Bokkluben World's Library
In 2002 the editors of the Norwegian Book Clubs, with the Norwegian Nobel Institute, polled a panel of 100 authors from 54 countries on what they considered the “best and most central works in world literature.” Among the authors polled were Milan Kundera, Doris Lessing, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, John Irving, Nadine Gordimer, and Carlos Fuentes. The list of 100 works appears alphabetically by author. Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books. The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that "they are all on an equal footing," with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction "best literary work ever written."
- 1
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 2
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 3
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851 · 34 lists
- 4
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 5
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 6
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
- 7
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 8
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
- 9
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
- 10
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
- 11
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1615 · 27 lists
- 12
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
- 13
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
- 14
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
- 15
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885 · 25 lists
- 16
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981 · 25 lists
- 17
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321 · 25 lists
- 18
To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
- 19
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
- 20
The Stranger
Albert Camus · 1942 · 23 lists
- 21
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · 22 lists
- 22
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 23
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
- 24
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
- 25
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
- 26
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958 · 19 lists
- 27
- 28
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann · 1924 · 18 lists
- 29
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726 · 17 lists
- 30
Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner · 1936 · 16 lists
- 31
The Odyssey
Homer · -800 · 16 lists
- 32
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway · 1952 · 15 lists
- 33
The Red and the Black
Stendhal · 1830 · 14 lists
- 34
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman · 1855 · 13 lists
- 35
Dead Souls
Nikolai Gogol · 1842 · 12 lists
- 36
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932 · 12 lists
- 37
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann · 1909 · 11 lists
- 38
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence · 1913 · 11 lists
- 39
The Aeneid
Virgil · 19 · 10 lists
- 40
The Tale of Genji
Murasaki Shikibu · 2000 · 10 lists
- 41
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 1904 · 9 lists
- 42
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass · 1959 · 9 lists
- 43
Hamlet
William Shakespeare · 1623 · 8 lists
- 44
Hunger
Knut Hamsun · 1890 · 8 lists
- 45
The Castle
Franz Kafka · 1907 · 8 lists
- 46
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil · 1979 · 8 lists
- 47
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez · 1985 · 7 lists
- 48
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing · 1962 · 7 lists
- 49
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin · 1929 · 6 lists
- 50
Metamorphoses
Ovid · 1479 · 6 lists
- 51
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo · 1955 · 6 lists
- 52
The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869 · 6 lists
- 53
Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar · 1951 · 5 lists
- 54
Pippi Longstocking
Astrid Lindgren · 2011 · 4 lists
- 55
Blindness
Henry Green · 1926 · 3 lists
- 56
Independent People
Halldór Laxness · 1999 · 3 lists
- 57
Père Goriot
Honoré de Balzac · 1800 · 3 lists
- 58
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih · 1986 · 3 lists
- 59
Jacques the Fatalist
Denis Diderot · 2006 · 2 lists
- 60
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
João Guimarães Rosa · 1956 · 2 lists
- 61
A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen · 1889 · 0 lists
- 62
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert · 1869 · 0 lists
- 63
Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz · 1981 · 0 lists
- 64
Collected Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges · 1998 · 0 lists
- 65
- 66
Cousin Pons / Old Goriot
Honoré de Balzac · 2008 · 0 lists
- 67
Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio · 1516 · 0 lists
- 68
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
Lu Xun · 1990 · 0 lists
- 69
Essays
Michel de Montaigne · 1618 · 0 lists
- 70
Faust, First Part
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 1962 · 0 lists
- 71
Further Confessions of Zeno
Italo Svevo · 1969 · 0 lists
- 72
Gargantua and Pantagruel
François Rabelais · 1930 · 0 lists
- 73
History
Elsa Morante · 1494 · 0 lists
- 74
King Lear
William Shakespeare · 1604 · 0 lists
- 75
Mahabharata
Vyasa · 2010 · 0 lists
- 76
- 77
Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable
Samuel Beckett · 2016 · 0 lists
- 78
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 0 lists
- 79
Njal's Saga
Anonymous · 2002 · 0 lists
- 80
Oedipus Rex
Sophocles · 2006 · 0 lists
- 81
One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous · 2005 · 0 lists
- 82
Othello
William Shakespeare · 1622 · 0 lists
- 83
Poems of Paul Celan
Paul Celan · 1988 · 0 lists
- 84
- 85
Romancero gitano
Federico García Lorca · 1928 · 0 lists
- 86
The Book of Job
Anonymous · 1892 · 0 lists
- 87
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer · 1478 · 0 lists
- 88
The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories
Hans Christian Andersen · 2007 · 0 lists
- 89
The Complete Stories
Franz Kafka · 1971 · 0 lists
- 90
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe · 1849 · 0 lists
- 91
- 92
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Anonymous · -2300 · 0 lists
- 93
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759 · 0 lists
- 94
The Mathnawi: The Spiritual Couplets of Maulana Jalalu-D-Din Mahammad I Rumi
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi · 0 lists
- 95
- 96
The Possessed
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1872 · 0 lists
- 97
The Recognition of Śakuntalā
Kālidāsa · 2011 · 0 lists
- 98
The Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata · 1996 · 0 lists
- 99
The Stories of Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov · 1932 · 0 lists
- 100
Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzákis · 1965 · 0 lists
