A childs-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.

98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore

A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.
97 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Dont panic.
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian kings new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but shes already engaged. Woe is he!
94 Midnights Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carr
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. Something nasty has been observed in the
woodshed.
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperors son. And the worlds first novel?
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and womens liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls inner
space fiction.
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles.
86 Old Goriot by Honor de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero Rastingnac became a
byword for ruthless social climbing.
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his force
dame.
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
One for all and all for one: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to germinate social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of
French miners.
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus

Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts the gentle indifference of the world.
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.
READ: The best books of 2014
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he cant move a glass church 400km.
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.
78 Alices Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carrolls ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isnt that crazy?
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims hes innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But innocent of what?
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonists first long secret drink of golden fire is under a hay wagon.
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents unexplained separation.
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldis Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the jackals ousting the nobility, or leopards.
69 If On a Winters Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.
68 Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology.
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds The world is what it is.
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia,
redemption.
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctors idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.

63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevensons bogey tale came to him in a dream.
62 Gullivers Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swifts scribulous satire on travellers tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George Is).
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garca Mrquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a womans trashed diaries which reveal shes plotting her own murder.
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolao
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.
56 The Tin Drum by Gnter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the
Holocaust.
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholars sexual obsession with a prepubescent nymphet is complicated by her mothers
passion for him.
53 The Handmaids Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a phony prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
READ: The best books of 2014
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Okies set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlems African-American community.
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctors infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it cant matter.
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.

45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet

Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum sivilisation.
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmers local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionarys
arrival.
38The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaires love for a woman with a voice full of money gets him in trouble.
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money, said W?H Auden.
36 Les Misrables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Dead men are heavier than broken hearts in this hardboiled crime noir.
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroines bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert
Lovelace.
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears the wrong kind of overcoat.
31 Suite Francaise by Irne Nmirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life
in Nazi-occupied France.
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the c word in the classic English country house novel.
29 Life: a Users Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.

27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Human endeavours to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world have
tragic consequences.
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial
revolution.
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by TS Eliot as the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels.
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest
sentences in English literature: 4,391 words.
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctors wife to an agonising end.
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.
21 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sternes bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill
Deedes.
17 Tess of the DUrbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greenes literary Punch and Judy show.
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentlemans personal gentleman.
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each others souls. Then he
storms off.
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickenss semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads,
creeps and capital fellows.
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimuss suicide doesnt spoil our heroines stream-of-consciousness party.
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literatures most celebrated lemony cake.
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The conquest of the earth, said Conrad, is not a pretty thing.
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe affronts her destiny by marrying an adulterous egoist.
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoys doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow.
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
One of the few English novels written for grown-up people, said Virginia Woolf.
Top 20 Life-Changing Novels by Women
1 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
2 The Handmaids Tale Margaret Atwood
3 Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter JK Rowling
5 Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
6 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen
7 Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
8 Little Women Louisa May Alcott
9 The Secret History Donna Tartt
10 I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith

11 The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

12 Beloved Toni Morrison
13 Gone With The Wind Margaret Mitchell
14 We Need To Talk About Kevin Lionel Shriver
15 The Time Travellers Wife Audrey Niffenegger
16 Middlemarch George Eliot
17 I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings Maya Angelou
18 The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing
19 The Colour Purple Alice Walker
20 The Womens Room Marilyn French

Oeroeg
by Hella S. Haasse