Best English Novels for Reading Project
1. The
Lord of the Rings
by JRR Tolkein
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic
creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.
2. To
Kill a Mockingbird by
Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and
freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.
3. The
Home and the World
by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a
radical revolutionary appears.
4. The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a
Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.
5. One
Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall
post-coital execution.
6. The
Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already
engaged. Woe is he!
7. Midnight’s
Children
by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims
are switched at birth.
8. Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy
by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for
British spies suspected of treason.
9. Cold
Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances.
“Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.
10. The
Tale of Genji
by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the
world’s first novel?
11. Under
the Net
by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine
movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.
12. The
Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s
liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.
13. Eugene
Onegin
by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel
of thwarted love.
14. On
the Road
by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn
like fabulous yellow roman candles”.
15. Old
Goriot
by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration
realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social
climbing.
16. The
Red and the Black
by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism
and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.
17. The
Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous
swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.
• Follow Telegraph Books on Twitter
18. Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal
unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.
19. The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and
accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.
20. The
Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a
14th-century Italian monastry.
21. Oscar
and Lucinda
by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest
he can’t move a glass church 400km.
22. Wide
Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice
to the mad woman in the attic.
23. Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to
believe six impossible things before breakfast.
24. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine
gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?
25. The
Trial
by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly
arrested. But “innocent of what”?
26. Cider
with Rosie
by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of
golden fire” is under a hay wagon.
27. Waiting
for the Mahatma
by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian
youth becomes an anti-British extremist.
28. All
Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a
teenage soldier.
29. Dinner
at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by
their parents’ unexplained separation.
30. The
Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into
18th-century Chinese society.
31. The
Leopard
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the
“jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.
32. If On
a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this
playful postmodernist puzzle.
33. Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born
from a perverse technology”.
34. 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.”
35. Crime
and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with
an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.
36. Dr
Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by
the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.
37. The
Cairo Trilogy
by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the
First World War to the coup of 1952.
38. The
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a
dream.
39. Gulliver’s
Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall
tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).
40. My
Name Is Red
by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591.
Unusually, we hear from the corpse.
41. One
Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in
this Colombian family saga.
42. London
Fields
by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed
diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.
43. The
Savage Detectives
by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world,
sleep around, challenge critics to duels.
44. The
Glass Bead Game
by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game
of musical and mathematical rules.
45. The
Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key
text of European magic realism.
46. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born
historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.
47. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent
“nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.
48. The
Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile,
fertile women are enslaved for breeding.
49. The
Catcher in the Rye
by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent
anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.
50. Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all
late-20th-century American life is here.
51. Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down
the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.
52. The
Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl
seeking decent wages and dignity.
53. Go
Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in
Harlem’s African-American community.
54. The
Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But
if life means nothing, it can’t matter.
55. The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite
pupil who becomes a nun.
56. The
Voyeur
by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the
beach. If so, who heard?
57. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by
his existence, but decides to muddle on.
58. The
Rabbit books
by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is
unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.
59. The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the
Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.
60. The
Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the
midnight moors.
61. The
House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for
love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.
62. Things
Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is
shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.
63. The
Great Gatsby
by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman
with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.
64. The
Warden
by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best
understands the role of money,” said W. H Auden.
65. Les
Misérables
by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for
good, but it ends badly.
66. Lucky
Jim by
Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with
his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.
67. The
Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in
this hardboiled crime noir.
68. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is
savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.
69. A
Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated
character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.
70. Suite
Francaise
by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was
gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied
France.
71. Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country
house novel.
72. Life:
a User’s Manual
by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian
apartment block. Plus empty rooms.
73. Tom
Jones
by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing
his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.
74. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous
mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.
75. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against
the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.
76. The
Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by TS Eliot as “the first, the longest,
and the best of modern English detective novels”.
77. Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with
humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391
words.
78. Madame
Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a
provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end.
79. A
Passage to India
by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist
oppression of British rule in India.
80. 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than
the TV series it inspired.
81. Tristram
Shandy
by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy,
experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!
82. The
War of the Worlds
by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by
a dose of the sniffles.
83. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this
journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.
84. Tess
of the D’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the
cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.
85. Brighton
Rock
by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and
marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.
86. The
Code of the Woosters by
PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely
manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.
87. Wuthering
Heights
by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and
Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.
