300 Greatest Novels Of All Time

Book covers for Don Quixote and War and Peace
Criteria: These greatest novels of all time are ranked according to their initial and lasting acclaim, influence as well as initial and lasting popularity.

Disclaimer: This list is strongly influenced by the Western canon of literature. This means that in the broader scope of a global literature certain regions may be underrepresented, among them India, China, Africa and Latin America.

List Begun: 2022-11-18
Greatest Novels
  1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
  2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  3. Ulysses by James Joyce
  4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  5. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
  6. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  8. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  9. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
10. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
11. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
12. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
13. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel DeFoe
15. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
16. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
17. Middlemarch by George Eliot
18. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
19. The Trial by Franz Kafka
20. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
21. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
22. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
23. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
24. Emma by Jane Austen
25. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
26. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
27. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
28. Candide by Voltaire
29. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
30. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
31. Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
32. Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en
33. Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
34. The Stranger by Albert Camus
35. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
36. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
37. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
38. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
40. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
41. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
42. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
43. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
44. Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
45. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
46. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
47. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
48. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
49. Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory
50. Utopia by Thomas More
51. Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell
52. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
54. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
55. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
56. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
57. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
58. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
59. Eugenie Grandet by Honoré de Balzac
60. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
61. Beloved by Toni Morrison
62. The Ambassadors by Henry James
63. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
64. Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
65. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
66. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
67. A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert
68. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
69. Molloy/Malone Dies/The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
70. The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil
71. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
72. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
73. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
74. Journey to the End of Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline
75. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
76. The Castle by Franz Kafka
77. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
80. Persuasion by Jane Austen
81. Germinal by Émile Zola
82. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
83. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
84. Dracula by Bram Stoker
85. Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
86. The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
87. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
88. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
89. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
90. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
91. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de La Fayette
92. Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Guanzhong Luo
93. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
94. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
95. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
96. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
97. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
98. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
99. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
100. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

101. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
102. Native Son by Richard Wright
103. The Water Margin by Shi Naian
104. Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail
105. Animal Farm by George Orwell
106. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
107. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
108. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
109. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
110. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
111. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
112. Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy
113. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
114. The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal
115. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
116. Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
117. A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov
118. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
119. Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
120. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
121. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
122. The Plague by Albert Camus
123. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
124. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
125. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
126. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
127. Prose Tristan by Unknown
128. The Tale of the Heike by Helen Craig McCullough
129. Tale of Hong Gildong by Heo Gyun
130. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
131. My Antonia by Willa Cather
132. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
133. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
134. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
135. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
136. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
137. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
138. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
139. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek
140. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo
141. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
142. The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
143. Celestina by Fernando de Rojas
144. Lazarillo de Tormes by Diego Hurtado de Mendoza
145. Jacques the Fatalist by Denis Diderot
146. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
147. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
148. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
149. Moll Flanders by Daniel DeFoe
150. Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding
151. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
152. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
153. Waverley by Walter Scott
154. Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
155. Thérèse Raquin by Emile Zola
156. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
157. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
158. Simplicius Simplicissimus by H.J.C. von Grimmelshausen
159. The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole
160. Oroonoko by Aphra Behn
161. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
162. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
163. And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov
164. Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf
165. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
166. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
167. Cousin Bette by Honoré de Balzac
168. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
169. Charlotte's Web by E.B. White
170. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
171. Howards End by E.M. Forster
172. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
173. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
174. Nineteen Nineteen/The 42nd Parallel/The Big Money by John Dos Passos
175. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
176. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
177. The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot
178. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
179. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
180. Light in August by William Faulkner
181. Herzog by Saul Bellow
182. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
183. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
184. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
185. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
186. Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
187. The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy
188. Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
189. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
190. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
191. Hard Times by Charles Dickens
192. Silas Marner by George Eliot
193. The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
194. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne
195. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
196. Manon Lescaut by Abbe Prevost
197. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
198. The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith
199. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
200. The Call of the Wild by Jack London

201. War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
202. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
203. Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
204. Blindness by José Saramago
205. Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
206. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
207. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe
208. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
209. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
210. Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
211. Bouvard et Pécuchet by Gustave Flaubert
212. Hyperion by Friedrich Hölderlin
213. El Buscón by Francisco de Quevedo
214. The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
215. The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine De Pizan
216. Daphnis and Chloe by Longus
217. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
218. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
219. Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope
220. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
221. Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike
222. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
223. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling
224. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
225. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
226. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
227. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
228. King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard
229. La Regenta by Clarín
230. Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
231. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis
232. Maldoror (Les Chants de Maldoror) by Comte de Lautréamont
233. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
234. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
235. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
236. Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
237. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
238. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
239. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
240. The Waves by Virginia Woolf
241. Rabbit Redux by John Updike
242. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
243. Guzmán de Alfarache by Mateo Alemá
244. Pamela by Samuel Richardson
245. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
246. Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerom
247. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
248. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
249. A Room With a View by E.M. Forster
250. The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch
251. Atonement by Ian McEwan
252. Thomas of Reading, Or, The Sixe Worthie Yeomen of the West by Thomas Deloney
253. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
254. The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
255. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
256. Independent People by Halldor Laxness
257. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
258. The World According to Garp by John Irving
259. The Stand by Stephen King
260. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
261. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
262. Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
263. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
264. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
265. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
266. Rabbit at Rest by John Updike
267. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
268. Dune by Frank Herbert
269. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
270. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
271. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
272. Petersburg by Andrei Bely
273. Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
274. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
275. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
276. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
277. Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton
278. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
279. The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie
280. The Nun by Denis Diderot
281. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
282. Season of Migration to the North by Al-Tayyib Salih
283. Children of Gebelawi by Naguib Mahfouz
284. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
285. Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee
286. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
287. Fanny Hill by John Cleland
288. Julie, or the New Heloise by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
289. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
290. Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
291. Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
292. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
293. Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
294. Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford
295. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
296. The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy
297. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
298. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
299. The Road by Cormac McCarthy
300. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs


Don Quixote book cover
Don Quixote





War and Peace book cover
War and Peace




Ulysses book cover
Ulysses





Pride and Prejudice book cover
Pride and Prejudice




In Search of Lost Time book cover
In Search of Lost Time





Great Expectations book cover
Great Expectations





Adventures of Huckleberry Finn book cover
Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn




Crime and Punishment book cover
Crime and Punishment