The Observer's Top 100
List compiled by Robert McCrum for The Observer. Newspaper acquired by The Guardian.
- 1
Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra · 1615 · 27 lists
- 2
The Pilgrim's Progress
John Bunyan · 1678 · 0 lists
- 3
Robinson Crusoe
Daniel Defoe · 1719 · 11 lists
- 4
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift · 1726 · 17 lists
- 5
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding · 1749 · 11 lists
- 6
Clarissa
Samuel Richardson · 1748 · 6 lists
- 7
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Laurence Sterne · 1759 · 0 lists
- 8
Dangerous Liaisons
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · 1995 · 7 lists
- 9
Emma
Jane Austen · 1815 · 12 lists
- 10
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley · 1818 · 20 lists
- 11
Nightmare Abbey
Thomas Love Peacock · 1818 · 0 lists
- 12
Black Sheep
Georgette Heyer · 1966 · 0 lists
- 13
The Charterhouse of Parma
Stendhal · 1962 · 7 lists
- 14
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas · 1844 · 14 lists
- 15
Sybil
Flora Rheta Schreiber · 1973 · 0 lists
- 16
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens · 1850 · 19 lists
- 17
Wuthering Heights
Emily Brontë · 1847 · 29 lists
- 18
Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë · 1847 · 26 lists
- 19
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray · 1847 · 15 lists
- 20
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 1850 · 13 lists
- 21
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville · 1851 · 0 lists
- 22
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 1856 · 26 lists
- 23
The Woman in White
Wilkie Collins · 1860 · 11 lists
- 24
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll · 1865 · 5 lists
- 25
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott · 1848 · 13 lists
- 26
The Way We Live Now
Anthony Trollope · 1875 · 0 lists
- 27
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1876 · 24 lists
- 28
Daniel Deronda
George Eliot · 1800 · 5 lists
- 29
The Brothers Karamazov
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1880 · 22 lists
- 30
The Portrait of a Lady
Henry James · 1881 · 13 lists
- 31
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain · 1885 · 25 lists
- 32
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson · 1886 · 8 lists
- 33
Three Men in a Boat
Jerome K. Jerome · 1889 · 0 lists
- 34
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde · 1891 · 11 lists
- 35
The Diary of a Nobody
George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith · 1919 · 0 lists
- 36
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 1895 · 8 lists
- 37
Riddle of the Sands
Erskine Childers · 1903 · 0 lists
- 38
The Call of the Wild
Jack London · 1903 · 13 lists
- 39
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 1904 · 9 lists
- 40
The Wind in the Willows
Kenneth Grahame · 1908 · 12 lists
- 41
In Search of Lost Time
Marcel Proust · 1913 · 29 lists
- 42
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence · 1915 · 5 lists
- 43
The Good Soldier
Ford Madox Ford · 1915 · 12 lists
- 44
The Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan · 1915 · 8 lists
- 45
Ulysses
James Joyce · 1920 · 39 lists
- 46
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
- 47
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster · 1924 · 18 lists
- 48
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 0 lists
- 49
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925 · 21 lists
- 50
Men Without Women
Ernest Hemingway · 1927 · 0 lists
- 51
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner · 1915 · 0 lists
- 52
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley · 1932 · 17 lists
- 53
Scoop
Evelyn Waugh · 1938 · 0 lists
- 54
U.S.A. Trilogy
John Dos Passos · 1960 · 0 lists
- 55
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 1939 · 13 lists
- 56
The Pursuit of Love
Nancy Mitford · 1945 · 2 lists
- 57
The Plague
Albert Camus · 1947 · 7 lists
- 58
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 0 lists
- 59
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 60
Wise Blood
Flannery O'Connor · 1952 · 5 lists
- 61
Charlotte’s Web
E. B. White · 1952 · 0 lists
- 62
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954 · 23 lists
- 63
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis · 1953 · 6 lists
- 64
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954 · 14 lists
- 65
The Quiet American
Graham Greene · 1940 · 5 lists
- 66
On the Road
Jack Kerouac · 1957 · 24 lists
- 67
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 68
The Tin Drum
Günter Grass · 1959 · 9 lists
- 69
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958 · 19 lists
- 70
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark · 1961 · 13 lists
- 71
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960 · 33 lists
- 72
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 0 lists
- 73
Herzog
Saul Bellow · 1961 · 10 lists
- 74
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967 · 33 lists
- 75
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont
Elizabeth Taylor · 1971 · 0 lists
- 76
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John Le Carré · 1974 · 8 lists
- 77
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison · 1977 · 14 lists
- 78
The Bottle Factory Outing
Beryl Bainbridge · 1975 · 0 lists
- 79
The Executioner's Song
Norman Mailer · 1979 · 2 lists
- 80
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler
Italo Calvino · 1982 · 6 lists
- 81
A Bend in the River
V.S. Naipaul · 1979 · 5 lists
- 82
Waiting for the Barbarians
J.M. Coetzee · 1980 · 4 lists
- 83
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson · 1980 · 0 lists
- 84
Lanark
Alasdair Gray · 1981 · 0 lists
- 85
The BFG
Roald Dahl · 1980 · 0 lists
- 86
The Periodic Table
Primo Levi · 1975 · 0 lists
- 87
Money
Martin Amis · 1880 · 0 lists
- 88
An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro · 1986 · 4 lists
- 89
Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey · 1988 · 2 lists
- 90
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Milan Kundera · 2019 · 3 lists
- 91
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
Salman Rushdie · 1990 · 0 lists
- 92
L.A. Confidential
James Ellroy · 1990 · 0 lists
- 93
Wise Children
Angela Carter · 1991 · 2 lists
- 94
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2001 · 18 lists
- 95
The Golden Compass
Philip Pullman · 2007 · 0 lists
- 96
American Pastoral
Philip Roth · 1997 · 10 lists
- 97
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald · 2001 · 11 lists
- 98
Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · 1932 · 12 lists
- 99
Malone Dies
Samuel Beckett · 1997 · 4 lists
- 100
The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster · 1987 · 3 lists
