The Guardian's Essential Library

This is one of the 743 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
10372 Essays On Music Theodor Adorno 2002 German English
4660 The Painter Of Modern Life Charles Baudelaire 1863 French French
4660 Beethoven's Letters Ludwig van Beethoven 1866 German German
1613 Ways Of Seeing John Berger 1972 British English
805 The Story of Art Ernest H. Gombrich 1950 British English
7088 The Glenn Gould Reader Glenn Gould 1984 Canadian English
134 Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann 1947 German German
5992 The Classical Style Charles Rosen 1971 American English
5227 Memories And Commentaries Igor Stravinsky 1960 Russian English
515 Lives of the Artists Giorgio Vasari 1550 Italian Italian
1870 Brief Lives John Aubrey 1898 British English
303 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
868 Henry James Leon Edel 1953 American English
1405 The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell 1857 British English
2708 Alan Turing Andrew Hodges 1983 British English
6875 Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage Richard Holmes 1993 British English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
3180 The Quest For Corvo A. J. A. Symons 1934 British English
8081 The Invisible Woman Claire Tomalin 1990 British English
95 Orlando Virginia Woolf 1928 British English
193 Persuasion Jane Austen 1817 British English
387 Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens 1864 British English
30 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
83 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
73 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
75 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
736 The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton 1913 American English
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
21 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
336 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
363 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
1622 The Mediterranean And The Mediterranean World In The Age Of Philip Ii Fernand Braudel 1949 French French
2470 Essays And Criticism William Hazlitt 1823 British English
537 The Waning of the Middle Ages Johan Huizinga 1919 Dutch Dutch
2384 The Face of Battle John Keegan 1976 British English
1018 If Not Now, When? Primo Levi 1982 Italian Italian
3468 The Armada Garrett Mattingly 1959 American English
6907 English Society In The Eighteenth Century Roy Porter 1982 British English
1179 Annals Cornelius Tacitus 109 Roman Latin
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
1826 Experience Martin Amis 2000 British English
521 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou 1969 American English
639 Testament Of Youth Vera Brittain 1933 British English
5731 Diaries Alan Clark 1993 British English
4159 The Naked Civil Servant Quentin Crisp 1968 British English
9495 C John Diamond 1998 British English
1618 Good-Bye to All That Robert Graves 1929 British English
125 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian Italian
2267 Long Walk To Freedom Nelson Mandela 1994 South African English
304 The Autobiography of Malcolm X Alex Haley 1965 American English
576 Complete Poems Elizabeth Bishop 1969 American English
1553 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
751 Poems Of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy 1898 British English
4624 Christina Rossetti Christina Georgina Rossetti 2001 British English
342 The Sonnets William Shakespeare 1609 British English
1098 Collected Poems Of Edward Thomas Edward Thomas 1920 British English
1607 The Prelude William Wordsworth 1850 British English
1449 Corpus Aristotelicum Aristotle -322 Greek Greek
637 Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke 1790 British English
404 The Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay 1787 American English
344 Leviathan Thomas Hobbes 1651 British English
323 Communist Manifesto Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels 1848 German German
10086 Orwell And Politics George Orwell 2001 British English
526 The Social Contract Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1762 French French
9668 Development As Freedom Amartya Sen 1999 Indian English
226 Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville 1835 French French
7058 E=Mc2 David Bodanis 2000 British English
9003 Climbing Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins 1996 British English
5520 The Rise And Fall Of The Third Chimpanzee Jared Diamond 1991 American English
9882 Trilobite! Richard Fortey 2000 British English
8228 Bully For Brontosaurus Stephen Jay Gould 1991 American English
7966 The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Paul Hoffman 1998 American English
1035 Cosmos Carl Sagan 1980 American English
9668 The Code Book Simon Singh 1999 British English
6647 Mendeleyev's Dream Paul Strathern 2000 British English
301 The Double Helix James D. Watson 1968 American English
1162 The Road to Oxiana Robert Byron 1937 British English
6396 In Xanadu William Dalrymple 1989 British English
10086 Don Quixote's Delusions Miranda France 2001 British English
3180 Eothen Alexander William Kinglake 1844 British English
1810 A Time Of Gifts Patrick Leigh Fermor 1977 British English
1244 Danube Claudio Magris 1986 Italian Italian
9209 Sun Dancing Geoffrey Moorhouse 1997 British English
2628 Old Glory Jonathan Raban 1981 British English
1399 The Great Railway Bazaar Paul Theroux 1975 American English
9668 In Siberia Colin Thubron 1999 British English
152 The Prince Niccolo Machiavelli 1532 Italian Italian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
3060 Montaillou Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie 1975 French French
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English