. 32.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude
    by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

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  33. 33.
    Love in the Time of Cholera
    by GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ

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  34. 34.
    The Epic of Gilgamesh
    by Maureen Gallery Kovacs

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  35. 35.
    Goethe's Faust
    by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

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  36. 36.
    Dead Souls: A Novel
    by Nikolai Gogol

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  37. 37.
    The Tin Drum (Vintage International)
    by Gunter Grass

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  38. 38.
    ?
    The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
    by Joao Guimaraes Rosa

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  39. 39.
    Hunger
    by Knut Hamsun

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  40. 40.
    The Old Man and The Sea
    by Ernest Hemingway

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  41. 41.
    The Odyssey (Everyman's Library (Cloth))
    by Homer

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  43. 43.
    ?
    The Book of Job

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  44. 44.
    Ulysses (Vintage International)
    by James Joyce

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  45. 45.
    The Complete Stories
    by Franz Kafka

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  46. 46.
    The Trial
    by Franz Kafka

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  47. 47.
  49. 49.
    Pippi Longstocking (PMC) (Puffin Modern Classics)
    by Astrid Lindgren

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  50. 50.
    The Sound of the Mountain
    by Yasunari Kawabata

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Created by Robot Co-op on Nov 30, 2005.
 

Comments

Pages: 1 2

Dyanna

agreed — 2 weeks ago

This is a fairly poor list on the surface. Once i get through all the books that I haven’t read, I’ll repost with an update.

Jun 22, 09:35AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

Tarquin_Furie

ok... — 4 weeks ago

So of course there are a lot of great titles, of great literature. Classics, but what about the more recent stuff, what about the best fiction that most people have not heard of. Anyone could tell you that these books are ‘imortant’ to read, I’m sure they are, but I’m sure most people know this already. What about the new, less spoken about fiction? Tell me something I don’t know. Best books I haven’t heard of, or have yet to encounter. Give me something that will be a classic in fifty more years…yeah?

Jun 06, 09:05AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

rwhitney22
Golden

missing — 24 weeks ago

and of course no Catch-22. Hmm. There was an impressive mentioning of Dostoyevsky, though.

Jan 20, 02:34PM | 0 comments | Reply to this

Yossariangirl

Untitled — 25 weeks ago

It’s generally thought that an intellectual or culture-vulture should be equipped with a broader mind familiar with WORLD literature, but the Guardian is obviously oblivious of the literature of small nations and languages that still count for something in the world outside the UK or the USA… Or do intellectuals live only in these countries…

Jan 12, 09:47AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

Ilovebuddy

Incredibly Stupid — 27 weeks ago

Where is Les Miserables? Acctually, where is Victor Hugo at all? These people were probably too shallow to read any of his masterpieces.

Dec 30, 10:13AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

Lisili
Jena

Lop-sided crap! — 1 year ago

I think this list is a bit biased. There are so many great books and authors – it seems weird, that in a list limited to 100 places Dostoyevsky is named 4 times and Kafka 3 times.
Moreover, most of the books are either heavy or dull (in some cases both) and I honestly doubt that any person employed at the Guardian ever read Ulysses.

May 11, 12:40PM | 1 comment | Reply to this

Lisa
Melbourne

Untitled — 1 year ago

Oops, I accidentally deleted Pippi Longstocking, which should be on the list after The Golden Notebook. Sorry!

Apr 21, 04:11PM | 1 comment | Reply to this

reesies
London

Untitled — 1 year ago

someone had deleted the first 5 books off of here so I added them back in.

Apr 15, 03:40AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

abnoos
Tehran

Untitled — 1 year ago

Where’s Adieu Gary Cooper? where’s Mortelle? or The blindness? where’s The catcher of the rye? gee! this list is too old!

Feb 09, 01:19AM | 0 comments | Reply to this

dandv
Sunnyvale

Give me a break... — 1 year ago

...this list is crap! Where’s Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”, the second most influential book after the Bible (http://www.usatoday.com/money/companies/management/2002-09-23-ayn-rand_x.htm)?

And where are the Mars trilogy, the Foundation series, and other amazing Science Fiction novels?

Dec 28, 02:10AM | 1 comment | Reply to this


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