The Observer's 100 Best Novels

Given by The Observer

100 Works 1,592,609 Books 25,888 Reviews ½ 3.9
"Without any reference to the 2003 list, for the next 100 weeks the Observer, in collaboration with the Guardian, and supported by Waterstones, will publish a serial account of the classic English show more and American novel, from A to Z, and from the late 17th century to the present day."

The Observer, 22 Sep 2013

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Not to be confused with The Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of all Time published in 2003 which includes translations into English. show less
Year Awarded:
2013
WorkOrder Label
The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by John Bunyan
1
Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe
2
Gulliver's Travels (1727) by Jonathan Swift
3
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady (1747) by Samuel Richardson
4
Tom Jones (1749) by Henry Fielding
5
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759) by Laurence Sterne
6
Emma (1815) by Jane Austen
7
Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
8
Nightmare Abbey (1818) by Thomas Love Peacock
9
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1833) by Edgar Allan Poe
10
Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) by Benjamin Disraeli
11
Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
12
Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
13
Vanity Fair (1848) by William Makepeace Thackeray
14
David Copperfield (1850) by Charles Dickens
15
The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne
16
Moby Dick (1851) by Herman Melville
17
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll
18
The Moonstone (1868) by Wilkie Collins
19
Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott
20
Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot
21
The Way We Live Now (1874) by Anthony Trollope
22
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
23
Kidnapped (1886) by Robert Louis Stevenson
24
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) (1889) by Jerome K. Jerome
25
The Sign of Four (1890) by Arthur Conan Doyle
26
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
27
New Grub Street (1891) by George Gissing
28
Jude the Obscure (1895) by Thomas Hardy
29
The Red Badge of Courage (1894) by Stephen Crane
30
Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
31
Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad
32
Sister Carrie (1900) by Theodore Dreiser
33
Kim (1901) by Rudyard Kipling
34
The Call of the Wild (1903) by Jack London
35
The Golden Bowl (1904) by Henry James
36
Hadrian the Seventh (1904) by Frederick Rolfe
37
The Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth Grahame
38
The History of Mr. Polly (1910) by H. G. Wells
39
Zuleika Dobson (1911) by Max Beerbohm
40
The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Madox Ford
41
The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) by John Buchan
42
The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence
43
Of Human Bondage (1915) by W. Somerset Maugham
44
The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton
45
Ulysses (1922) by James Joyce
46
Babbitt (1922) by Sinclair Lewis
47
A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster
48
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) by Anita Loos
49
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf
50
The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
51
Lolly Willowes, or The Loving Huntsman (1926) by Sylvia Townsend Warner
52
The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway
53
The Maltese Falcon (1930) by Dashiell Hammett
54
As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
55
Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
56
Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons
57
1919 (1932) by John Dos Passos
58
Tropic of Cancer (1934) by Henry Miller
59
Scoop (1938) by Evelyn Waugh
60
Murphy (1938) by Samuel Beckett
61
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
62
Party Going (1939) by Henry Green
63
At Swim-Two-Birds (1939) by Flann O'Brien
64
The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
65
Joy in the Morning (1947) by P. G. Wodehouse
66
All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren
67
Under the Volcano (1947) by Malcolm Lowry
68
The Heat of the Day (1948) by Elizabeth Bowen
69
1984 (1949) by George Orwell
70
The End of the Affair (1951) by Graham Greene
71
The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
72
The Adventures of Augie March (1953) by Saul Bellow
73
Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
74
Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
75
On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
76
Voss (1957) by Patrick White
77
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
78
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) by Muriel Spark
79
Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
80
The Golden Notebook (1962) by Doris Lessing
81
A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
82
A Single Man (1964) by Christopher Isherwood
83
In Cold Blood (1965) by Truman Capote
84
The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
85
Portnoy's Complaint (1967) by Philip Roth
86
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor
87
Rabbit Redux (1971) by John Updike
88
Song of Solomon (1977) by Toni Morrison
89
A Bend in the River (1979) by V. S. Naipaul
90
Midnight's Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
91
Housekeeping (1980) by Marilynne Robinson
92
Money: A Suicide Note (1984) by Martin Amis
93
An Artist of the Floating World (1986) by Kazuo Ishiguro
94
The Beginning of Spring (1988) by Penelope Fitzgerald
95
Breathing Lessons (1988) by Anne Tyler
96
Amongst Women (1990) by John McGahern
97
Underworld (1997) by Don DeLillo
98
Disgrace (1999) by J. M. Coetzee
99
True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) by Peter Carey
100

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