Time's Magazine Top 100 English novels, 1923-2005
Published in January 2005 this list was curated by Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo. It encompasses English language novels published between 1923, when Time magazine was founded, to 2005.
- 1
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow · 1953 · 11 lists
- 2
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren · 1946 · 10 lists
- 3
American Pastoral
Philip Roth · 1997 · 10 lists
- 4
Animal Farm
George Orwell · 1945 · 15 lists
- 5
Appointment in Samarra
John O'Hara · 1934 · 0 lists
- 6
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume · 1970 · 0 lists
- 7
The Assistant
Bernard Malamud · 1744 · 0 lists
- 8
Atonement
Ian McEwan · 2001 · 18 lists
- 9
Beloved
Toni Morrison · 1987 · 31 lists
- 10
The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood · 1935 · 0 lists
- 11
The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler · 1939 · 13 lists
- 12
The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood · 2000 · 4 lists
- 13
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy · 1985 · 14 lists
- 14
Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh · 1945 · 10 lists
- 15
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder · 1927 · 5 lists
- 16
Call it Sleep
Henry Roth · 1934 · 6 lists
- 17
Catch-22
Joseph Heller · 1961 · 29 lists
- 18
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger · 1951 · 32 lists
- 19
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess · 1962 · 17 lists
- 20
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron · 1920 · 4 lists
- 21
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen · 2001 · 16 lists
- 22
The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon · 1965 · 4 lists
- 23
A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell · 1951 · 5 lists
- 24
The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West · 1939 · 0 lists
- 25
Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather · 1927 · 0 lists
- 26
A Death in the Family
James Agee · 1957 · 5 lists
- 27
The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen · 1938 · 0 lists
- 28
Deliverance
James Dickey · 1970 · 0 lists
- 29
Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone · 1973 · 0 lists
- 30
Falconer
John Cheever · 1929 · 0 lists
- 31
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles · 1969 · 5 lists
- 32
The Golden Notebook
Doris May Lessing · 1962 · 0 lists
- 33
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin · 1952 · 9 lists
- 34
Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell · 1936 · 22 lists
- 35
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 1939 · 32 lists
- 36
Gravity's Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon · 1973 · 12 lists
- 37
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925 · 0 lists
- 38
A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh · 1934 · 5 lists
- 39
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 1940 · 11 lists
- 40
The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene · 1948 · 6 lists
- 41
Herzog
Saul Bellow · 1961 · 10 lists
- 42
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson · 1980 · 0 lists
- 43
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul · 1961 · 0 lists
- 44
I, Claudius
Robert Graves · 1934 · 8 lists
- 45
Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace · 1996 · 11 lists
- 46
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison · 1952 · 29 lists
- 47
Light in August
William Faulkner · 1931 · 9 lists
- 48
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis · 1950 · 7 lists
- 49
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov · 1955 · 38 lists
- 50
Lord of the Flies
William Golding · 1954 · 14 lists
- 51
The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien · 1954 · 23 lists
- 52
Loving
Henry Green · 1945 · 4 lists
- 53
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis · 1953 · 6 lists
- 54
The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead · 1940 · 3 lists
- 55
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie · 1981 · 25 lists
- 56
Money
Martin Amis · 1880 · 0 lists
- 57
The Moviegoer
Walker Percy · 1961 · 8 lists
- 58
Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf · 1925 · 20 lists
- 59
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs · 1959 · 0 lists
- 60
Native Son
Richard Wright · 1940 · 18 lists
- 61
Neuromancer
William Gibson · 1984 · 10 lists
- 62
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005 · 11 lists
- 63
Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell · 1948 · 0 lists
- 64
On the Road
Jack Kerouac · 1957 · 24 lists
- 65
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey · 1962 · 13 lists
- 66
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosiński · 1965 · 0 lists
- 67
Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov · 1962 · 13 lists
- 68
A Passage to India
E. M. Forster · 1924 · 18 lists
- 69
Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion · 1970 · 5 lists
- 70
Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth · 1967 · 7 lists
- 71
Possession
A. S. Byatt · 1990 · 6 lists
- 72
The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene · 1940 · 6 lists
- 73
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark · 1961 · 13 lists
- 74
Rabbit, Run
John Updike · 1960 · 0 lists
- 75
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow · 1974 · 10 lists
- 76
The Recognitions
William Gaddis · 1955 · 6 lists
- 77
Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett · 1929 · 0 lists
- 78
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates · 1961 · 0 lists
- 79
The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles · 1948 · 4 lists
- 80
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · 19 lists
- 81
Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson · 1992 · 0 lists
- 82
The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth · 1960 · 0 lists
- 83
The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner · 1929 · 26 lists
- 84
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford · 1985 · 0 lists
- 85
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John Le Carré · 1963 · 13 lists
- 86
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway · 1926 · 22 lists
- 87
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston · 1937 · 22 lists
- 88
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958 · 19 lists
- 89
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee · 1960 · 33 lists
- 90
To The Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf · 1927 · 25 lists
- 91
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller · 1934 · 12 lists
- 92
Ubik
Philip K. Dick · 1969 · 0 lists
- 93
Under the Net
Iris Murdoch · 1954 · 3 lists
- 94
Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry · 1947 · 15 lists
- 95
Watchmen
Alan Moore · 1987 · 3 lists
- 96
White Noise
Don DeLillo · 1984 · 13 lists
- 97
White Teeth
Zadie Smith · 2000 · 17 lists
- 98
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 1966 · 11 lists
- 99
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 1900 · 0 lists
- 100
At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O'Brien · 1939 · 7 lists