The 100 Greatest Novels

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

About this list

Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Russian Newspaper), 101 Books

The list of “100 best books” according to the Russian newspaper “NG-Ex libris” (book review, supplement to “Nezavisimaya Gazeta”), published on January 31, 2008.

This ranking consists of 100 novels that, in the opinion of the editorial team, shook the literary world and influenced the entire culture. Books are listed in chronological order.

Who voted?
The list wasn’t crowdsourced—it was drawn up in-house by NG-Ex Libris’s own editorial desk. Roughly five staff critics, led by editor-in-chief Evgeny Lesin, debated and agreed on the final 100 titles during their weekly editorial meetings in January 2008.

This list was originally published in 2008 and was added to this site over 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
145 Gargantua and Pantagruel Francois Rabelais 1532 French French
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
489 Manon Lescaut Abbe Prevost 1731 French French
282 The Sorrows of Young Werther Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1774 German German
51 The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne 1759 British English
210 Dangerous Liaison Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 1782 French French
889 The 120 Days of Sodom Marquis de Sade 1904 French French
797 The Manuscript Found in Saragossa Jan Potocki 1805 Polish French
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
378 Melmoth the Wanderer Charles Robert Maturin 1820 British English
1782 The Wild Ass's Skin Honoré de Balzac 1831 French French
366 The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Victor Hugo 1831 French French
42 The Red and the Black Stendhal 1830 French French
365 Eugene Onegin Alexander Pushkin 1833 Russian Russian
7169 The Confession Of A Child Of The Century Alfred de Musset 1836 French French
277 The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens 1836 British English
249 A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Lermontov 1840 Russian Russian
104 Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol 1842 Russian Russian
119 The Three Musketeers Alexandre Dumas 1844 French French
105 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
20 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
194 Oblomov Ivan Goncharov 1859 Russian Russian
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
4735 The Headless Horseman Thomas Mayne Reid 1865 Irish English
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
12 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
57 The Idiot Fyodor Dostoevsky 1869 Russian Russian
4723 Venus in Furs Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch 1870 Austrian German
94 Demons Fyodor Dostoevsky 1872 Russian Russian
243 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain 1876 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
18 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 1880 Russian Russian
1407 The Golovlyov Family Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin 1880 Russian Russian
89 The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 1890 Irish English
294 The Time Machine H. G. Wells 1895 British English
53 Dracula Bram Stoker 1897 British English
1705 The Sea-Wolf Jack London 1904 American English
2181 The Little Demon Fedor Sologub 1907 Russian Russian
730 Petersburg Andrei Bely 1913 Russian Russian
891 Golem Gustav Meyrink 1915 Austrian German
321 We Yevgeny Zamyatin 1924 Russian Russian
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
7169 Julio Jurenito Ilya Ehrenburg 1921 Russian Russian
159 The Good Soldier Švejk Jaroslav Hašek 1921 Czech Czech
2289 The White Guard Mikhail Bulgakov 1925 Russian Russian
25 The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 1924 German German
21 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
11340 She Who Runs on the Waves Alexander Grin 2002 Russian Russian
1161 The Twelve Chairs Ilya Ilf, Evgeniy Petrov 1928 Russian Russian
999 Chevengur Andrey Platonov 1928 Russian Russian
9 The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner 1929 American English
67 A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway 1929 American English
48 Journey to the End of The Night Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1932 French French
50 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1932 British English
1691 Cat Country Lao She 1932 Chinese Chinese
239 Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller 1934 American English
7169 The Life Of Klim Samgin Maxim Gorky 1930 Russian Russian
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
1499 Three Comrades Erich Maria Remarque 1936 German German
960 The Gift Vladimir Nabokov 1938 Russian Russian
34 The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 1967 Russian Russian
571 And Quiet Flows The Don Mikhail Sholokhov 1928 Russian Russian
82 The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil 1930 Austrian German
348 The Glass Bead Game Hermann Hesse 1943 German German
7169 Two Captains Veniamin Kaverin 1940 Russian Russian
496 Froth on the daydream Boris Vian 1947 French French
135 Doctor Faustus Thomas Mann 1947 German German
76 The Plague Albert Camus 1947 French French
6 Nineteen Eighty Four George Orwell 1949 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
150 Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury 1953 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
14 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 1955 American English
112 Doctor Zhivago Boris Pasternak 1957 Russian Russian
41 On the Road Jack Kerouac 1957 American English
259 Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs 1959 American English
5967 Pornografia Witold Gombrowicz 1960 Polish Polish
858 The Woman in the Dunes Kobo Abé 1962 Japanese Japanese
354 Hopscotch Julio Cortazar 1963 Argentinian Spanish
7871 Незнайка на Луне Nikolay Nosov 1965 Russian Russian
442 The Magus John Fowles 1965 British English
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
528 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick 1968 American English
7924 Shatuny Yuri Mamleev 1966 Russian Russian
1749 First Circle Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1968 Russian Russian
84 Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 1969 American English
744 Moscow to the End of the Line Venedikt Yerofeev 1970 Russian Russian
2004 A School For Fools Sasha Sokolov 1976 Russian Russian
1454 Pushkin House Andrey Bitov 1978 Russian Russian
8696 It's Me, Eddie Eduard Limonov 1978 Russian Russian
8766 The Island Of Crimea Vasily Aksenov 1979 Russian Russian
99 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Czech Czech
9598 Москва 2042 Vladimir Voinovich 1987 Russian Russian
10913 Роман Vladimir Sorokin 1998 Russian Russian
1715 The Clay Machine-gun Victor Pelevin 1996 Russian Russian
9589 Blue Lard Vladimir Sorokin 1999 Russian Russian