Världsbiblioteket (The World Library) by Tidningen Boken
Världsbiblioteket (The World Library) was a Swedish list of the 100 best books in the world, made in 1991 by the Swedish literary magazine Tidningen Boken. The list was compiled through votes from members of the Svenska Akademien, Swedish Crime Writers' Academy, librarian, authors and others. Approximately 30 of the books were Swedish.
-
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Watership Down is a heroic fantasy novel about a small group of rabbits, written by British author Richard Adams. Although the animals in the story live in their natural environment, they are anthr...
-
The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
The House of the Spirits (La casa de los espíritus, 1982) is the debut novel by Isabel Allende. Initially, the novel was rejected by several Spanish-language publishers, but became an instant best ...
-
The Queen's Tiara by Carl Jonas Love Almquist
The Queen's Tiara (Swedish: Drottningens juvelsmycke) is a classic Swedish novel by Carl Jonas Love Almquist. It is the fourth instalment in the series of novels known as Törnrosens bok (The Boo...
-
The Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
Les Fleurs du mal (English: The Flowers of Evil) is a volume of French poetry by Charles Baudelaire. First published in 1857 (see 1857 in poetry), it was important in the symbolist and modernist mo...
-
The Long Ships by Frans G. Bengtsson
The Long Ships or Red Orm (original Swedish: Röde Orm meaning Red Serpent or Red Snake) is an adventure novel by the Swedish writer Frans G. Bengtsson. The narrative is set in the late 10th century...
-
The Bible by Christian Church
The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and completed in 1611 by the Church of England. Printed by the King's Printer, Robert Barker, the fi...
-
Kallocain by Karin Boye
This is a novel of the future, profoundly sinister in its vision of a drab terror. Ironic and detached, the author shows us the totalitarian World-state through the eyes of a product of that state,...
- Google -
Death of Virgil by Hermann Broch
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours...
- Google -
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The narrative is non-linear, involving several flashbacks, and two primary narrators: Mr. Lockwood and Ellen "Nelly" Dean. The novel opens in 1801, with Mr. Lockwood arriving at Thrushcross Grange,...
-
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master and Margarita (Russian: Ма́стер и Маргари́та) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently atheistic Soviet Union. Many critics consi...
-
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
A young, eighteenth-century Italian nobleman defies parental authority by adopting an exclusively arboreal life, watching from his perch in the trees the passing of the Enlightenment and participat...
- Google -
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Since it was first published in English, in 1946, Albert Camus's extraordinary first novel, The Stranger (L'Etranger), has had a profound impact on millions of American readers. Through this story ...
-
The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier
A composer, fleeing an empty existence in New York City, takes a journey with his mistress to one of the few remaining areas of the world not yet touched by civilization the upper reaches of a grea...
- Google -
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
In 1862 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a shy Oxford mathematician with a stammer, created a story about a little girl tumbling down a rabbit hole. Thus began the immortal adventures of Alice, perhaps th...
-
Journey to the End of The Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Journey to the End of Night is the first novel of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This semi-autobiographical work describes antihero Ferdinand Bardamu. His surname, Bardamu, is derived from the French word...
-
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Alonso Quixano, a retired country gentleman in his fifties, lives in an unnamed section of La Mancha with his niece and a housekeeper. He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes th...
-
The Lady with the Dog by Anton Chekhov
"The Lady with the Dog" (Russian: Дама с собачкой, Dama s sobachkoy)[1] is a short story by Anton Chekhov first published in 1899. It tells the story of an adulterous affair between a Russian banke...
-
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The story details an incident when Marlow, an Englishman, took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Although Conrad does not specify the name of th...
-
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
Belonging in the immortal company of the great works of literature, Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the ...
-
The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
Written for publication as a serial, The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely-related adventures. The novel's main character, Mr. Samuel Pickwick, Esquire, is a kind and wealthy old gentleman, ...
-
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The story of the abandoned waif who learns to survive through challenging encounters with distress and misfortune.
-
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It is a murder story, told from a murder;s point of view, that implicates even the most innocent reader in its enormities. It is a cat-and-mouse game between a tormented young killer and a cheerful...
-
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot is a novel written by the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky and first published in 1868. It was first published serially in Russian in Russky Vestnik, St. Petersburg, 1868-1869. The Idiot...
-
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, The Karamazov Brothers, is both a brilliantly told crime story and a passionate philosophical debate. The dissolute landowner Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov is mur...
-
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Clyde Griffiths is a young man with ambitions. He's in love with a rich girl, but it's a poor girl he has gotten pregnant, Roberta Alden, who works with him at his uncle's factory. One day he takes...
- Time -
-
Second-class Citizen by Buchi Emecheta
Adah, a woman from the Ibo tribe, moves to England to live with her Nigerian student husband. She soon discovers that life for a young Nigerian woman living in London in the 1960s is grim. Rejected...
- Google -
Light in August by William Faulkner
Lght in August is an exploration of racial conflict in the society of the Southern United States.
-
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
For daring to peer into the heart of an adulteress and enumerate its contents with profound dispassion, the author of Madame Bovary was tried for "offenses against morality and religion." What shoc...
