110 Best Books: The Perfect Library

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

About this list

The Telegraph, 112 Books

From classics and sci-fi to poetry, biographies and books that changed the world… we present the ultimate reading list.

This list was originally published in 2008 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

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Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
24 The Odyssey Homer -740 Greek Ancient greek
15899 The Chronicles of Barsetshire Anthony Trollope 1855 British English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
343 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
1611 The Prelude William Wordsworth 1850 British English
3636 Odes John Keats 1820 British English
127 Paradise Lost John Milton 1667 British English
1229 Songs of Innocence and Experience William Blake 1789 British English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English
14984 Collected Poems of Ted Hughes Ted Hughes 2003 British English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
97 For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway 1940 American English
16614 The Ballad of Peckham Rye Muriel Spark 1960 British English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
686 Rabbit Is Rich John Updike 1981 American English
784 Rabbit at Rest John Updike 1990 American English
668 Rabbit Redux John Updike 1971 American English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
420 The Human Stain Philip Roth 2000 American English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
548 Le Morte d'Arthur Thomas Malory 1485 British Middle english
210 Dangerous Liaison Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1782 French French
453 I, Claudius Robert Graves 1934 British English
921 Master and Commander Patrick O'Brian 1969 British English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
3083 Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransome 1930 British English
381 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis 1950 British English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
399 His Dark Materials Philip Pullman 1995 British English
12552 Histoire de Babar Jean de Brunhoff 1931 French French
2436 The Railway Children Edith Nesbit 1906 British English
165 Winnie the Pooh A. A. Milne 1926 British English
236 Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone J. K. Rowling 1997 British English
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
115 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
673 Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea Jules Verne 1870 French French
294 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1895 British English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
917 The Day of the Triffids John Wyndham 1951 British English
361 Foundation Isaac Asimov 1951 American English
1004 2001 Arthur C. Clarke 1968 British English
528 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 1968 American English
893 Neuromancer William Gibson 1984 American, Canadian English
143 The Talented Mr. Ripley Patricia Highsmith 1955 American English
142 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
205 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle 1927 British English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
633 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carré 1974 British English
1001 Red Dragon Thomas Harris 1981 American English
423 Murder on the Orient Express Agatha Christie 1934 British English
1785 The Murders in the Rue Morgue Edgar Allan Poe 1841 American English
139 The Woman in White Wilkie Collins 1860 British English
17120 Killshot Elmore Leonard 1989 American English
17120 The Plantagenet Saga Jean Plaidy 1976 British English
328 Das Kapital Karl Marx 1867 German German
1416 Rights of Man Thomas Paine 1791 British English
527 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
229 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
1041 On War Carl Von Clausewitz 1832 German German
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
345 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
177 The Interpretation of Dreams Sigmund Freud 1899 Austrian German
180 On the Origin of Species Charles Darwin 1859 British English
634 Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Robert M. Pirsig 1974 American English
1255 Jonathan Livingston Seagull Richard Bach 1970 American English
190 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 1979 British English
3171 The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell 2000 American English
1655 The Beauty Myth Naomi Wolf 1990 American English
9155 How to Cook Delia Smith 1971 British English
14232 A Year in Provence Peter Mayle 1989 British English
14984 A Child Called 'It' Dave Pelzer 1995 American English
9218 Eats, Shoots and Leaves Lynne Truss 2003 British English
17120 Schott's Original Miscellany Ben Schott 2002 British English
830 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon 1776 British English
14132 A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Winston Churchill 1956 British English
14132 A History of the Crusades Stephen Runciman 1951 British English
624 The Histories of Herodotus Herodotus -450 Greek Ancient greek
596 The History of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides -410 Greek Ancient greek
14881 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Unknown 890 Unknown Old english
13583 A People's Tragedy Orlando Figes 1996 British English
6276 Citizens Simon Schama 1989 British English
14962 The Origins of the Second World War A. J. P. Taylor 1961 British English
133 Confessions Augustine 397 Roman Latin
1257 Lives of the Caesars Suetonius 121 Roman Latin
515 Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari 1550 Italian Italian
126 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian Italian
14897 Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man Siegfried Sassoon 1928 British English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
1406 The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell 1857 British English
1621 Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves 1929 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
5741 Diaries Alan Clark 1993 British English
541 The Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence 1926 British English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
1713 Encyclopédie Denis Diderot 1751 French French