The Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of All Time

Given by The Observer

100 Works 1,783,214 Books 28,678 Reviews ½ 4.0
Original list in The Observer, 12 Oct. 2003.

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"If lists are a guilty pleasure, then book lists are a sinful addiction. That's an observation for which the show more Observer can adduce empirical evidence. Ten years ago, on 12 October 2003, in a headline-grabbing stunt, writing as literary editor, I compiled (with a lot of help from colleagues) a list, provocatively entitled "The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time". Say what you like about lists, but this one rapidly developed a life of its own, like a sci-fi alien. Once the initial furore – why no Updike? How on earth could we exclude PG Wodehouse? – had died down, the creature we had created continued to circulate in cyberspace, sponsoring a rare mixture of rage and delight, apparently without rhyme or reason. Every now and again, some particular group would tangle with the Observer list. And it would drive them mad (in good and bad ways) all over again. For reasons I have yet to fathom, it excited special notice in Australia."

Robert McCrum in The Observer, 22 Sep 2013.

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Not to be confused with The Observer's 100 Best Novels started in 2013, which excludes the translations that are such a feature of this 2003 list.
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Year Awarded:
2003
WorkOrder Label
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan
2
Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe
3
Gulliver's Travels (1727) by Jonathan Swift
4
Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding
5
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1747) by Samuel Richardson
6
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by Laurence Sterne
7
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
8
Emma (1815) by Jane Austen
9
Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley
10
Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock
11
The Black Sheep (1842) by Honoré de Balzac
12
The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) by Stendhal
13
The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) by Alexandre Dumas père
14
Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli
15
David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens
16
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
17
Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
18
Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray
19
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
20
Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
21
Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
22
The Woman in White (1859) by Wilkie Collins
23
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
24
Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott
25
The Way We Live Now (1874) by Anthony Trollope
26
Anna Karenina (1875) by Leo Tolstoy
27
Daniel Deronda (1876) by George Eliot
28
The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
29
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James
30
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
31
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
32
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889) by Jerome K. Jerome
33
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
34
The Diary of a Nobody (1892) by George Grossmith
35
Jude the Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy
36
The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers
37
The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London
38
Nostromo (1904) by Joseph Conrad
39
The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame
40
In Search of Lost Time (1913) by Marcel Proust
41
The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence
42
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
43
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan
44
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
45
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
46
A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
47
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
48
The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
49
Men Without Women (1927) by Ernest Hemingway
50
Journey to the End of the Night (1983) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
51
As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
52
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
53
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh
54
U.S.A. (1938) by John Dos Passos
55
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
56
The Pursuit of Love (1945) by Nancy Mitford
57
The Plague (1947) by Albert Camus
58
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
59
Malone Dies (1951) by Samuel Beckett
60
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
61
Wise Blood (1952) by Flannery O'Connor
62
Charlotte's Web (1952) by E. B. White
63
The Lord of the Rings (1954) by J. R. R. Tolkien
64
Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis
65
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
66
The Quiet American (1955) by Graham Greene
67
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
68
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
69
The Tin Drum (1959) by Günter Grass
70
Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe
71
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
72
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
73
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
74
Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow
75
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
76
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor
77
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) by John le Carré
78
Song of Solomon (1977) by Toni Morrison
79
The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) by Beryl Bainbridge
80
The Golden Notebook, book 2 (1975) by Doris Lessing
81
The Executioner's Song (1979) by Norman Mailer
81
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979) by Italo Calvino
82
A Bend in the River (1979) by V. S. Naipaul
83
Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) by J. M. Coetzee
84
Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
85
Lanark (1981) by Alasdair Gray
86
The New York Trilogy (1985) by Paul Auster
87
The BFG (1982) by Roald Dahl
88
The Periodic Table (1975) by Primo Levi
89
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) by Martin Amis
90
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) by Kazuo Ishiguro
91
Oscar and Lucinda (1988) by Peter Carey
92
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1979) by Milan Kundera
93
Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) by Salman Rushdie
94
L. A. Confidential (1990) by James Ellroy
95
Wise Children (1991) by Angela Carter
96
Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan
97
Northern Lights (1995) by Philip Pullman
98
American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
99
Austerlitz (2001) by W. G. Sebald
100

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