The Greatest Books of All Time


How is this list generated?


This list is generated from 130 "best of" book lists from a variety of great sources. An algorithm is used to create a master list based on how many lists a particular book appears on. Some lists count more than others. I generally trust "best of all time" lists voted by authors and experts over user-generated lists. On the lists that are actually ranked, the book that is 1st counts a lot more than the book that's 100th. If you're interested in the details about how the rankings are generated and which lists are the most important(in my eyes) please check out the list details page.

If you have any comments, suggestions, or corrections please feel free to e-mail me.


  1. 701 . Deliverance by James Dickey

    Narrated in the first person by one of the main characters, graphic artist Ed Gentry, the novel begins with four middle-aged men in a large Georgia city planning a weekend canoe trip down the ficti...

  2. 702 . True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey

    True History of the Kelly Gang is a historical novel by Australian writer Peter Carey. It was first published in Brisbane by the University of Queensland Press in 2000. It won the 2001 Man Booker P...

  3. 703 . Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

    Annie John is a haunting and provocative story of a young girl growing up on the island of Antigua. A classic coming-of-age story in the tradition of The Catcher in the Rye and A Portrait of the Ar...

    - Google
  4. 704 . Thousand Cranes by Yasunari Kawabata

    Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s Thousand Cranes is a luminous story of desire, regret, and the almost sensual nostalgia that binds the living to the dead. While attending a traditional tea c...

    - Google
  5. 705 . Smilla's Sense of Snow: A Novel by Peter Høeg

    Smilla's Sense of Snow presents one of the toughest heroines in modern fiction. Smilla Qaavigaaq Jaspersen is part Eskimo but she lives in Copenhagen and keeps to herself. When her six-year old nei...

    - Google
  6. 706 . Hyperion by Friedrich Holderlin

    Hyperion is a novel of stirring lyricism, philosophical sublimity, and enduring influence. It stands among Hölderlin’s most extraordinary achievements. A Greek hermit recounts the pivotal phases of...

    - Google
  7. 707 . If Not Now, When? by Primo Levi

    Recounts the adventures of a band of Jews--former Soviet soldiers and concentration camp survivors--who battle the retreating German army in the closing days of World War II

    - Google
  8. 708 . Embers by Sandor Marai

    Originally published in 1942 and now rediscovered to international acclaim, this taut and exquisitely structured novel by the Hungarian master Sandor Marai conjures the melancholy glamour of a deca...

    - Google
  9. 709 . Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen

    Simplicius Simplicissimus (German: Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch) is a picaresque novel of the lower Baroque style, written in 1668 by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen and prob...

    - Google
  10. 710 . The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr by E. T. A. Hoffmann

    Tomcat Murr is a loveable, self-taught animal who has written his own autobiography. But a printer's error causes his story to be accidentally mixed and spliced with a book about the composer Johan...

    - Google
  11. 711 . The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

    Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape ...

    - Google
  12. 712 . Elective Affinities by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

    Elective Affinities (German: Die Wahlverwandtschaften), also translated under the title Kindred by Choice, is the third novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1809. The title is taken fr...

  13. 713 . Green Henry by Gottfried Keller

    'Green Henry' is a representation of Gottfried Keller's ideals and philosophy that documents the emergence of an artist and the development of a man. Partly autobiographical, the narrative recounts...

    - Google
  14. 714 . The Country Girls by Edna O'Brien

    The Country Girls is a trilogy by Irish author Edna O'Brien. It consists of three novels: The Country Girls (1960), The Lonely Girl (1962), and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). The trilogy was ...

  15. 715 . Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

    Fugitive Pieces is a novel by Canadian poet Anne Michaels. The story is divided into two sections. The first centers around Jakob Beer, a Polish Holocaust survivor while the second involves a man n...

  16. 716 . Fateless by Imre Kertész

    Relates the daily life of prisoners at a Nazi concentration camp through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy who is deported to the camp with his father.

    - Google
  17. 717 . Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau

    A tragedy about the power of the imagination and the strange, claustrophobic world of childhood. At home, Paul shares a private world with his sister Elisabeth, a world from which parents are tacit...

    - Google
  18. 718 . Jealousy: A Novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet

    La Jalousie is a 1957 novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet. The title of its English editions is Jealousy, but this fails to capture the ambiguity of the French title: "la jalousie" can be translated as "j...

    - Google
  19. 719 . Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

    Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is the first novel by British author Alan Sillitoe and won the Author's Club First Novel Award. It was adapted by Sillitoe into a 1960 film starring Albert Finney...

  20. 720 . The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë

    The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the second and final novel by the English author Anne Brontë. It was first published in 1848 under the pseudonym Acton Bell. Probably the most shocking of the Brontës...

  21. 721 . Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun

    The Growth of the Soil (Norwegian Markens Grøde) is the novel by Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun which won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. - Wikipedia

    - Google
  22. 722 . The Stechlin by Theodor Fontane

    First English translation of the final work of Theodor Fontane, one of Germany's most significant novelists.

    - Google
  23. 723 . Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts by Joseph von Eichendorff

    The life of a ne'er-do is a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff . It was 1 822 / 1,823 completed and first published in 1826. The work is the highlight of musical prose and as an example of the late ...

