50 Greatest Books of All Time

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

About this list

A list of the 50 greatest books of all time as determined by a panel of secret judges for Globe and Mail. The books are not ranked.

who voted?
"a panel of secret judges"
I am going to go with 5 judges

This list was originally published in 2008 and was added to this site over 12 years ago.

View: List Grid Table

Rank	Book	Authors	Year	Country	Language
22	Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	1884	American	English
2	In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	1913	French	French
180	On the Origin of Species	Charles Darwin	1859	British	English
30	The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	1308	Italian	Italian
220	The Republic	Plato	-379	Greek	Ancient greek
8	Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	1605	Spanish	Spanish
1	Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	Irish	English
328	Das Kapital	Karl Marx	1867	German	German
133	Confessions	Augustine	397	Roman	Latin
152	The Prince	Niccolo Machiavelli	1532	Italian	Italian
3	The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	1925	American	English
28	Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	British	English
531	The Wealth of Nations	Adam Smith	1776	Scottish	English
177	The Interpretation of Dreams	Sigmund Freud	1899	Austrian	German
65	Gulliver's Travels	Jonathan Swift	1726	British	English
5	One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	Colombian	Spanish
131	King Lear	William Shakespeare	1608	British	English
458	Critique of Pure Reason	Immanuel Kant	1781	German	German
13	Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	1813	British	English
37	The Iliad	Homer	-750	Greek	Ancient greek
24	The Odyssey	Homer	-740	Greek	Ancient greek
18	The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1880	Russian	Russian
812	Collected Poems of T.S. Eliot	T. S. Eliot	1963	British	English
14	Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	American	English
505	The Quran	Unknown	610	Arabic	Arabic
387	Our Mutual Friend	Charles Dickens	1864	British	English
624	The Histories of Herodotus	Herodotus	-450	Greek	Ancient greek
7	Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	1851	American	English
20	Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1857	French	French
295	Franz Kafka	Franz Kafka	1971	Czech	Unknown
19	The Bible	Unknown	-1400	Jewish	Hebrew, aramaic, greek
1018	Principia Mathematica	Isaac Newton	1687	British	Latin
268	Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats	William Butler Yeats	1933	Irish	English
863	Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems	Galileo	1632	Italian	Italian
106	Oedipus the King	Sophocles	-429	Greek	Ancient greek
383	Oedipus at Colonus	Sophocles	-401	Greek	Ancient greek
125	Antigone	Sophocles	-441	Greek	Ancient greek
323	Mahabharata	Vyasa	-400	Indian	Sanskrit
35	Alice's Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	1865	British	English
527	The Social Contract	Jean-Jacques Rousseau	1762	French	French
96	Faust	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1808	German	German
162	Silent Spring	Rachel Carson	1962	American	English
1997	An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding	David Hume	1748	Scottish	English
12	War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1869	Russian	Russian
774	A Vindication of the Rights of Woman	Mary Wollstonecraft	1792	British	English
122	Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	1353	Italian	Italian
101	Waiting for Godot	Samuel Beckett	1953	Irish	French
130	The Tale of Genji	Murasaki Shikibu	1001	Japanese	Classical japanese
73	The Portrait of a Lady	Henry James	1881	American	English
1713	Encyclopédie	Denis Diderot	1751	French	French
128	The Stories of Anton Chekhov	Anton Chekhov	1900	Russian	Russian
45	Fictions	Jorge Luis Borges	1944	Argentinian	Spanish
75	Essays	Michel de Montaigne	1580	French	French