-
Stockholm series by Per Anders Fogelström
Per Anders Fogelström (1917–1998) was among the leading figures in modern Swedish literature. He spent his whole life in Stockholm, and the most famous of his many works is a series of five novels ...
-
Simon and the Oaks by Marianne Fredriksson
The friendship of two Swedish boys and the way they are influenced by each other's families. One boy descends from wealthy Jewish intellectuals, the other is the son of a craftsman working with his...
- Google -
The Women's Room by Marilyn French
The Women's Room is a novel by American feminist author Marilyn French, published in 1977. French first appeared as a major participant in the feminist movement with the publication of The Women...
-
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One of the 20th century's enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world, and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning car...
-
The Counterfeiters by André Gide
The Counterfeiters is a 1925 novel by French author André Gide, first published in Nouvelle Revue Française. With many characters and crisscrossing plotlines, its main theme is that of the original...
-
Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust is a tragic play, although more appropriately it should be defined a tragicomedy, despite the very title of the work. It was published in two parts: Faust. Der Tr...
-
My Childhood by Maxim Gorky
1926. Maxim Gorky, pseudonym of Alexei Maksimovich Peshkov, Soviet novelist, playwright and essayist, who was a founder of social realism. Although known principally as a writer, he was closely ass...
- Google -
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
A classic in children's literature The Wind in the Willow is alternately slow moving and fast paced. The book focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. T...
-
Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
Pinkie, a boy gangster in pre-war Brighton, is a Catholic dedicated to evil and damnation. In a dark setting of double crossing and razor slashes, his ambition and hatreds are horribly fulfilled, u...
- Google -
The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
The Good Soldier Švejk is the abbreviated title of an unfinished satirical novel by Jaroslav Hašek. It was illustrated by Josef Lada and George Grosz after Hašek's death. The original Czech title o...
-
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Catch-22 is a satirical, historical novel by the American author Joseph Heller, first published in 1961. The novel, set during the later stages of World War II from 1943 onwards, is frequently cite...
-
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
The novel explores the lives and values of the so-called "Lost Generation," chronicling the experiences of Jake Barnes and several acquaintances on their pilgrimage to Pamplona for the annual San F...
-
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea is one of Hemingway's most enduring works. Told in language of great simplicity and power, it is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordea...
-
Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf (orig. German Der Steppenwolf) is the tenth novel by German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first translated into English in 1929. Combining ...
-
The Odyssey by Homer
The Odyssey is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is, in part, a sequel to the Iliad, the other work traditionally ascribed to Homer. The poem is fundamental to the m...
-
The World According to Garp by John Irving
The story deals with the life of T. S. Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband. She encounters a dying ball turret gunner known only as Technica...
-
After the Flood by P. C. Jersild
After the Flood (Swedish: Efter floden) is a 1982 novel by the Swedish novelist P.C. Jersild. It was well received as it played into the contemporary fear of nuclear holocaust. P.C. Jersild was an ...
-
The Days of His Grace by Eyvind Johnson
The Days of His Grace (Swedish: Hans nådes tid) is a 1960 novel by Swedish writer Eyvind Johnson. Set mostly in northern Italy, close to Aquileia, it tells the story of the fate of a Langobard fami...
-
Ulysses by James Joyce
Ulysses chronicles the passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. The title parallels and alludes to Odysseus (Latinised into Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyss...
-
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka by Franz Kafka
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka is a compilation of all Kafka's short stories. With the exception of Kafka's three novels (The Trial, The Castle and Amerika), this collection includes all of Ka...
-
They Burn the Thistles by Yaşar Kemal
Yasar Kemal's reoccurring character, Memed, is on the run, hunted by his enemies, wounded, at wit's end, and having lost all faith in himself--that is until me meets an extraordinarily beautiful st...
- Google -
The Czar's Madman by Jaan Kross
This historical novel is about a Livonian nobleman, Timotheus von Bock, who has married a peasant girl named Eeva to prove everyone that good men are equal before nature, God and ideals. Eeva's bro...
-
The Dwarf by Par Lagerkvist
The Swedish novelist's profound concern about social problems is demonstrated in the actions of a dwarf whose devotion to the Prince brings inevitable disaster
- Google -
Barabbas by Par Lagerkvist
Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carve...
- Google -
The Emperor of Portugallia by Selma Lagerlöf
The Emperor of Portugallia (Swedish: Kejsarn av Portugallien) is a novel by Nobel-laureate Selma Lagerlöf, published in 1914 with drawings by Albert Engström. Lagerlöf called it a "Swedish King Lea...
-
Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Pippi Longstocking is a children's book written in 1945 by Astrid Lindgren. Pippi is a 9-year old that lives in an old villa in a Swedish town. (which remains unnamed for the series) She meet To...
-
Mio, My Son by Astrid Lindgren
Mio, My Son is a children's book by Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. It was first published in 1954 in Sweden, with the Swedish title Mio, min Mio. The writing is stylised and the story strongly rem...
-
The Wind on the Moon by Eric Linklater
The Wind on the Moon: A story for children is a fantasy novel by Eric Linklater, published by Macmillan in 1944 with illustrations by Nicholas Bentley. The American division Macmillan US published ...
