Best Novels of All-Time

 About Novels

Definition of a Novel

For the most part, novels are dedicated to narrating individual experiences of characters, creating a closer, more complex portrait of these characters and the world they live in. Inner feelings and thoughts, as well as complex, even conflicting ideas or values are typically explored in novels, more so than in preceding forms of literature. It’s not just the stories themselves that are more personal, but the experience of reading them as well. Where epic poetry and similar forms of storytelling were designed to be publicly read or consumed as an audience, novels are geared more towards an individual reader.

Top 10

1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
2. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
3. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
5. Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
6. 1984 by George Orwell (1948)
7. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
9. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
10. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

Full List

• 1984 by George Orwell (1948)
• A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul (1979)
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
• A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell (1951)
• A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh (1934)
• A Passage to India by EM Forster (1924)
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (1916)
• A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (1859)
• All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth (1997)
• An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser (1925)
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie (1939)
• Animal Farm by George Orwell (1946)
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877)
• Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara (1934)
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner (1930)
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939)
• Atonement by Ian McEwan (2002)
• Beloved by Toni Morrison (1987)
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1986)
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932)
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (1946)
• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866)
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940)
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)
• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (1927)
• Deliverance by James Dickey (1970)
• Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce (1939)
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (1940)
• Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin (1953)
• Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (1936)
• Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973)
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899)
• Herzog by Saul Bellow (1964)
• Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (1981)
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves (1934)
• In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust (1913)
• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)
• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (1952)
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1901)
• Light in August by William Faulkner (1932)
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954)
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
• Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851)
• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)
• Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
• Neuromancer by William Gibson (1984)
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad (1904)
• Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Maugham (1915)
• Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (1937)
• On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey (1962)
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov (1962)
• Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth (1969)
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)
• Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow (1975)
• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
• Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser (1900)
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)
• Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (1913)
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (1920)
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (1939)
• The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (2000)
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (1927)
• The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
• The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (1951)
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844)
• The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles (1969)
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (1962)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
• The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (1940)
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene (1948)
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis (1950)
• The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1954)
• The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (1929)
• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer (1948)
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (1952)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark (1960)
• The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis (1955)
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)
• The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949)
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929)
• The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926)
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (1937)
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960)
• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (1929)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne (1870)
• Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch (1954)
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (1947)
• Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
• Vanity Fair by William Thackeray (1848)
• Waiting for the Barbarians by JM Coetzee (1980)
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1867)
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966)
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919)
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (1952)
• Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920)
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (1847)

20 Bonus Popular Books

• A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (1929)
• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)
• Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (1952)
• Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (1952)
• Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling (1997)
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (2016)
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1862)
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel (2001)
• Paradise Lost by John Milton (1667)
• Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho (1988)
• The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (1472)
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (2003)
• The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

3 Bonus Kid's Books

• Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (1908)
• Kindness is my Superpower: A children's Book About Empathy, Kindness and Compassion by Alicia Ortego (2020)
• Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (1883)

Resources

• Zeitgeist Popularity | LibraryThing 
• Best Sellers - Books | The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review | Wikipedia