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9754 Views Share:The Observer's The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
Book list created by coroner 
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152
7.9
0
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
99
7.3
0
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
5
8
0
Tom Jones (Wordsworth Classics) - Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
12
6.8
0
Clarissa, or the History of A Young Lady - Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
21
9.2
0
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ... - Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
3
8
0
Les Liaisons Dangereuses: Dangerous Liaisons (BBC Radio Collection)... - Pierre Ambroise Francois Choderlos de Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
188
7.7
0
Emma - Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
179
7.7
0
Frankenstein (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus)... - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
4
7
0
Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
4
5
0
The Black Sheep (Penguin Classics) - Honore Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
7
6
0
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
41
8.1
0
The Count of Monte Cristo (Wordsworth Classics)... - Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
3
5.5
0
Sybil: or The Two Nations - Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
20
7.1
0
David Copperfield (Wordsworth Classics) - Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
489
8
0
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
223
8
0
Jane Eyre (Penguin Popular Classics) - Charlotte Brontë
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
124
7
0
The Scarlet Letter (Bantam Classics) - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
97
7.7
0
Moby-Dick or, The Whale - Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
170
7.5
0
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
30
8.1
0
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
338
8.3
0
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
158
7.2
0
Little Women (Penguin Popular Classics) - Louisa May Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
2
10
0
The Way We Live Now (Barnes & Noble Classics)... - Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
90
7.4
0
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
1
1
0
Daniel Deronda (Wordsworth Classics) - George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
162
8.7
0
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
25
7.4
0
The Portrait of a Lady (Oxford World's Classics)... - Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
400
7.5
0
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
200
7.7
0
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
19
7
0
Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog... - Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
614
8.3
0
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
11
7
0
Diary of a Nobody (Wordsworth Classics) - George Grossmith,Weedon Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
41
7
0
Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics) - Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
5
6
0
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
123
7.5
0
The Call Of The Wild - Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
13
6.4
0
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
50
8.1
0
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
3
10
0
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
12
4.5
0
The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
10
8.8
0
The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion - Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
7
7.7
0
The Thirty-Nine Steps (Wordsworth Classics) - John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
167
7.8
0
Ulysses - James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
198
7.6
0
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
31
7.6
0
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
12
8
0
Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
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The British love to read and, as the BBC prepares to reveal the nation's best loved books, The Observer has compiled its own list of essential fiction from the past 300 years.
By Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday October 12 2003
Chronological order.
By Robert McCrum
The Observer, Sunday October 12 2003
Chronological order.
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