The 100 Best Books in the World by AbeBooks.de (in German)
German bookseller website AbeBooks.de makes their selection for the "100 greatest books ever written".
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Metamorphoses by Ovid
The Metamorphoses by the Roman poet Ovid is a narrative poem in fifteen books that describes the creation and history of the world. Completed in 8 AD, it has remained one of the most popular works ...
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Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
This lyrical tragedy of two star-crossed lovers and their feuding families is one of the world's most famous love stories.
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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...
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Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A shipwreck’s sole escapee, Robinson Crusoe endures 28 years of solitude on a Caribbean island and manages not only to survive but also to prevail. A warm humanity, evocative details of his struggl...
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The Adventures of Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
At the heart of Charles Dickens's second novel, first published in 1838, is a story as much about crime and poverty as it is about justice and charity. Orphaned at birth, Oliver Twist grows up unde...
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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...
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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...
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The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Celebrated novel traces the moral degeneration of a handsome young Londoner from an innocent fop into a cruel and reckless pursuer of pleasure and, ultimately, a murderer. As Dorian Gray sinks into...
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain is an 1876 novel about a young boy growing up along the Mississippi River. The story is set in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, inspired by Hannibal,...
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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...
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Germany, a Winter Tale by Heinrich Heine
This historic bilingual edition presents Heine's German text in a version dating from 1887 and a translation by Edgar Alfred Bowring from the same year. The original work, published in 1844, was ba...
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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,...
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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...
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Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (German: Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen) is a philosophical novel by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, composed in four ...
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The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by English author Rudyard Kipling. The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some ...
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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 ...
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The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
The Man without Qualities (1930-42) is a novel in three books by the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil. The main issue of this "story of ideas", which takes place in the time of the Au...
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Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
The story concerns a small-time criminal, Franz Biberkopf, fresh from prison, who is drawn into the underworld. When his criminal mentor murders the prostitute whom Biberkopf has been relying on as...
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Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Published in 1937, it tells the tragic story of George Milton and Lennie Small, two displaced migrant ranch workers during the Great Depression in California. Based on Steinbeck's own experiences a...
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Set in the London of AD 2540 (632 A.F. in the book), the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embod...
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Animal Farm by George Orwell
Animal Farm is a dystopian novella by George Orwell. Published in England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a democrat...
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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...
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The Trial by Franz Kafka
Written in 1914, The Trial is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century: the terrifying tale of Josef K., a respectable bank officer who is suddenly and inexplicably arrested and mu...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
It tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a communist guerilla unit during the Spanish Civil War. As an expert in the use of explosives, he is ...
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The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath, who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and...
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Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lord of the Flies discusses how culture created by man fails, using as an example a group of British schoolboys stuck on a deserted island who try to govern themselves, but with disastrous results....
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I'm Not Stiller by Max Frisch
Max Rudolf Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991) was a Swiss architect, playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German literature after World War II. In his creative works Fri...
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In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no appar...
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Nausea by Jean Paul Sartre
Sartre's greatest novel — and existentialism's key text — now introduced by James Wood. Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressio...
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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 ...
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), by Milan Kundera, is a philosophic novel about a man and his two women and their lives in the Prague Spring of the Czechoslovak Communist period in 1968. ...
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A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
In the "brilliant novel" ("The New York Times) V.S. Naipaul takes us deeply into the life of one man--an Indian who, uprooted by the bloody tides of Third World history, has come to live in an isol...
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Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The character of the chief protagonist of The Satanic Verses is based on Indian film star Amitabh Bachchan and a bit of Rama Rao. The title refers to what are known as the satanic verses, a group o...
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The Lover by Marguerite Duras
An international best-seller with more than one million copies in print and a winner of France's Prix Goncourt, The Lover has been acclaimed by critics all over the world since its first publicatio...
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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...
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The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Sri Lankan-Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje. The story deals with the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned English man, his Canadian nurse, a...
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The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster
The New York Trilogy is a series of novels by Paul Auster. Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a si...
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The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day (1989) is the third published novel by Japanese-British author Kazuo Ishiguro. The Remains of The Day is one of the most highly-regarded post-war British novels. It won the B...
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Waiting for the Barbarians by J M Coetzee
For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts a...
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American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the y...
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The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
In Marion Zimmer Bradley's masterpiece, we see the tumult and adventures of Camelot's court through the eyes of the women who bolstered the king's rise and schemed for his fall. From their childhoo...
