The Guardian's 100 Best Novels Of All Time In English (2026)
The greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?
- 1
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 1871 · 26 lists
- 2
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 0 lists
- 3
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 4
To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
- 5
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 0 lists
- 6
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
- 7
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 1869 · 29 lists
- 8
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
- 9
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen · 1813 · 28 lists
- 10
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
- 11
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 0 lists
- 12
Bleak House
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 11 lists
- 13
Emma
Jane Austen · 1815 · 12 lists
- 14
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
- 15
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851 · 0 lists
- 16
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 0 lists
- 17
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 18
Persuasion
Jane Austen · 1817 · 7 lists
- 19
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759 · 0 lists
- 20
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
- 21
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
- 22
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958 · 19 lists
- 23
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981 · 25 lists
- 24
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1989 · 0 lists
- 25
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 26
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1615 · 27 lists
- 27
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 28
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
- 29
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov · 1962 · 13 lists
- 30
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818 · 20 lists
- 31
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark · 1961 · 13 lists
- 32
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy · 1997 · 0 lists
- 33
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
- 34
Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel · 2009 · 0 lists
- 35
Great Expectations
Charles Dickens · 1861 · 19 lists
- 36
The Handmaid’s Tale
Margaret Atwood · 1985 · 0 lists
- 37
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 38
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton · 1920 · 17 lists
- 39
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · 22 lists
- 40
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · 1977 · 14 lists
- 41
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899 · 29 lists
- 42
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann · 1924 · 18 lists
- 43
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson · 1980 · 0 lists
- 44
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 1956 · 0 lists
- 45
The Golden Notebook
Doris May Lessing · 1962 · 0 lists
- 46
The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa · 2000 · 0 lists
- 47
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847 · 15 lists
- 48
The Metamorphosis
Franz Kafka · 1915 · 0 lists
- 49
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry · 1995 · 0 lists
- 50
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966 · 11 lists
- 51
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante · 2011 · 0 lists
- 52
The Golden Bowl
Henry James · 1904 · 6 lists
- 53
The Transit of Venus
Shirley Hazzard · 1980 · 0 lists
- 54
Orlando
Virginia Woolf · 1928 · 11 lists
- 55
The Waves
Virginia Woolf · 1931 · 9 lists
- 56
Mansfield Park
Jane Austen · 1814 · 3 lists
- 57
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
- 58
Disgrace
J.M. Coetzee · 1999 · 0 lists
- 59
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005 · 0 lists
- 60
Howards End
E. M. Forster · 1910 · 11 lists
- 61
The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald · 1998 · 0 lists
- 62
Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 2006 · 0 lists
- 63
White Teeth
Zadie Smith · 2000 · 0 lists
- 64
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford · 1915 · 12 lists
- 65
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 1982 · 6 lists
- 66
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov · 1967 · 18 lists
- 67
The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil · 1979 · 8 lists
- 68
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · 0 lists
- 69
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866 · 22 lists
- 70
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 1895 · 8 lists
- 71
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler · 1979 · 0 lists
- 72
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens · 1800 · 6 lists
- 73
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald · 2001 · 0 lists
- 74
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga · 1988 · 0 lists
- 75
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison · 1970 · 5 lists
- 76
Dracula
Bram Stoker · 1897 · 16 lists
- 77
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence · 1915 · 5 lists
- 78
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul · 1961 · 0 lists
- 79
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 1952 · 9 lists
- 80
Rebecca
Daphne Du Maurier · 1938 · 15 lists
- 81
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann · 1909 · 11 lists
- 82
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene · 1951 · 6 lists
- 83
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway · 1929 · 9 lists
- 84
The Talented Mr. Ripley
Patricia Highsmith · 1955 · 13 lists
- 85
The Vegetarian
Kang Han · 2004 · 0 lists
- 86
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James · 1898 · 5 lists
- 87
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst · 2004 · 0 lists
- 88
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow · 1974 · 10 lists
- 89
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin · 1969 · 0 lists
- 90
Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf · 1922 · 0 lists
- 91
Life and Fate
Vasily Grossman · 1980 · 0 lists
- 92
A Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert · 1869 · 0 lists
- 93
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino · 1972 · 7 lists
- 94
The Known World
Edward P. Jones · 2003 · 0 lists
- 95
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy · 1878 · 2 lists
- 96
Pedro Paramo
Juan Rulfo · 1955 · 0 lists
- 97
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 0 lists
- 98
The Road
Cormac McCarthy · 2006 · 0 lists
- 99
The Go-Between
L. P. Hartley · 1953 · 2 lists
- 100
My Ántonia
Willa Cather · 1918 · 0 lists