-
The Unknown Soldier by Väinö Linna
The Unknown Soldier (Tuntematon sotilas) is author Väinö Linna's first major novel and his other major work besides Under the North Star. Published in 1954, it is a story about the Continuation War...
-
Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, published in 1901 when he was twenty-six years old. It portrays the downfall (already announced in the subtitle, Decline of a family) of a wealthy mer...
-
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain is a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in November 1924. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of 20th century German literature.
-
Flowering Nettle by Harry Martinson
Flowering Nettle (Nässlorna blomma) is a partly autobiographical novel written by the Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson in 1935 and first translated into English by Naomi Walford in 1936.[1] ...
-
-
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell is a young American in search of the absolute. The progress of his spiritual odyssey involves him with some of Maugham's most brilliant characters - his fiancée Isabel whose choice be...
- Google -
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
The Thorn Birds is a 1977 best-selling novel by Colleen McCullough, an Australian author. In 1983 it was adapted as a television mini-series that, during its television run March 27-30, became t...
-
Winnie the Pooh by A. A Milne
Winnie-the-Pooh, commonly shortened to Pooh Bear and once referred to as Edward Bear, is a fictional bear created by A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Wi...
-
The Emigrants by Vilhelm Moberg
The Emigrants is the collective name of a series of four novels by the Swedish author Vilhelm Moberg: The Emigrants (1949) Unto a Good Land (1952) The Settlers (1956) The Last Letter Home (19...
- Wikpedia -
History by Elsa Morante
History: A Novel is a novel by Italian author Elsa Morante, largely seen to be her most famous and controversial work. Published in 1974, it narrates the story of a woman, Ida Ramundo, and her two ...
-
Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Doctor Zhivago is a 20th century novel by Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a medical doctor and poet. It tells the story of a man to...
-
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Swann's Way, the first part of A la recherche de temps perdu, Marcel Proust's seven-part cycle, was published in 1913. In it, Proust introduces the themes that run through the entire work. The narr...
-
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
All Quiet on the Western Front (German: Im Westen nichts Neues) is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. The book describes the German soldiers' extreme physical and men...
-
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye is a 1945 novel by J. D. Salinger. Originally published for adults, the novel has become a common part of high school and college curricula throughout the English-speaking wo...
-
The Alberta Trilogy by Cora Sandel
Imaginative and intelligent, Alberta is a misfit trapped in a stiflingly provincial town in the far north of Norway whose only affinity is for her extrovert brother Jacob.
- Google -
The Werewolf by Aksel Sandemose
The Werewolf is a boldly drawn novel of the tyranny of love over men and women and the unending trials of strength between good and evil in human nature. Its main characters are of heroic stature y...
- Google -
First Folio by William Shakespeare
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio. Printed in folio...
-
Oedipus the King by Sophocles
Oedipus the King is an Athenian tragedy by Sophocles that was first performed c. 429 BC. It was the second of Sophocles's three Theban plays to be produced, but it comes first in the internal chron...
-
-
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on a poor family of sharecroppers, the Joads, driven from their home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in the agriculture industry. In a ...
-
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black), subtitled Chronique du XIXe siécle ("Chronicle of the 19th century"), is an historical psychological novel in two volumes by Stendhal, published in 1830...
-
The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
Balzac considered it the most important French novel of his time. André Gide later deemed it the greatest of all French novels, and Henry James judged it to be a masterpiece. Now, in a major litera...
-
The Red Room by August Strindberg
The Red Room (Swedish: Röda rummet) is a Swedish novel by August Strindberg that was first published in 1879.[1] A satire of Stockholm society, it has frequently been described as the first modern ...
-
Hemsöborna by August Strindberg
The People of Hemsö (Swedish: Hemsöborna) is an 1887 novel by August Strindberg about the life of people of the island Hemsö in the Stockholm archipelago. Hemsö is a fictional island, but it is bas...
-
Doctor Glas by Hjalmar Soderberg
Stark, brooding, and enormously controversial when first published in 1905, this astonishing novel juxtaposes impressions of fin-de-siècle Stockholm against the psychological landscape of a man bes...
-
-
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Epic in scale, War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events leading up to Napoleon's invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of fi...
-
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky. Tragedy unfolds as Anna rejects her passionless marriage and must endu...
-
The Christmas Oratorio by Göran Tunström
The accidental death in the 1930s of Solveig Nordensson profoundly affects three generations of Nordensson men, until her grandson Victor finally finds redemption in a staging of Bach's "Christmas ...
- Google -
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Revered by all of the town's children and dreaded by all of its mothers, Huckleberry Finn is indisputably the most appealing child-hero in American literature. Unlike the tall-tale, idyllic worl...
-
Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset
The turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary master In her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life st...
- Google -
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (French: Vingt mille lieues sous les mers) is a classic science fiction novel by French writer Jules Verne published in 1870. It tells the story of Captain Nem...
-
Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola
Thérèse Raquin [teʁɛz ʁakɛ̃] is a novel (first published in 1867) and a play (first performed in 1873) by the French writer Émile Zola. The novel was originally published in serial format in the jo...
