The 100 Greatest Novels Ever

What are the 100 greatest novels ever written? (That’s novels, not plays or poems… sorry Milton and Shakespeare…) Following the criteria from the 100 greatest albums list, here are the rules:

1) Don’t think about it too much. If something feels like it belongs, it probably does. And if something feels out of place, it probably is. You can argue all day about the relative merits of CS Lewis’ ‘The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe’ and Philip Pullman’s ‘The Golden Compass’, but in the end only one of those feels like it belongs on the list.

2) It is not necessary for me to have read a novel, or even to intend reading it, for it to be included. I would rather be smashed in the head by ‘Clarissa’ than read it – it doesn’t matter, it still belongs here.

3) On a related note, whether I liked the novel or not is also irrelevant. It pains me physically to leave off awesome books like William Gibson’s ‘Neuromancer’ and Martin Amis’ ‘Money’ at the expense of snore-fests like ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Great Expectations’, but that’s the way it has to be.

4) A little bit of research is required. You might think that something like George Eliot’s ‘The Mill on the Floss’, because it’s always billed as a ‘classic’, is generally considered amongst the greatest ever novels, but take a quick glance at a few ‘best-of’ lists and you will soon realise it is not. And who knew Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son’ was so famous?

With those rules in mind, here is the final list:

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Emma – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Go Tell it on the Mountain – William Baldwin
Old Goriot – Honore de Balzac
Herzog – Saul Bellow
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
The Outsider – Albert Camus
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
The Woman In White – Wilkie Collins
The Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
An American Tragedy – Theodore Dreiser
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Tom Jones – Henry Fielding
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier – Ford Madox Ford
A Passage to India – EM Forster
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
The Tin Drum – Gunter Grass
I, Claudius – Robert Graves
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
Portrait of a Lady – Henry James
Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Trial – Franz Kafka
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Dangerous Liaisons – Pierre Choderos de Laclos
Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence
Women in Love – DH Lawrence
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Golden Notebook – Doris Lessing
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
Under the Volcano – Malcolm Lowry
The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji – Shikibu Murasaki
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
U.S.A. Trilogy – John Dos Passos
Remembrance of Things Past – Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
Clarissa – Samuel Richardson
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
The Catcher In The Rye – JD Salinger
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Red and the Black – Stendhal
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – Laurence Sterne
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
Charlotte’s Web – EB White
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
Native Son – Richard Wright