88. David
Copperfield
by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s
semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital
fellows.
89. Robinson
Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God,
and a native to convert, on a desert island.
90. Pride
and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced
girl. And a stately pile.
91. Don
Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a
skinny horse tilting at windmills.
92. Mrs
Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s
stream-of-consciousness party.
93. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South
Africa loses everything after seducing a student.
94. Jane
Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr
Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.
95. In
Search of Lost Time
by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring
literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.
96. Heart
of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is
not a pretty thing.”
97. The
Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her
destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.
98. Anna
Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a
daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.
99. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on
the white whale which ate his leg.
100. Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for
grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.
101. Don Quixote Miguel
De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced
readers for centuries.
102. Pilgrim's
Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
103. Robinson
Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
104. Gulliver's
Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of
Swift's vision.
105. Tom Jones Henry
Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of
sex ending in a blissful marriage.
106. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
107. Tristram
Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for
its own good.
108. Dangerous
Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and
ferocious.
109. Emma Jane
Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never
fails to fascinate and annoy.
110. Frankenstein Mary
Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
111. Nightmare
Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
112. The Black
Sheep Honoré De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
113. The
Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in
post-Napoleonic France.
114. The Count of
Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of
adventure writing.
115. Sybil Benjamin
Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary
genius.
116. David
Copperfield Charles DickensThis highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
117. Wuthering
Heights Emily Brontë
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to
ignore.
118. Jane
Eyre Charlotte Brontë
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
119. Vanity
Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
120. The Scarlet
Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
121. Moby-Dick Herman
Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any
novel.
122. Madame Bovary Gustave
Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss
the point entirely.
123. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental
cruelty.
124. Alice's
Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still
baffles most kids.
125. Little Women Louisa
M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
126. The Way We
Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
127. Anna Karenina Leo
Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
128. Daniel
Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
129. The Brothers 1Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
130. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
131. Huckleberry 1Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral
and still incredibly influential.
132. The Strange
Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural
storyteller.
133. Three Men in
a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
134. The Picture
of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured
homosexuality.
135. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of
Mr Pooter.
136. Jude the
Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
137. The Riddle of
the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the
Irish republican rising.
138. The Call of
the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
139. Nostromo Joseph
Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
140. The Wind in
the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's
son.
141. In Search of
Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle époque. Probably the longest
novel on this list.
142. The Rainbow D.
H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
143. The Good
Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of
unreliable narration.
144. The Thirty-Nine
Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and
suspense.
145. Ulysses James
Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than
read.
146. Mrs Dalloway Virginia
Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English
novelists.
147. A Passage to
India EM Forster
Forster's great love song to India.
148. The Great
Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
149. The Trial Franz
Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
150. Men Without
Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first
attracted notice.
151. Journey to
the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece
of linguistic innovation.
152. As I Lay
Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
153. Brave New
World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
154. Scoop Evelyn
Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.
155. USA John
Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express
the story of America.
156. The Big Sleep Raymond
Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
157. The Pursuit
Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
158. The Plague Albert
Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
159. Nineteen
Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated
the world over.
160. Malone
Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the
author of Waiting for Godot.
161. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still
mesmerises.
162. Wise Blood Flannery
O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
163. Charlotte's
Web EB White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
164. The Lord Of
The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
165. Lucky Jim Kingsley
Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
166. Lord of the
Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
167. The Quiet
American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
168 On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
169. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and
narrative.
170. The Tin Drum Günter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
171. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
172. The Prime of Miss Jean BrodieMuriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut
glass.
173. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice
in the Deep South.
174. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
'He would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was
sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he
didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
175. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
176. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García
Márquez
A postmodern masterpiece.
177. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.
178. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carré
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.
179. Song of Solomon Toni MorrisonThe definitive novelist of the African-American experience.
180. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.
181. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is
possibly his masterpiece.
182. If on a Winter's Night a TravellerItalo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.
183. A Bend in the River VS Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily
reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.
184. Waiting for
the Barbarians JM Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
185. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of
women.
186. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.
187. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
188. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.
189. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.
190. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.
191. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo
Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends
and family.
192. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double
Booker prizewinner.
193. The Book of
Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical
fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.
194. Haroun and the Sea of StoriesSalman Rushdie
195. LA Confidential James Ellroy
196. Wise Children Angela Carter
197. Atonement Ian McEwan
198. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
199. American Pastoral Philip Roth
200. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald