TIME Magazine All Time 100 Novels

This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

TIME Magazine, 100 Books

Time critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo pick the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.

This list was originally published in 2005 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
280 The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow 1953 American English
149 All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren 1946 American English
380 American Pastoral Philip Roth 1997 American English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
2261 Appointment in Samarra John O'Hara 1934 American English
573 Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret Judy Blume 1970 American English
2071 The Assistant Bernard Malamud 1957 American English
248 Atonement Ian McEwan 2001 British English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
2019 The Berlin Stories Christopher Isherwood 1945 British English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
1261 The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood 2000 Canadian English
198 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy 1985 American English
141 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 1945 British English
631 The Bridge of San Luis Rey Thornton Wilder 1927 American English
519 Call It Sleep Henry Roth 1934 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
153 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
1541 The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron 1967 American English
237 The Corrections Jonathan Franzen 2001 American English
441 The Crying of Lot 49 Thomas Pynchon 1966 American English
325 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell 1951 British English
347 The Day of the Locust Nathanael West 1939 American English
391 Death Comes for the Archbishop Willa Cather 1927 American English
466 A Death in the Family James Agee 1957 American English
569 The Death of the Heart Elizabeth Bowen 1938 British, Irish English
925 Deliverance James Dickey 1970 American English
2953 Dog Soldiers Robert Stone 1974 American English
4524 Falconer John Cheever 1977 American English
567 The French Lieutenant's Woman John Fowles 1969 British English
61 The Golden Notebook Doris May Lessing 1962 British English
353 Go Tell it on the Mountain James Baldwin 1953 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
254 Gravity's Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 1973 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
467 A Handful of Dust Evelyn Waugh 1934 British English
118 The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers 1940 American English
1107 The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene 1948 British English
298 Herzog Saul Bellow 1964 American English
331 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson 1980 American English
223 A House for Mr. Biswas V. S. Naipaul 1961 Trinidadian English
453 I, Claudius Robert Graves 1934 British English
333 Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 1996 American English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
181 Light in August William Faulkner 1932 American English
381 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis 1950 British English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
734 Loving Henry Green 1945 British English
392 Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis 1954 British English
472 The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead 1940 Australian English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
750 Money Martin Amis 1984 British English
182 The Moviegoer Walker Percy 1961 American English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
259 Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs 1959 American English
107 Native Son Richard Wright 1940 American English
893 Neuromancer William Gibson 1984 American, Canadian English
266 Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
154 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
1181 The Painted Bird Jerzy Kosinski 1965 Polish English
72 Pale Fire Vladimir Nabokov 1962 American English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
433 Play It As It Lays Joan Didion 1970 American English
241 Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth 1969 American English
718 Possession A. S. Byatt 1990 British English
187 The Power and the Glory Graham Greene 1940 British English
169 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 1961 British, Scottish English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
406 Ragtime E. L. Doctorow 1975 American English
561 The Recognitions William Gaddis 1955 American English
536 Red Harvest Dashiell Hammett 1929 American English
611 Revolutionary Road Richard Yates 1961 American English
619 The Sheltering Sky Paul Bowles 1949 American English
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
1597 Snow Crash Neal Stephenson 1992 American English
1422 The Sot-Weed Factor John Barth 1960 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
1637 The Sportswriter Richard Ford 1986 American English
233 The Spy Who Came in From the Cold John le Carré 1963 British English
62 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
68 Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston 1937 American English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
1421 Ubik Philip K. Dick 1969 American English
902 Under the Net Iris Murdoch 1954 British English
63 Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1947 British English
808 Watchmen Alan Moore 1986 American, British English
364 White Noise Don DeLillo 1985 American English
221 White Teeth Zadie Smith 2000 British English
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
195 An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 American English
357 At Swim Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1939 Irish English