12 Novels Considered the Greatest Book Ever Written
This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.
About this list
Encyclopedia Britannica, 12 Books
Literary critics, historians, avid readers, and even casual readers will all have different opinions on which novel is truly the “greatest book ever written.” Is it a novel with beautiful, captivating figurative language? Or one with gritty realism? A novel that has had an immense social impact? Or one that has more subtly affected the world? Here is a list of 12 novels that, for various reasons, have been considered some of the greatest works of literature ever written.
This list was originally published in 2016 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.
| Rank | Book | Authors | Year | Country | Language | Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1877 | Russian | Russian | |
| 16 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 | American | English | |
| 3 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 | American | English | |
| 5 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Colombian | Spanish | |
| 78 | A Passage to India | E. M. Forster | 1924 | British | English | |
| 36 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 | American | English | |
| 8 | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 1605 | Spanish | Spanish | |
| 49 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 | American | English | |
| 32 | Mrs. Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 | British | English | |
| 60 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 | Nigerian | English | |
| 28 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 1847 | British | English | |
| 159 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 1982 | American | English |