
The top 100 books of all time
The 100 greatest non-fiction books
Looking for great book recommendations? Ourcritics and experts pick the best books, and give thedefinitive subject lists
1984 byGeorge Orwell, England, (1903-1950)
A Doll's House byHenrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906)
A Sentimental Education byGustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
Absalom, Absalom! byWilliam Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn byMark Twain, United States, (1835-1910)
The Aeneid byVirgil, Italy, (70-19 BC)
Anna Karenina byLeo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Beloved byToni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931)
Berlin Alexanderplatz byAlfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957)
Blindness byJose Saramago, Portugal, (1922-2010)
The Book of Disquiet byFernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935)
The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC)
The Brothers Karamazov byFyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Buddenbrooks byThomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Canterbury Tales byGeoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400)
The Castle byFranz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Children of Gebelawi byNaguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911)
Collected Fictions byJorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986)
Complete Poems byGiacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837)
The Complete Stories byFranz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
The Complete Tales byEdgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849)
Confessions of Zeno byItalo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928)
Crime and Punishment byFyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Dead Souls byNikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852)
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories byLeo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Decameron byGiovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands byJoao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories byLu Xun, China, (1881-1936)
The Divine Comedy byDante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321)
Don Quixote byMiguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616)
Essays byMichel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592)
Fairy Tales and Stories byHans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875)
Faust byJohann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832)
Gargantua and Pantagruel byFrancois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553)
Gilgamesh Mesopotamia, (c 1800 BC)
The Golden Notebook byDoris Lessing, England, (b.1919)
Great Expectations byCharles Dickens, England, (1812-1870)
Gulliver's Travels byJonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745)
Gypsy Ballads byFederico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936)
Hamlet byWilliam Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
History byElsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985)
Hunger byKnut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952)
The Idiot byFyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
The Iliad byHomer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Independent People byHalldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998)
Invisible Man byRalph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master byDenis Diderot, France, (1713-1784)
Journey to the End of the Night byLouis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961)
King Lear byWilliam Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Leaves of Grass byWalt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy byLaurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768)
Lolita byVladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977)
Love in the Time of Cholera byGabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
Madame Bovary byGustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880)
The Magic Mountain byThomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955)
Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC)
The Man Without Qualities byRobert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942)
The Mathnawi byJalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273)
Medea byEuripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC)
Memoirs of Hadrian byMarguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987)
Metamorphoses byOvid, Italy, (c 43 BC)
Middlemarch byGeorge Eliot, England, (1819-1880)
Midnight's Children bySalman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947)
Moby-Dick byHerman Melville, United States, (1819-1891)
Mrs. Dalloway byVirginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300)
Nostromo byJoseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924)
The Odyssey byHomer, Greece, (c 700 BC)
Oedipus the King Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC)
Old Goriot byHonore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850)
The Old Man and the Sea byErnest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961)
One Hundred Years of Solitude byGabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia, (b. 1928)
The Orchard bySheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292)
Othello byWilliam Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616)
Pedro Paramo byJuan Rulfo Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986)
Pippi Longstocking byAstrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002)
Poems byPaul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970)
The Possessed byFyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881)
Pride and Prejudice byJane Austen, England, (1775-1817)
The Ramayana byValmiki, India, (c 300 BC)
The Recognition of Sakuntala byKalidasa, India, (c. 400)
The Red and the Black byStendhal, France, (1783-1842)
Remembrance of Things Past byMarcel Proust, France, (1871-1922)
Season of Migration to the North byTayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929)
Selected Stories byAnton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904)
Sons and Lovers byDH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930)
The Sound and the Fury byWilliam Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962)
The Sound of the Mountain byYasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972)
The Stranger byAlbert Camus, France, (1913-1960)
The Tale of Genji byShikibu Murasaki, Japan, (c 1000)
Things Fall Apart byChinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930)
Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500)
The Tin Drum byGunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927)
To the Lighthouse byVirginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941)
The Trial byFranz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable bySamuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989)
Ulysses byJames Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941)
War and Peace byLeo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910)
Wuthering Heights byEmily Brontë, England, (1818-1848)
Zorba the Greek byNikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957)
This list of the 100 best books of all time was prepared by Norwegian Book Clubs. They asked 100 authors from 54 countries around the world to nominate the ten books which have had the most decisive impact on the cultural history of the world, and left a mark on the authors' own thinking. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided