The Telegraph’s 100 Novels Everyone Should Read

This is one of the 743 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.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
30 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
75 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
28 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
259 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
12 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
552 The Code of the Woosters P. G. Wodehouse 1938 British English
219 Brighton Rock Graham Greene 1938 British English
118 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
433 Scoop Evelyn Waugh 1938 British English
375 War of the Worlds H. G. Wells 1898 British English
52 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
21 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
135 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
274 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
329 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell 1951 British English
331 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
3103 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
218 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
163 The Hound of the Baskervilles Arthur Conan Doyle 1902 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
783 Rabbit at Rest John Updike 1990 American English
666 Rabbit Redux John Updike 1971 American English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
684 Rabbit Is Rich John Updike 1981 American English
244 Nausea Jean Paul Sartre 1938 French French
6066 The Voyeur Alain Robbe-Grillet 1955 French French
167 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 1961 British, Scottish English
101 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Czech Czech
366 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
410 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
261 Austerlitz W. G. Sebald 2001 German German
91 The Tin Drum Günter Grass 1959 German German
347 The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse 1943 German German
354 The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolaño 1998 Chilean Spanish
1673 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
217 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
2046 Palace Walk Naguib Mahfouz 1956 Egyptian Arabic
13486 Palace of Desire Naguib Mahfouz 1957 Egyptian Arabic
13486 Sugar Street Naguib Mahfouz 1957 Egyptian Arabic
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
730 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
840 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
1829 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant Anne Tyler 1982 American English
86 All Quiet on the Western Front Erich Maria Remarque 1928 German German
13506 Waiting for the Mahatma R. K. Narayan 1955 Indian English
1073 Cider with Rosie Laurie Lee 1959 British English
20 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
157 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
1559 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
359 Germinal Émile Zola 1885 French French
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
41 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
228 Father Goriot Honoré de Balzac 1835 French French
42 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
363 Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin 1833 Russian Russian
61 The Golden Notebook Doris May Lessing 1962 British English
900 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
690 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré 1974 British English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
280 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
1085 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