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Baudolino by Umberto Eco
It is April 1204, and Constantinople, the splendid capital of the Byzantine Empire, is being sacked and burned by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino sa...
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A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking
A landmark volume in science writing by one of the great minds of our time, Stephen Hawking’s book explores such profound questions as: How did the universe begin—and what made its start possible? ...
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The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
Il Principe (The Prince) is a political treatise by the Florentine public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities), it was origi...
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The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (generally referred to by the short title The Wealth of Nations) is the magnum opus written by Scottish economist and moral philosophe...
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Das Kapital by Karl Marx
Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (German pronunciation: [das kapiˈtaːl]) (Capital, in the English translation) is an extensive treatise on political economy written in German by Karl Ma...
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The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money was written by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. The book, generally considered to be his magnum opus, is largely credited with creatin...
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Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy by Jostein Gaarder
One day Sophie comes home from school to find two questions in her mail: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Before she knows it she is enrolled in a correspondence course with a m...
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Household Tales by Brothers Grimm
Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen) is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection ...
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The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was written by English historian Edward Gibbon and published in six volumes. Volume I was published in 1776, and went through six printings. ...
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The World as Will and Idea by Arthur Schopenhauer
The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung) is the central work of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It was published in December 1818.
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On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, published on Thursday 24 November 1859, is a seminal work of scientific literature considered to be the foundation of evolutionary biology. Its full title...
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The Story of Art by E. H. Gombrich
An illustrated introduction to art appreciation with a survey of the major art periods and styles and descriptions of the work and world of the masters
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Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (German: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795–96. - Wikipedia
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Nathan the Wise by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
An 18th-century German play about religious tolerance in a terrific new translation.
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Don Carlos: Infante of Spain, a Drama in Five Acts by Friedrich Schiller
Don Carlos (German: Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien) is a (historical) tragedy in five acts by Friedrich Schiller; it was written between 1783 and 1787 and first produced in Hamburg in 1787. The tit...
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Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist
"You can send me to the scaffold, but I can make you suffer, and I mean to." Based on actual historic events, this thrilling saga of violence and retribution bridged the gap between medieval and mo...
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Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans by Honore De Balzac
Honoré de Balzac's Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, translated either as The Splendors and Miseries of Courtesans or as A Harlot High and Low, was published in four parts from 1838-1847. It c...
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Effi Briest by Theodor Fontane
Unworldly young Effi Briest is married off to Baron von Innstetten, an austere and ambitious civil servant twice her age, who has little time for his new wife. Isolated and bored, Effi finds comfor...
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The Last Days of Mankind by Karl Kraus
The Last Days of Mankind (German: Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) is a satirical play by Karl Kraus. It is considered one of the most important Kraus works. One third of the play is drawn from doc...
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Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann
Professor Unrat (1905, trans. by Ernest Boyd as Small Town Tyrant), which translates as "Professor Garbage," is one of the most important works of Heinrich Mann and has achieved notoriety through f...
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Farewell, My Lovely: A Novel by Raymond Chandler
Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder...
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The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig
On a cruise ship bound for Buenos Aires, an electifying encounter takes place between the reigning world chess champion and an unknown passenger. The stranger’s diffident manner masks his extraordi...
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The German Lesson by Siegfried Lenz
While in an institution for delinquent boys, Siggi Jepsen writes about his life in wartime Germany and his relationship with a painter of international reputation who was betrayed by his father.
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The Clown by Heinrich Böll
Through the eyes of a despairing artist, Hans Schneir, who recreates in his pantomimes incidents in people's lives with honesty and compassion, Boll draws a revealing portrait of German society und...
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The Good Person of Szechwan by Bertolt Brecht
Brecht's parable of good and evil was first performed in 1943 and remains one of his most popular and frequently produced plays worldwide. This unique bilingual edition allows students to compare t...
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The Physicists by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
The Physicists (German: Die Physiker) (written 1961, performed 1962, and published 1962, Verlags AG "Die Arche", Zürich, Switzerland) is a satiric drama often recognized as the most impressive yet ...
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Eye Of The Needle by Ken Follett
One enemy spy knows the secret to the Allies' greatest deception, a brilliant aristocrat and ruthless assassin -- code name: "The Needle" -- who holds the key to ultimate Nazi victory. Only one per...
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The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth
#1 New York Times bestselling author Frederick Forsyth’s unforgettable novel of a conspiracy, a killer, and the one man who can stop him… He is known only as “The Jackal”—a cold, calculating assass...
