Telegraph's Perfect Library: 110 books
From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world… we present the ultimate reading list. Published in 2008.
- 1
- 2
The Odyssey
Homer · -800 · 21 lists
- 3
The Chronicles of Barsetshire
Anthony Trollope · 1879 · 1 list
- 4
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
- 5
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726 · 17 lists
- 6
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
- 7
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
- 8
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
- 9
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847 · 15 lists
- 10
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
- 11
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
- 12
The Sonnets
William Shakespeare · 1850 · 2 lists
- 13
The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer · 1478 · 7 lists
- 14
The Prelude
William Wordsworth · 1850 · 3 lists
- 15
Odes
Fernando Pessoa · 1959 · 1 list
- 16
Paradise Lost
John Milton · 1667 · 8 lists
- 17
Songs of Innocence and Experience
William Blake · 1794 · 1 list
- 18
Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats · 1994 · 7 lists
- 19
Collected Poems of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes · 2005 · 2 lists
- 20
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
- 21
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
- 22
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 23
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway · 1940 · 13 lists
- 24
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
Muriel Spark · 1960 · 1 list
- 25
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960 · 12 lists
- 26
Rabbit is Rich
John Updike · 1981 · 8 lists
- 27
Rabbit At Rest
John Updike · 1990 · 6 lists
- 28
Rabbit Redux
John Updike · 1961 · 6 lists
- 29
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 30
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 31
The Human Stain
Philip Roth · 2000 · 6 lists
- 32
Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier · 1938 · 15 lists
- 33
Le Morte dArthur
Thomas Malory · 1557 · 3 lists
- 34
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · 1995 · 7 lists
- 35
I, Claudius
Robert Graves · 1934 · 8 lists
- 36
Master and Commander
Patrick O'Brian · 1969 · 3 lists
- 37
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · 22 lists
- 38
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak · 1958 · 6 lists
- 39
Tess Of The D'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1891 · 10 lists
- 40
Swallows And Amazons
Arthur Ransome · 1930 · 2 lists
- 41
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis · 1950 · 7 lists
- 42
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954 · 23 lists
- 43
His Dark Materials
Philip Pullman · 2000 · 8 lists
- 44
Histoire de Babar
Jean de Brunhoff · 1999 · 2 lists
- 45
The Railway Children
E. Nesbit · 1906 · 1 list
- 46
Winnie-the-Pooh
Christina Milner · 1926 · 7 lists
- 47
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone
J.K. Rowling · 1997 · 9 lists
- 48
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame · 1908 · 12 lists
- 49
Treasure Island
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1880 · 13 lists
- 50
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818 · 20 lists
- 51
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
Jules Verne · 1870 · 5 lists
- 52
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895 · 5 lists
- 53
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932 · 17 lists
- 54
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 36 lists
- 55
The Day of the Triffids
John Wyndham · 1951 · 5 lists
- 56
Foundation
Isaac Asimov · 1951 · 3 lists
- 57
2001
Arthur C. Clarke · 1968 · 5 lists
- 58
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick · 1968 · 4 lists
- 59
Neuromancer
William Gibson · 1984 · 10 lists
- 60
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955 · 13 lists
- 61
The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett · 1929 · 15 lists
- 62
The Complete Sherlock Holmes
Arthur Conan Doyle · 1900 · 10 lists
- 63
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 1939 · 13 lists
- 64
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carré · 1974 · 8 lists
- 65
Red Dragon
Thomas Harris · 1981 · 4 lists
- 66
Murder on the Orient Express
Agatha Christie · 1934 · 5 lists
- 67
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe · 1841 · 2 lists
- 68
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins · 1860 · 11 lists
- 69
Killshot
Elmore Leonard · 1989 · 2 lists
- 70
The Plantagenet Saga
Jean Plaidy · 1976 · 1 list
- 71
Das Kapital
Karl Marx · 1867 · 6 lists
- 72
Rights of Man
Thomas Paine · 1791 · 1 list
- 73
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau · 1762 · 2 lists
- 74
Democracy in America
Alexis de Tocqueville · 1945 · 3 lists
- 75
On War
Carl von Clausewitz · 2020 · 3 lists
- 76
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli · 1515 · 5 lists
- 77
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651 · 5 lists
- 78
The Interpretation of Dreams
Sigmund Freud · 2018 · 10 lists
- 79
On the Origin of Species
Charles Darwin · 1859 · 7 lists
- 80
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Robert M. Pirsig · 1974 · 3 lists
- 81
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach · 1973 · 4 lists
- 82
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Douglas Adams · 1979 · 13 lists
- 83
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell · 2000 · 6 lists
- 84
The Beauty Myth
Naomi Wolf · 1990 · 1 list
- 85
How to Cook
Delia Smith · 1998 · 1 list
- 86
A Year in Provence
Peter Mayle · 1989 · 1 list
- 87
A Child Called 'It'
Dave Pelzer · 1987 · 1 list
- 88
Eats, Shoots and Leaves
Lynne Truss · 2006 · 3 lists
- 89
Schott's Original Miscellany
Ben Schott · 2003 · 1 list
- 90
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Edward Gibbon · 1776 · 5 lists
- 91
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples
Winston Churchill · 1998 · 1 list
- 92
A History of the Crusades
Stephen Runciman · 1951 · 1 list
- 93
The Histories of Herodotus
Herodotus · 1899 · 7 lists
- 94
History of the Peloponnesian War
Thucydides · 1526 · 7 lists
- 95
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
Unknown · 2004 · 1 list
- 96
A People's Tragedy
Orlando Figes · 1996 · 2 lists
- 97
Citizens
Simon Schama · 1989 · 2 lists
- 98
The Origins of the Second World War
A.J.P. Taylor · 1963 · 1 list
- 99
Confessions
Augustine of Hippo · 1482 · 6 lists
- 100
Lives of the Caesars
Suetonius · 1470 · 2 lists
- 101
Lives of the Artists
Giorgio Vasari · 1965 · 1 list
- 102
If This Is a Man
Primo Levi · 1991 · 4 lists
- 103
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
Siegfried Sassoon · 1928 · 3 lists
- 104
Eminent Victorians
Lytton Strachey · 1918 · 2 lists
- 105
The Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell · 1857 · 1 list
- 106
Good-Bye to All That
Robert Graves · 1929 · 2 lists
- 107
The Life of Samuel Johnson
James Boswell · 1791 · 4 lists
- 108
Diaries
Alan Clark · 1994 · 1 list
- 109
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T. E. Lawrence · 1996 · 3 lists
- 110
The Divine Comedy
Dante Alighieri · 1321 · 25 lists
- 111
The Waste Land
T.S. Eliot · 1991 · 7 lists
- 112
Encyclopédie
Denis Diderot · 2001 · 3 lists