Finest Works of Fiction

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

About this list

Martin Seymour-Smith and Editors, 55 Books

In Novels and Novelists, A Guide to the World of Fiction (1980) Seymour-Smith and the other contributors selected about 55 works of fiction as receiving full marks on the four criteria used for evaluation: Readability, Characterization, Plot, and Literary Merit. These represent, for the contributors, the finest works of fiction that have been written.

This list was originally published in 1980 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
225 Fairy Tales and Stories Hans Christian Andersen 1835 Danish Danish
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
533 Cousin Bette Honoré de Balzac 1846 French French
666 Humboldt's Gift Saul Bellow 1975 American English
122 Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio 1353 Italian Italian
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
128 The Stories of Anton Chekhov Anton Chekhov 1900 Russian Russian
766 Adolphe Benjamin Constant 1816 Swiss French
351 Moll Flanders Daniel Defoe 1722 British English
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
57 The Idiot Fyodor Dostoevsky 1869 Russian Russian
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
195 An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser 1925 American English
414 The Mill on the Floss George Eliot 1860 British English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
43 Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 1936 American English
3538 Amelia Henry Fielding 1751 British English
116 A Sentimental Education Gustave Flaubert 1869 French French
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
104 Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol 1842 Russian Russian
194 Oblomov Ivan Goncharov 1859 Russian Russian
1840 Mysteries Knut Hamsun 1892 Norwegian Norwegian
358 The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy 1886 British English
287 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy 1895 British English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
81 The Castle Franz Kafka 1926 Czech German
66 The Metamorphosis Franz Kafka 1915 Czech German
249 A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Lermontov 1840 Russian Russian
63 Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1947 British English
273 The Betrothed Alessandro Manzoni 1827 Italian Italian
305 The Confusions of Young Törless Robert Musil 1906 Austrian German
3262 The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese Cesare Pavese 1968 Italian Italian
426 The Moon and the Bonfires Cesare Pavese 1950 Italian Italian
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
2864 Gimpel the Fool Isaac Bashevis Singer 1953 Polish Yiddish
472 The Man Who Loved Children Christina Stead 1940 Australian English
147 Confessions of Zeno Italo Svevo 1923 Italian Italian
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
602 The Go-Between L. P. Hartley 1953 British English
2073 The Blithedale Romance Nathaniel Hawthorne 1852 American English
2212 Collected Stories W. Somerset Maugham 1951 British English
970 The Maias Eça de Queirós 1888 Portuguese Portuguese
1036 The Fortunes Of Richard Mahony Henry Handel Richardson 1917 Australian English
1608 The Loneliness of the Long-distance Runner Alan Sillitoe 1959 British English
5084 Short Friday Isaac Bashevis Singer 1964 Polish Yiddish
6964 The Seance and Other Stories Isaac Bashevis Singer 1968 Polish Yiddish
5702 The Complete Works of Nathanael West Nathanael West 1957 American English
321 We Yevgeny Zamyatin 1924 Russian Russian