500 Must Read Books

This is one of the 743 lists we use to generate our main The Greatest Books list.

About this list

The Daily Telegraph, 497 Books

500 'must-read' books of all time as selected by The Telegraph's team of literary experts.

This list was originally published in 2013 and was added to this site about 1 year ago.

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
84 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
2959 The Sea John Banville 2005 Irish English
14901 The New Confessions William Boyd 1987 British English
154 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
5215 Riders Jilly Cooper 1985 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
30 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
135 Tom Jones Henry Fielding 1749 British English
452 I, Claudius Robert Graves 1934 British English
118 Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 1891 British English
1545 What Maisie Knew Henry James 1897 American English
1 Ulysses James Joyce 1922 Irish English
197 Lady Chatterley's Lover D. H. Lawrence 1928 British English
402 Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel 2009 British English
453 The Sea, The Sea Iris Murdoch 1978 British English
355 At Swim Two-Birds Flann O'Brien 1939 Irish English
329 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell 1951 British English
221 White Teeth Zadie Smith 2000 British English
956 The Girls of Slender Means Muriel Spark 1963 British English
32 Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf 1925 British English
749 Money Martin Amis 1984 British English
549 Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan 1678 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
128 Bleak House Charles Dickens 1852 British English
196 Howards End E. M. Forster 1910 British English
245 The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy 1906 British English
813 Cranford Elizabeth Gaskell 1851 British English
1165 Lanark Alasdair Gray 1981 Scottish English
1178 Living Henry Green 1929 British English
295 Of Human Bondage W. Somerset Maugham 1915 British English
2022 Quartet in Autumn Barbara Pym 1977 British English
157 Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys 1966 British English
331 Clarissa Samuel Richardson 1748 British English
104 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
676 Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope 1857 British English
121 Decameron Giovanni Boccaccio 1353 Italian Italian
318 If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino 1979 Italian Italian
8 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 1605 Spanish Spanish
282 The Princess of Cleves Madame de La Fayette 1678 French French
11 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 1866 Russian Russian
20 The Trial Franz Kafka 1925 Czech German
208 Zorba the Greek Nikos Kazantzakis 1946 Greek Greek
101 The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 1984 Czech Czech
249 A Hero of Our Time Mikhail Lermontov 1840 Russian Russian
125 If This Is a Man Primo Levi 1947 Italian Italian
1790 Confessions Of Felix Krull, Confidence Man Thomas Mann 1954 German German
274 Life, a User's Manual Georges Perec 1978 French French
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
273 The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1782 French French
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
14861 The Coming Of Age Simone de Beauvoir 1970 French French
213 Life and Fate Vasily Grossman 1980 Russian Russian
209 Hunger Knut Hamsun 1890 Norwegian Norwegian
56 The Leopard Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa 1958 Italian Italian
247 Death in Venice Thomas Mann 1912 German German
474 Embers Sandor Marai 1942 Hungarian Hungarian
993 Blindness José Saramago 1995 Portuguese Portuguese
511 Perfume Patrick Suskind 1985 German German
147 Confessions of Zeno Italo Svevo 1923 Italian Italian
179 Fathers and Sons Ivan Turgenev 1862 Russian Russian
1483 Independence Day Richard Ford 1995 American English
73 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne 1850 American English
231 The Call of the Wild Jack London 1903 American English
750 All the Pretty Horses Cormac McCarthy 1992 American English
117 The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers 1940 American English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
2949 Fugitive Pieces Anne Michaels 1996 Canadian English
15786 The Colossus Of Maroussi Henry Miller 1941 American English
49 Beloved Toni Morrison 1987 American English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
3869 We Need To Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver 2003 American English
26 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 1939 American English
681 Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Hunter S. Thompson 1971 American English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
218 The House of Mirth Edith Wharton 1905 American English
184 Uncle Tom's Cabin Harriet Beecher Stowe 1852 American English
362 White Noise Don DeLillo 1985 American English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
97 For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway 1940 American English
488 The Shipping News Annie Proulx 1993 Canadian English
418 The Human Stain Philip Roth 2000 American English
174 Rabbit, Run John Updike 1960 American English
159 The Color Purple Alice Walker 1982 American English
333 Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 1996 American English
309 Bonfire of the Vanities Tom Wolfe 1987 American English
290 The House of the Spirits Isabel Allende 1982 Chilean Spanish
354 The Savage Detectives Roberto Bolaño 1998 Chilean Spanish
389 The Alchemist Paulo Coelho 1988 Brazilian Portuguese
353 Hopscotch Julio Cortazar 1963 Argentinian Spanish
1366 Like Water For Chocolate Laura Esquivel 1989 Mexican Spanish
187 The Power and the Glory Graham Greene 1940 British English
17008 The Motorcycle Diaries Che Guevara 1993 Argentinian Spanish
5 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 1967 Colombian Spanish
755 The Labyrinth of Solitude Octavio Paz 1950 Mexican Spanish
685 The Time of the Hero Mario Vargas Llosa 1963 Peruvian Spanish
1259 The President Miguel Angel Asturias 1946 Guatemalan Spanish
311 Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges 1962 Argentinian Spanish
1280 The Death of Artemio Cruz Carlos Fuentes 1962 Mexican Spanish
17008 I, The Supreme Augusto Roa Bastos 1974 Paraguayan Spanish
123 Pedro Páramo Juan Rulfo 1955 Mexican Spanish
60 Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe 1958 Nigerian English
1157 Half of a Yellow Sun Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie 2006 Nigerian English
259 Disgrace J. M. Coetzee 1999 South African English
888 The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver 1998 American English
1229 Children of Gebelawi Naguib Mahfouz 1959 Egyptian Arabic
13890 My Traitor's Heart Rian Malan 1990 South African English
8239 In The Country Of Men Hisham Matar 2006 British English
4846 The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Alexander McCall Smith 1998 Scottish English
730 A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul 1979 Trinidadian English
516 Season of Migration to the North Al-Tayyib Salih 1966 Sudanese Arabic
1001 A Dry White Season Andre Brink 1979 South African Afrikaans
4712 The Bride Price Buchi Emecheta 1976 Nigerian English
1851 July's People Nadine Gordimer 1981 South African English
988 The Grass Is Singing Doris May Lessing 1950 British English
264 Cry, the Beloved Country Alan Paton 1948 South African English
1233 Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories Ryunosuke Akutagawa 1915 Japanese Japanese
46 One Thousand and One Nights Unknown 800 Multiple Arabic
1986 All about H. Hatterr G. V. Desani 1948 Indian English
4863 Heat and Dust Ruth Prawer Jhabvala 1975 Indian English
14854 Spring Snow Yukio Mishima 1969 Japanese Japanese