Top 50 Books

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

About this list

The Daily Telegraph, 50 Books

2,000 people voted in an online poll to determine the 50 greatest books of all time.

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

View: List Grid Table
Rank Book Authors Year Country Language Actions
16 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 1960 American English
17 The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien 1959 English English
379 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe C. S. Lewis 1950 British English
12 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 1813 British English
1071 The Da Vinci Code Dan Brown 2003 American English
15 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 1847 British English
55 Animal Farm George Orwell 1945 British English
38 Great Expectations Charles Dickens 1860 British English
1013 Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban J. K. Rowling 1999 British English
50 Lord of the Flies William Golding 1954 British English
1674 The Time Traveler's Wife Audrey Niffenegger 2003 American English
33 Catch-22 Joseph Heller 1961 American English
153 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Ken Kesey 1962 American English
58 Gone With the Wind Margaret Mitchell 1936 American English
1691 The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold 2002 American English
13 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 1869 Russian Russian
2020 Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden 1997 American English
1811 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon 2003 British English
3 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925 American English
891 The Kite Runner Khaled Hosseini 2003 Afghan English
28 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 1847 British English
144 Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence 1913 British English
10 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 1877 Russian Russian
21 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 1857 French French
84 Emma Jane Austen 1815 British English
1083 Birdsong Sebastian Faulks 1993 British English
4 The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger 1951 American English
9917 My Sister's Keeper Jodi Picoult 2004 American English
154 A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess 1962 British English
78 A Passage to India E. M. Forster 1924 British English
59 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 1938 British English
1932 Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernières 1994 British English
248 Atonement Ian McEwan 2001 British English
64 Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie 1981 Indian English
2 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 1913 French French
30 Middlemarch George Eliot 1871 British English
221 White Teeth Zadie Smith 2000 British English
27 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 1927 British English
980 It Stephen King 1986 American English
93 Little Women Louisa May Alcott 1868 American English
104 Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray 1847 British English
47 David Copperfield Charles Dickens 1849 British English
5381 The Horse Whisperer Nicholas Evans 1995 British English
69 Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe 1719 British English
7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 1851 American English
65 Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift 1726 British English
39 Frankenstein Mary Shelley 1818 British English
22 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 1884 American English
781 Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome 1889 British English
12766 The Island Victoria Hislop 2005 British English