50 Best Cult Books

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

About this list

A cult book may be hard to define but one thing is for sure: you know a cult book when you see one. Cult books are somehow, intangibly, different from simple bestsellers - though many of them are that. And people have passionate feelings on both sides: Our critics present a selection of the most notable cult writing from the past two centuries. Some is classic. Some is catastrophic. All of it had the power to inspire

The names/initials of the editors who voted on this are: Christopher Howse, TP, Andrew McKie, Serena Davies, Martin Chilton, Sarah Crompton, Sameer Rahim, Dominic Sandbrook, Tim Martin, Toby Clements, AMcK, Ceri Radford, Mick Brown, Alex Clark, Sam Leith

This list was originally published in 2016 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
84	Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut	1969	American	English
226	The Alexandria Quartet	Lawrence Durrell	1957	British	English
583	Against Nature	J. K. Huysmans	1884	French	French
795	Baby And Child Care	Benjamin Spock	1946	American	English
1655	The Beauty Myth	Naomi Wolf	1990	American	English
103	The Bell Jar	Sylvia Plath	1963	American	English
33	Catch-22	Joseph Heller	1961	American	English
4	The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	1951	American	English
4194	The Celestine Prophecy	James Redfield	1993	American	English
4607	The Dice Man	Luke Rhinehart	1971	American	English
1883	Chariots Of The Gods	Erich Von Däniken	1968	German	German
203	A Confederacy of Dunces	John Kennedy Toole	1980	American	English
275	The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1782	French	French
258	The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner	James Hogg	1824	Scottish	English
4252	Dianetics	L. Ron Hubbard	1950	American	English
2994	The Doors Of Perception	Aldous Huxley	1954	British	English
100	Dune	Frank Herbert	1965	American	English
190	The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy	Douglas Adams	1979	British	English
540	The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test	Tom Wolfe	1968	American	English
827	Fear of Flying	Erica Jong	1973	American	English
1259	The Female Eunuch	Germaine Greer	1970	Australian	English
434	The Fountainhead	Ayn Rand	1943	American	English
1387	Gödel, Escher, Bach	Douglas Hofstadter	1979	American	English
254	Gravity's Rainbow	Thomas Pynchon	1973	American	English
5379	The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail	Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, Henry Lincoln	1982	British	English
575	I Capture the Castle	Dodie Smith	1948	British	English
318	If on a Winter's Night a Traveller	Italo Calvino	1979	Italian	Italian
6135	Iron John	Robert Bly	1990	American	English
1255	Jonathan Livingston Seagull	Richard Bach	1970	American	English
442	The Magus	John Fowles	1965	British	English
312	Labyrinths	Jorge Luis Borges	1962	Argentinian	Spanish
56	The Leopard	Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa	1958	Italian	Italian
34	The Master and Margarita	Mikhail Bulgakov	1967	Russian	Russian
2183	No Logo	Naomi Klein	1999	Canadian	English
41	On the Road	Jack Kerouac	1957	American	English
683	Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas	Hunter S. Thompson	1971	American	English
1403	The Outsider	Colin Wilson	1956	British	English
462	The Prophet	Kahlil Gibran	1923	Lebanese	English
492	The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists	Robert Tressell, Peter Miles	1914	British	English
736	Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam	Edward FitzGerald	1859	British	English
1163	The Road to Oxiana	Robert Byron	1937	British	English
163	Siddhartha	Hermann Hesse	1922	German	German
282	The Sorrows of Young Werther	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1774	German	German
834	Story of O	Pauline Reage	1954	French	French
23	The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942	French	French
1681	The Teachings Of Don Juan	Carlos Castaneda	1968	American	English
642	Testament Of Youth	Vera Brittain	1933	British	English
222	Thus Spake Zarathustra	Friedrich Nietzsche	1883	German	German
16	To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	1960	American	English
634	Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance	Robert M. Pirsig	1974	American	English