Best Books (Fiction, Prose) : Experts Choose Their Favourites

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

About this list

The Book "Best Books", 197 Books

This list of books is from the book titled "Best Books: Experts Choose Their Favourites". This is a very small set of the books that are listed in the book. This is only the Fiction, non-fiction prose, drama, and genre fiction. The experts in these categories who made up the lists are: Brenda Richardson, Chris Murray, Roz Kaveney, Anthony Thwaite, Claire Tomalin, Malcolm Bardbury, Oliver Harris, Ian F A Bell, Kadiatu Kanneh, Brian Aldiss, Marina Oliver, Colin Dexter, Derek Parker, and T. J. Lustig.

This list was originally published in 1996 and was added to this site about 2 years ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
1162 Essays Francis Bacon 1597 British English
1326 The Compleat Angler Izaak Walton 1653 British English
4420 Selections From The Tatler And The Spectator Joseph Addison, Richard Steele 1804 British English
1982 The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne Gilbert White 1789 British English
639 Reflections on the Revolution in France Edmund Burke 1790 British English
1406 The Life of Charlotte Brontë Elizabeth Gaskell 1857 British English
1825 Studies In The History Of The Renaissance Walter Pater 1873 British English
965 Eminent Victorians Lytton Strachey 1918 British English
9682 The Englishwoman's Diary Harriet Blodgett 1994 American English
9907 The Oxford Book Of Letters Frank Kermode, Anita Kermode 1995 British English
705 Oroonoko Aphra Behn 1688 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
503 Pamela Samuel Richardson 1740 British English
134 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
679 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker Tobias Smollett 1771 British English
352 The Vicar of Wakefield Oliver Goldsmith 1766 British English
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
346 The Castle of Otranto Horace Walpole 1764 British English
83 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
258 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner James Hogg 1824 Scottish English
216 A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens 1843 British English
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
121 Bleak House Charles Dickens 1852 British English
1815 The Ring And The Book Robert Browning 1868 British English
468 Daniel Deronda George Eliot 1876 British English
358 The Mayor of Casterbridge Thomas Hardy 1886 British English
1057 The Master of Ballantrae Robert Louis Stevenson 1889 British English
470 The Secret Agent Joseph Conrad 1907 British English
85 The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford 1915 British English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
219 Brighton Rock Graham Greene 1938 British English
141 Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 1945 British English
1921 Anglo Saxon Attitudes Angus Wilson 1956 British English
1316 The Fountain Overflows Rebecca West 1956 British English
158 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
5348 Collected Stories Of V. S. Pritchett V. S. Pritchett 1982 British English
2066 The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman Angela Carter 1972 British English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
357 At Swim Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1939 Irish English
4816 The New Oxford Book Of English Verse Helen Gardner 1972 British English
7887 Six Centuries Of Verse Seamus Heaney 1984 Multiple Unknown
4514 The Rattle Bag Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney 1982 British English
9682 The Oxford Book Of Comic Verse John Gross 1994 British English
4660 Poets Of The English Language W. H. Auden, Norman Holmes Pearson 1950 American English
1239 The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne John Donne 1952 British English
4420 Poems Of George Herbert George Herbert 1633 British English
2403 The Poems Of John Wilmot, Earl Of Rochester John Wilmot 1680 British English
1273 Selected Poems of Lord Byron Lord Byron 1800 British English
1273 Robert Browning's Poetry Robert Browning 1833 British English
707 Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson 1830 British English
576 Complete Poems Elizabeth Bishop 1969 American English
752 Poems Of Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy 1898 British English
1815 The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman A. E. Housman 1939 British English
812 Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot T. S. Eliot 1963 British English
618 Poems of W. H. Auden W. H. Auden 1930 British English
4684 The Complete Poems Philip Larkin 1988 British English
300 The Life of Samuel Johnson James Boswell 1791 British English
4420 Memoirs Of The Author Of A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman William Godwin 1798 British English
4420 Life Of John Sterling Thomas Carlyle 1851 British English
6079 John Keats Robert Gittings 1968 British English
868 Henry James Leon Edel 1953 American English
1641 Disraeli Robert Blake 1966 British English
6157 The Rise And Fall Of The Man Of Letters John Gross 1969 British English
2711 Alan Turing Andrew Hodges 1983 British English
8760 Mrs. Humphry Ward John Sutherland 1990 British English
5157 Coleridge Richard Holmes 1989 British English
2504 The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper 1827 American English
773 The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym Edgar Allan Poe 1838 American English
74 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
184 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 American English
73 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James 1881 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
552 The Red Badge of Courage Stephen Crane 1895 American English
853 Mc Teague Frank Norris 1899 American English
336 Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser 1900 American English
737 The Custom of the Country Edith Wharton 1913 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
36 Invisible Man Ralph Ellison 1952 American English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
455 V Thomas Pynchon 1963 American English
298 Herzog Saul Bellow 1964 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
77 Leaves of Grass Walt Whitman 1855 American English
156 Poems of Emily Dickinson Emily Dickinson 1890 American English
1810 The Weary Blues Langston Hughes 1926 American English
465 Collected Poems Wallace Stevens 1954 American English
748 Howl and Other Poems Allen Ginsberg 1956 American English
5310 The Adams Jefferson Letters Lester J. Cappon 1959 American English
3238 The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson Ralph Waldo Emerson 2000 American English
1489 Abraham Lincoln, Speeches And Letters Abraham Lincoln 1907 American English
4420 The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies James McNeill Whistler 1890 American English
377 The Education of Henry Adams Henry Adams 1907 American English
934 The Theory of the Leisure Class Thorstein Veblen 1899 American English
5935 Look At Me Now And Here I Am Gertrude Stein 1967 American Unknown
4420 Guide To Kulchur Ezra Pound 1938 American English
2259 Advertisements for Myself Norman Mailer 1959 American English
540 The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test Tom Wolfe 1968 American English
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
4260 Petals of blood Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1977 Kenyan English
5404 Our Sister Killjoy Ama Ata Aidoo 1977 Ghanaian English
6228 Idu Flora Nwapa 1970 Nigerian English
732 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
166 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez 1985 Colombian Spanish
6455 The Arrivants Kamau Brathwaite 1973 Barbadian English
1195 Song Of Lawino Okot P'Bitek 1966 Ugandan Acholi
6228 Song Of Ocol Okot P'Bitek 1970 Ugandan Acholi
516 Season of Migration to the North Al-Tayyib Salih 1966 Sudanese Arabic
746 Nervous Conditions Tsitsi Dangarembga 1988 Zimbabwean English
361 Foundation Isaac Asimov 1951 American English
1609 The Drowned World J. G. Ballard 1962 British English
6436 Blood Music Greg Bear 1985 American English
2713 Mission Of Gravity Hal Clement 1954 American English
2932 Martian Time Slip Philip K. Dick 1964 American English
893 Neuromancer William Gibson 1984 American, Canadian English