100 Best Novels Written in English

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

About this list

The Guardian, 100 Books

Respected literary critic Robert McCrum selects the definitive 100 novels written in English.

This list was originally published in 2015 and was added to this site over 11 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
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
332 Clarissa Samuel Richardson 1748 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
1574 Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock 1818 British English
773 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Edgar Allan Poe 1838 American English
2362 Sybil Benjamin Disraeli 1845 British English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
393 The Moonstone Wilkie Collins 1868 British English
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
703 The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope 1875 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
1243 Kidnapped Robert Louis Stevenson 1886 British English
782 Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome 1889 British English
2453 The Sign of Four Arthur Conan Doyle 1890 British English
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
606 New Grub Street George Gissing 1891 British English
287 Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy 1895 British English
552 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895 American English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
336 Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser 1900 American English
247 Kim Rudyard Kipling 1901 British English
230 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
376 The Golden Bowl Henry James 1904 American English
1116 Hadrian the Seventh Frederick Rolfe 1904 British English
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
963 Zuleika Dobson Max Beerbohm 1911 British English
1169 The History of Mr. Polly H. G. Wells 1910 British English
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
344 The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan 1915 British English
487 Rainbow D.H. Lawrence 1915 British English
292 Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham 1915 British English
92 The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton 1920 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
256 Babbitt Sinclair Lewis 1922 American English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
1167 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Anita Loos 1925 American English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
62 The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 1926 American English
647 Lolly Willowes Sylvia Townsend Warner 1926 British English
142 The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett 1930 American English
79 As I Lay Dying William Faulkner 1930 American English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
480 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons 1932 British English
11545 Nineteen Nineteen John Dos Passos 1932 American English
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
435 Scoop Evelyn Waugh 1938 British English
1026 Murphy Samuel Beckett 1938 Irish English
120 The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler 1939 American English
3629 Party Going Henry Green 1939 British English
357 At Swim Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1939 Irish English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
2451 Joy in the Morning P. G. Wodehouse 1946 British English
149 All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren 1946 American English
63 Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry 1947 British English
967 The Heat of the Day Elizabeth Bowen 1949 British English
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
176 The End of the Affair Graham Greene 1951 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
280 The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow 1953 American English
52 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
826 Voss Patrick White 1957 Australian English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
169 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark 1961 British, Scottish English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
61 The Golden Notebook Doris May Lessing 1962 British English
153 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
3585 A Single Man Christopher Isherwood 1964 British English
109 In Cold Blood Truman Capote 1966 American English
103 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath 1963 American English
241 Portnoy's Complaint Philip Roth 1969 American English
1549 Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor 1971 British English
668 Rabbit Redux John Updike 1971 American English
260 Song of Solomon Toni Morrison 1977 American English
732 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
331 Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson 1980 American English
750 Money Martin Amis 1984 British English
3068 An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro 1986 British English
4213 The Beginning of Spring Penelope Fitzgerald 1988 British English
2387 Breathing Lessons Anne Tyler 1988 American English
1408 Amongst Women John McGahern 1990 Irish English
411 Underworld Don DeLillo 1997 American English
255 Disgrace J. M. Coetzee 1999 South African English
1154 True History of the Kelly Gang Peter Carey 2000 Australian English