Robert McCrum's top 10 books of the twentieth century
This is one of the 759 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
The Guardian, 10 Books
Robert McCrum is The Observer's literary editor and the author of, among other books, My Year Off. This is a list of this top 10 books of the twentieth century.
This list was originally published in 2000 and was added to this site almost 12 years ago.
| Rank | Book | Authors | Year | Country | Language | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 1913 | French | French | |
| 1 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 | Irish | English | |
| 82 | The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil | 1930 | Austrian | German | |
| 21 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 | Czech | German | |
| 1026 | Murphy | Samuel Beckett | 1938 | Irish | English | |
| 5 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Colombian | Spanish | |
| 85 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | 1915 | British | English | |
| 91 | The Tin Drum | Günter Grass | 1959 | German | German | |
| 732 | A Bend in the River | V. S. Naipaul | 1979 | Trinidadian | English | |
| 283 | Nostromo | Joseph Conrad | 1904 | British | English |