100 novels everyone should read
Marcel ProustThe best novels of all time, from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch
100 to 91
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
90 to 81
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
80 to 71
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70 to 61
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60 to 51
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
50 to 41
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40 to 31
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W?H Auden.
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
30 to 21
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sowing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
Hailed by TS Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20 to 11
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10 to 1
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
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