The Telegraph’s 100 Novels Everyone Should Read

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

About this list

Telegraph, 104 Books

The best novels of all time from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch

This list was originally published in 2009 and was added to this site almost 12 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
255 Disgrace J. M. Coetzee 1999 South African English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
556 The Code of the Woosters P. G. Wodehouse 1938 British English
219 Brighton Rock Graham Greene 1938 British English
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
435 Scoop Evelyn Waugh 1938 British English
372 War of the Worlds H. G. Wells 1898 British English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
393 The Moonstone Wilkie Collins 1868 British English
813 Cranford Elizabeth Gaskell 1851 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
276 Life, a User's Manual Georges Perec 1978 French French
248 Atonement Ian McEwan 2001 British English
1448 Suite Française Irène Némirovsky 2004 French French
325 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell 1951 British English
332 Clarissa Samuel Richardson 1748 British English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
392 Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis 1954 British English
40 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 1862 French French
3110 The Warden Anthony Trollope 1855 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
217 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
164 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle 1902 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
784 Rabbit at Rest John Updike 1990 American English
668 Rabbit Redux John Updike 1971 American English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
686 Rabbit Is Rich John Updike 1981 American English
245 Nausea Jean Paul Sartre 1938 French French
6075 The Voyeur Alain Robbe-Grillet 1955 French French
169 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 1961 British, Scottish English
99 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Czech Czech
353 Go Tell it on the Mountain James Baldwin 1953 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
411 Underworld Don DeLillo 1997 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
132 The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood 1985 Canadian English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
262 Austerlitz W. G. Sebald 2001 German German
91 The Tin Drum Günter Grass 1959 German German
348 The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse 1943 German German
355 The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolaño 1998 Chilean Spanish
1674 London Fields Martin Amis 1989 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
1299 My Name is Red Orhan Pamuk 1998 Turkish Turkish
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
218 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
2051 Palace Walk Naguib Mahfouz 1956 Egyptian Arabic
13529 Palace of Desire Naguib Mahfouz 1957 Egyptian Arabic
13529 Sugar Street Naguib Mahfouz 1957 Egyptian Arabic
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
732 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
841 Crash J. G. Ballard 1973 British English
318 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino 1979 Italian Italian
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
1830 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Anne Tyler 1982 American English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German
13551 Waiting for the Mahatma R. K. Narayan 1955 Indian English
1077 Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee 1959 British English
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
1561 Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey 1988 Australian English
114 The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 1980 Italian Italian
23 The Stranger Albert Camus 1942 French French
356 Germinal Émile Zola 1885 French French
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
42 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
228 Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac 1835 French French
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
365 Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin 1833 Russian Russian
61 The Golden Notebook Doris May Lessing 1962 British English
902 Under the Net Iris Murdoch 1954 British English
130 The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu 1001 Japanese Classical japanese
480 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons 1932 British English
633 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré 1974 British English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
282 The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1774 German German
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
190 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 1979 British English
1087 Home and the World Rabindranath Tagore 1916 Indian Bengali
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English