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' 100 novels everyone should read
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' 100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
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' 99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
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' A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
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' 98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
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' A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
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' 97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
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' Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
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' 96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
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' A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
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' 95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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' Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!
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' 94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
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' The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
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' 93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
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' Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
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' 92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
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' Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
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' 91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
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' The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?
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' 90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
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' A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
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' 89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
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' Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
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' 88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
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' Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
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' 87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
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' Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
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' 86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
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' A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.
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' 85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
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' Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
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' 84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
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' “One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
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' 83 Germinal by Emile Zola
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' Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
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' 82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
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' Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
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' 81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
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' Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
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' 80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
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' An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.
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' 79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
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' Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
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' 78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
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' Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
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' 77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
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' Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
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' 76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
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' K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?
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' 75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
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' Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
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' 74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
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' Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
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' 73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
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' The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
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' 72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
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' Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.
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' 71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
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' Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
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' 70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
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' Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
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' 69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
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' International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
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' 68 Crash by JG Ballard
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' Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.
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' 67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
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' East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”
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' 66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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' Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
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' 65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
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' Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
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' 64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
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' Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.
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' 63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
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' Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.
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' 62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
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' Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
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' 61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
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' A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
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' 60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
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' Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
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' 59 London Fields by Martin Amis
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' A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
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' 58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
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' Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
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' 57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
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' Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
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' 56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
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' Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
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' 55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
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' Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
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' 54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
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' Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
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' 53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
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' After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
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' 52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
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' Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
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' 51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
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' From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
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' 50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
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' Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
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' 49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
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' “Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
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' 48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
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' Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.
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' 47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
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' A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
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' 46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
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' A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.
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' 45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
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' Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
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' 44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
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' A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
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' 43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
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' A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
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' 42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
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' A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
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' 41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
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' A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
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' 40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
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' Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
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' 39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
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' A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
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' 38The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
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' A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
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' 37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
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' “Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W H Auden.
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' 36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
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' An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
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' 35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
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' An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
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' 34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
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' “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.
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' 33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
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' Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
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' 32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
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' Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
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' 31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
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' Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.
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' 30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
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' Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.
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' 29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
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' The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
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' 28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
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' Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
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' 27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
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' Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
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' 26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
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' Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
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' 25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
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' Hailed by T S Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.
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' 24 Ulysses by James Joyce
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' Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.
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' 23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
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' Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
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' 22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
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' A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
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' 21 1984 by George Orwell
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' In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
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' 20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
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' Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
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' 19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
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' Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
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' 18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
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' Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
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' 17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
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' Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
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' 16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
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' A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
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' 15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
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' A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
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' 14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
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' Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
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' 13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
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' Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.
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' 12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
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' A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
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' 11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
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' Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
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' 10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
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' Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
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' 9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
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' Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.
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' 8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
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' An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
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' 7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
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' Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
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' 6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
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' Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
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' 5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
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' “The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”
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' 4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
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' An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
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' 3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
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' Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
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' 2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
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' Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
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' 1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
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' “One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
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Ëó÷øèå êíèãè ïî âåðñèè BBC -- Spear -- 30.07.09@15:50 (×èò.: 386)