The 50 best French language books from 1900 to today

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

Le Temps, 69 Books

A jury of 50 people – journalists, booksellers, librarians, professors, heads of literary institutions and festivals from French-speaking Switzerland – established the list of literary masterpieces of the 20th and 21st centuries.

The list takes into account only literature written in French, whether from France, Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Africa or Asia, or elsewhere, since the choice of a writing language is also made according to travels and exiles, as for Samuel Beckett or Agota Kristof, two authors very well placed in the ranking.

This list was originally published in 2019 and was added to this site almost 2 years ago.

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