The Guardian's Essential Library

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

About this list

The Guardian, 100 Books

The Guardian asked eminent writers to choose 10 books from their respective fields to make up a capsule library of indispensable volumes. The only rules were that the books had to be in print and readily available in the UK.

From art to science via fiction and memoir, these are their selections for the Guardian's Essential Library of 100 vital books.

Art and music chosen by Susan Sontag
Biography chosen by Michael Holroyd
Fiction chosen by Julian Barnes
Fiction in translation chosen by Julian Barnes
History chosen by Simon Schama
Memoir and autobiography chosen by Linda Grant
Poetry chosen by Andrew Motion
Politics chosen by Timothy Garton Ash
Science chosen by Steve Jones
Travel chosen by Jan Morris

This list was originally published in 2002 and was added to this site over 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
10400 Essays On Music Theodor Adorno 2002 German English
4670 The Painter Of Modern Life Charles Baudelaire 1863 French French
4670 Beethoven's Letters Ludwig van Beethoven 1866 German German
1617 Ways Of Seeing John Berger 1972 British English
806 The Story of Art Ernest H. Gombrich 1950 British English
7101 The Glenn Gould Reader Glenn Gould 1984 Canadian English
135 Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann 1947 German German
6002 The Classical Style Charles Rosen 1971 American English
5236 Memories And Commentaries Igor Stravinsky 1960 Russian English
515 Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari 1550 Italian Italian
1871 Brief Lives John Aubrey 1898 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
868 Henry James Leon Edel 1953 American English
1406 The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell 1857 British English
2711 Alan Turing Andrew Hodges 1983 British English
6886 Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage Richard Holmes 1993 British English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
3185 The Quest For Corvo A. J. A. Symons 1934 British English
8097 The Invisible Woman Claire Tomalin 1990 British English
95 Orlando Virginia Woolf 1928 British English
192 Persuasion Jane Austen 1817 British English
387 Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens 1864 British English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
737 The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton 1913 American English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
338 Effi Briest Theodor Fontane 1895 German German
249 A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Lermontov 1840 Russian Russian
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
365 Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin 1833 Russian Russian
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
80 Candide Voltaire 1759 French French
1624 The Mediterranean And The Mediterranean World In The Age Of Philip Ii Fernand Braudel 1949 French French
2476 Essays And Criticism William Hazlitt 1823 British English
537 The Waning of the Middle Ages Johan Huizinga 1919 Dutch Dutch
2392 The Face of Battle John Keegan 1976 British English
1021 If Not Now, When? Primo Levi 1982 Italian Italian
3471 The Armada Garrett Mattingly 1959 American English
6918 English Society In The Eighteenth Century Roy Porter 1982 British English
1180 Annals Cornelius Tacitus 109 Roman Latin
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
1827 Experience Martin Amis 2000 British English
521 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou 1969 American English
642 Testament Of Youth Vera Brittain 1933 British English
5743 Diaries Alan Clark 1993 British English
4165 The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp 1968 British English
9518 C John Diamond 1998 British English
1621 Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves 1929 British English
126 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian Italian
2276 Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela 1994 South African English
306 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
576 Complete Poems Elizabeth Bishop 1969 American English
1555 Troilus And Criseyde Geoffrey Chaucer 1385 British Middle english
111 The Waste Land T. S. Eliot 1922 British English
317 The Poems of Robert Frost Robert Frost 1913 American English
752 Poems Of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy 1898 British English
4633 Christina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti 2001 British English
343 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
1100 Collected Poems Of Edward Thomas Edward Thomas 1920 British English
1611 The Prelude William Wordsworth 1850 British English
1449 Corpus Aristotelicum Aristotle -322 Greek Greek
639 Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke 1790 British English
404 The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay 1787 American English
345 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
324 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
10109 Orwell And Politics George Orwell 2001 British English
527 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
9691 Development As Freedom Amartya Sen 1999 Indian English
229 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
7071 E=Mc2 David Bodanis 2000 British English
9022 Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins 1996 British English
5529 The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond 1991 American English
9905 Trilobite! Richard Fortey 2000 British English
8245 Bully For Brontosaurus Stephen Jay Gould 1991 American English
7981 The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Paul Hoffman 1998 American English
1038 Cosmos Carl Sagan 1980 American English
9691 The Code Book Simon Singh 1999 British English
6661 Mendeleyev's Dream Paul Strathern 2000 British English
304 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
1163 The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron 1937 British English
6408 In Xanadu William Dalrymple 1989 British English
10109 Don Quixote's Delusions Miranda France 2001 British English
3185 Eothen Alexander William Kinglake 1844 British English
1811 A Time Of Gifts Patrick Leigh Fermor 1977 British English
1246 Danube Claudio Magris 1986 Italian Italian
9231 Sun Dancing Geoffrey Moorhouse 1997 British English
2632 Old Glory Jonathan Raban 1981 British English
1400 The Great Railway Bazaar Paul Theroux 1975 American English
9691 In Siberia Colin Thubron 1999 British English
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
3066 Montaillou Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 1975 French French
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English