Top 50 Books

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

About this list

The Folio Society, 49 Books

These top 50 books were voted on by The Folio Society members in 1997. The Folio Society is a London-based publisher, founded by Charles Ede in 1947 and incorporated in 1971.

This list was originally published in 1997 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
13 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
129 First Folio William Shakespeare 1623 British English
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
136 The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame 1908 British English
28 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
117 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
1247 The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling 1894 British English
453 I, Claudius Robert Graves 1934 British English
110 The Canterbury Tales Geoffrey Chaucer 1400 British Middle english
115 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson 1883 British English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
29 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
35 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865 British English
205 The Complete Sherlock Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle 1927 British English
830 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon 1776 British English
30 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri 1308 Italian Italian
141 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 1945 British English
480 Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons 1932 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
268 Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats 1933 Irish English
37 The Iliad Homer -750 Greek Ancient greek
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
678 Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope 1857 British English
366 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Victor Hugo 1831 French French
2881 The Diary of Samuel Pepys Samuel Pepys 1825 British English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
19 The Bible Unknown -1400 Jewish Hebrew, aramaic, greek
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
16891 The Wit Of Oscar Wilde Oscar Wilde 1900 Irish English
31 Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 1899 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
17152 Plums Of P.G. Wodehouse P. G. Wodehouse 1993 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
655 Stories of Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway 1987 American English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
1769 Under Milk Wood Dylan Thomas 1954 British English
225 Fairy Tales and Stories Hans Christian Andersen 1835 Danish Danish
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
782 Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome 1889 British English