The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time: The List

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

About this list

The Observer, 100 Books

The list of essential fiction from the past 300 years from Robert McCrum of The Observer.

This list was originally published in 2003 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
551 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
332 Clarissa Samuel Richardson 1748 British English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
210 Dangerous Liaison Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1782 French French
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
1574 Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock 1818 British English
13878 Black Sheep Georgette Heyer 1966 British English
138 The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal 1839 French French
87 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
14056 Sybil Flora Rheta Schreiber 1973 American English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
139 The Woman in White Wilkie Collins 1860 British English
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
703 The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope 1875 British English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
468 Daniel Deronda George Eliot 1876 British English
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
218 The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
782 Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome 1889 British English
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
946 The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith, Weedon Grossmith 1892 British English
287 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy 1895 British English
831 Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers 1903 British English
230 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
283 Nostromo Joseph Conrad 1904 British English
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
487 Rainbow D.H. Lawrence 1915 British English
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
344 The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan 1915 British English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
11572 Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway 1927 American English
79 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner 1930 American English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
435 Scoop Evelyn Waugh 1938 British English
185 U.S.A. Trilogy John Dos Passos 1930 American English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
1618 The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford 1945 British English
76 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
362 Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor 1952 American English
102 Charlotte's Web E. B. White 1952 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
392 Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis 1954 British English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
637 The Quiet American Graham Greene 1955 British English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
91 The Tin Drum Günter Grass 1959 German German
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
169 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 1961 British, Scottish English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
298 Herzog Saul Bellow 1964 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
1549 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor 1971 British English
633 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré 1974 British English
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
2854 The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge 1974 British English
2730 The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer 1979 American English
318 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino 1979 Italian Italian
732 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
471 Waiting for the Barbarians J. M. Coetzee 1980 South African English
331 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson 1980 American English
1166 Lanark Alasdair Gray 1981 Scottish English
1397 The BFG Roald Dahl 1982 British English
958 The Periodic Table Primo Levi 1975 Italian Italian
750 Money Martin Amis 1984 British English
3068 An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro 1986 British English
1561 Oscar and Lucinda Peter Carey 1988 Australian English
1093 The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera 1979 Czech Czech
1744 Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie 1990 British English
2515 L.A. Confidential James Ellroy 1990 American English
2696 Wise Children Angela Carter 1991 British English
248 Atonement Ian McEwan 2001 British English
2486 The Golden Compass Philip Pullman 1995 British English
380 American Pastoral Philip Roth 1997 American English
262 Austerlitz W. G. Sebald 2001 German German
48 Journey to the End of The Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932 French French
270 Malone Dies Samuel Beckett 1951 Irish French
910 The New York Trilogy Paul Auster 1985 American English