    - Google
  24. 724 . Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

    Earthly Powers is a panoramic saga of the 20th century by Anthony Burgess first published in 1980. On one level it is a parody of a "blockbuster" novel, with the 81-year-old hero, Kenneth Toomey (a...

  25. 725 . Platform by Michel Houellebecq

    Michel is a civil-servant at the Ministry of Culture. When his father is murdered, Michel takes a leave of absence to go on a package tour to Thailand. Infuriated by the shallow hypocrisy and medio...

    - Google
  26. 726 . Varieties of Disturbance: Stories by Lydia Davis

    Presents a collection of short fiction, including "What you Learn about the Baby" in which a mother describes how an infant disrupts her life and "Jane and Cane" details an elderly woman's search f...

    - Google
  27. 727 . The Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

    The Wapshot Chronicle is a 1957 novel by John Cheever about an eccentric family who live in a Massachusetts fishing village. The book won the National Book Award in 1958, and was later followed by ...

  28. 728 . The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

    "I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once." Despite the tumor-shrinking medical miracle that has bought her a few years, Hazel has never been anything but terminal, her fina...

    - Google
  29. 729 . Another Country by James Baldwin

    Another Country is a 1962 novel by James Baldwin. The novel tells of the bohemian lifestyle of musicians, writers and other artists living in Greenwich Village in the late 1950s. It portrayed many ...

  30. 730 . The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut

    The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds...

    - Google
  31. 731 . 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

    1Q84 (いちきゅうはちよん Ichi-Kyū-Hachi-Yon) is a dystopian novel written by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, first published in three volumes in Japan in 2009–10. It covers a fictionalized year of 1984 in ...

  32. 732 . The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

    Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014 Aged thirteen, Theo Decker, son of a devoted mother and a reckless, largely absent father, survives an accident that otherwise tears his life apart. Al...

    - Google
  33. 733 . Time and Again by Jack Finney

    When advertising artist Si Morley is recruited to join a covert government operation exploring the possibility of time travel, he jumps at the chance to leave his twentieth-century existence and st...

    - Google
  34. 734 . I, Robot by Isaac Asimov

    The three laws of Robotics: 1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm 2) A robot must obey orders givein to it by human beings except where s...

    - Google
  35. 735 . Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Xun Lu

    Xun (or Hsun) is the master (inventor?) of the modern Chinese short story. Some of his stories were translated into American English in 1941, but more recent translations have been into a British E...

    - Google
  36. 736 . Robert Browning's Poetry by Robert Browning

    Works by modern and Victorian critics are presented together with poems from each stage of Browning's literary career.

    - Google
  37. 737 . The African Child by Camara Laye

  38. 738 . The Passion by Jeanette Winterson

    Jeanette Winterson’s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirm...

    - Google
  39. 739 . What Is the What by Dave Eggers

    What Is the What is the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee in war-ravaged southern Sudan who flees from his village in the mid-1980s and becomes one of the so-called Lost Boys. Valentino’s tr...

    - Google
  40. 740 . The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

    The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindb...

  41. 741 . Sula by Toni Morrison

    Two girls who grow up to become women. Two friends who become something worse than enemies. In this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison tells the story of Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who meet ...

    - Google
  42. 742 . Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

    Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the S...

  43. 743 . The Left Hand Of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin

    Winter is an Earth-like planet with two major differences: conditions are semi arctic even at the warmest time of the year, and the inhabitants are all of the same sex. Tucked away in a remote corn...

    - Google
  44. 744 . The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen

    A profound, startling, and beautifully crafted debut novel, The Sympathizer is the story of a man of two minds, someone whose political beliefs clash with his individual loyalties.

    - Google
  45. 745 . My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk

    My Name Is Red (Benim Adım Kırmızı) is a Turkish novel by Nobel laureate author Orhan Pamuk. The English translation won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2003,. The French version w...

  46. 746 . God's Bits of Wood by Ousmane Sembène

    In 1947-48 the workers on the Dakar-Niger railway staged a strike. In this vivid, timeless novel, Sembene Ousmane envinces the color, passion, and tragedy of those formative years in the history of...

    - Google
  47. 747 . My Name Is Aram by William Saroyan

    "Marvelously captivating." — The New York Times. First published in 1940, Saroyan's international bestseller recounts the exploits of an Armenian clan in northern California at the turn of the 20th...

    - Google
  48. 748 . Of Love and Shadows by Isabel Allende

    This profoundly moving tale of love, bravery, and tragedy by New York Times bestselling author Isabel Allende brings to life a country ruled with an iron fist—and the men and women who dare to chal...

    - Google
  49. 749 . Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi

    As Firdaus sits in a grimy prison cell awaiting the relief that death will bring, she looks back at her life and what brought her to this point, from childhood cruelty to being forced into a marria...

    - Google
  50. 750 . Fragments by Heraclitus

    The wisdom poetry of the ancient Greek poet Heraclitus is collected into a single bilingual volume that covers everything from the nature of matter to human psychology. Reprint.

    - Google