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Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. by Ulrich Plenzdorf
Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The new Sorrows of Young W.) is an analytic collage-style novel (montage novel) and play by Ulrich Plenzdorf. - Wikipedia
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A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz
Winner of the National Jewish Book Award International Bestseller "[An] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy’s creation of a new self." — Th...
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The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
The songlines are the invisible pathways that criss-cross Australia, ancient tracks connecting communities and following ancient boundaries. Along these lines Aboriginals passed the songs which rev...
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The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
In a philosophical novel, two friends--a cynical, cerebral, blueblood obsessed by the future, and a hedonistic astronomer haunted by the past--are caught up in an angelic emissary's plan to clone o...
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Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood
Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces ...
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The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue
A tragedy in three letters: THE masterpiece of one of Japan's greatest writers The Hunting Gun follows the consequences of a tragic love affair. Told from the viewpoints of three different women, t...
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Shadows on the Hudson: A Novel by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Boris Makaver, a wealthy Jewish businessman living in New York City after the Holocaust, endures the tribulations of his daughter, Anna, as she makes many unfortunate decisions in her love life. 25...
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Betty Blue: The Story of a Passion by Philippe Djian
BETTY BLUE remains a cult book and film nearly twenty years since its first outing. The extraordinary story of an erotic, doomed love affair has transfixed hundreds of thousands of readers around t...
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South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel by Haruki Murakami
Following the massive complexity of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--Haruki Murakami's best-selling, award-winning novel--comes this deceptively simple love story, a contemporary rendering of the romanc...
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The Feast of the Goat: A Novel by Mario Vargas Llosa
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic - and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capita...
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Desert Flower by Waris Dirie, Cathleen Miller
Waris Dirie leads a double life -- by day, she is an international supermodel and human rights ambassador for the United Nations; by night, she dreams of the simplicity of life in her native Somali...
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The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
"Gabriel García Márquez meets Umberto Eco meets Jorge Luis Borges for a sprawling magic show." --The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Bestseller Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals in t...
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The Meaning of Hitler by Sebastian Haffner
The Meaning of Hitler is the title of the English translation of the originally German 1978 book Anmerkungen zu Hitler by the journalist and writer Raimund Pretzel, who published all his books unde...
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The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington
The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Since its initial publication, The Clash of C...
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An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It by Al Gore
The former vice-president details the factors contributing to the growing climate crisis, describes changes to the environment caused by global warming, and discusses the shift in environmental pol...
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The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle by Joseph A. Schumpeter
Schumpeter proclaims in this classical analysis of capitalist society first published in 1911 that economics is a natural self-regulating mechanism when undisturbed by "social and other meddlers." ...
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Auto Da Fé by Elias Canetti
Auto Da Fé is the story of Peter Kien, a distinguished, reclusive sinologist living in Germany between the wars. With masterly precision, Canetti reveals Kien's character, displaying the flawed per...
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Success: Three Years in the Life of a Province by Lion Feuchtwanger
Success is the title of a time novel by Lion Feuchtwanger . The subtitle is Three Years History of a Province . He was born in the years 1927-1930 and appeared in 1930. Together with the novels The...
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The Other Education: What you should know about the natural sciences by Ernst Peter Fischer
It was published as a reaction to Dieter Schwanitz' bestseller "Education. Everything there is to know", in which the natural sciences were deliberately excluded.
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The Animals' Conference by Erich Kästner
FOR a long time the animals had been watching the strange doings of people, and the day finally came when it was just too much for them!" Something had to be done for the world's children caught in...
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The Statement by Brian Moore
The hunt is on for an elusive Nazi war criminal in this “absorbing intellectual thriller that keeps you guessing . . . until the final page” (The New York Times). For four decades Pierre Brossard h...
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German History 1800–1918 by Thomas Nipperdey
Thomas Nipperdey offers readers insights into the history and the culture of German nationalism, bringing to light much-needed information on the immediate prenational period of transition. A subje...
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Castle Gripsholm by Kurt Tucholsky
While vacationing in Sweden, Kurt and his lover, Lydia, encounter a young girl fleeing the sadistic headmistress of the local children's home and decide to help end the injustices at her orphanage.
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Alberta empfängt einen Liebhaber by Birgit Vanderbeke
no translation. Original is in German
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Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en
Journey to the West is a Chinese novel published in the 16th century during the Ming Dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng'en. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. In En...
