Because everyone likes lists . . .
My top 100 novels. Fortunately, this list is still in progress! Last updated in 2026.
- War and Peace. Leo Tolstoy
- The Brothers Karamazov. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Ulysses. James Joyce
- Don Quixote. Miguel de Cervantes
- The Wings of the Dove. Henry James
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. James Joyce
- Anna Karenina. Leo Tolstoy
- Their Eyes Were Watching God. Zora Neale Hurston
- One Hundred Years of Solitude. Gabriel García Márquez
- The Power and the Glory. Graham Greene
- The Great Gatsby. F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Sound and the Fury. William Faulkner
- Beloved. Toni Morrison
- Infinite Jest. David Foster Wallace
- Native Son. Richard Wright
- Stoner. John Williams
- Crime and Punishment. Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Golden Bowl. Henry James
- Clarissa. Samuel Richardson
- The Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann
- From Here to Eternity. James Jones
- Of Human Bondage. Somerset Maugham
- Love in the Time of Cholera. Gabriel García Márquez
- Voss. Patrick White
- Washington Square. Henry James
- The Heart of the Matter. Graham Greene
- The Secret Agent. Joseph Conrad
- The Old Wives’ Tale. Arnold Bennett
- 2666. Roberto Bolaño
- The Moonstone. Wilkie Collins
- Darkness at Noon. Arthur Koestler
- Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell
- Lolita. Vladimir Nabokov
- The Adventures of Augie March. Saul Bellow
- Quicksand. Nella Larsen
- Lord of the Flies. William Golding
- The Age of Innocence. Edith Wharton
- The Monk. Matthew Lewis
- Buddenbrooks. Thomas Mann
- The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith
- I, Claudius. Robert Graves
- The Color Purple. Alice Walker
- The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea. Yukio Mishima
- The Transylvanian Trilogy. Miklós Bánffy
- Go Tell it on the Mountain. James Baldwin
- All the King’s Men. Robert Penn Warren
- Alone in Berlin. Hans Fallada
- An American Tragedy. Theodore Dreiser
- Moby Dick. Herman Melville
- Madame Bovary. Gustave Flaubert
- Things Fall Apart. Chinua Achebe
- Butcher’s Crossing. John Williams
- The Grapes of Wrath. John Steinbeck
- The Naked and the Dead. Norman Mailer
- Catch 22. Joseph Heller
- The Strudlhof Steps. Heimito von Doderer
- Under the Volcano. Malcolm Lowry
- As I Lay Dying. William Faulkner
- Jude the Obscure. Thomas Hardy
- The Death of the Heart. Elizabeth Bowen
- To the Lighthouse. Virginia Woolf
- White Noise. Don DeLillo
- A Clockwork Orange. Anthony Burgess
- A Tale of Two Cities. Charles Dickens
- A Room with a View. E. M. Forster
- Solomon Gursky Was Here. Mordecai Richler
- Brave New World. Aldous Huxley
- Under the Net. Irish Murdoch
- Freedom. Jonathan Franzen
- Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh
- The Good Soldier. Ford Madox Ford
- Brighton Rock. Graham Greene
- Independent People. Halldór Laxness
- The Information. Martin Amis
- The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde
- Late Nights on Air. Elizabeth Hay
- Loving. Henry Green
- The Catcher in the Rye. J. D. Salinger
- McTeague. Frank Norris
- The Remains of the Day. Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Left Hand of Darkness. Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Bridge on the Drina. Ivo Andrić
- Can You Forgive Her? Anthony Trollope
- The Hunter. Richard Stark
- Empire Falls. Richard Russo
- Dune. Frank Herbert
- The God of Small Things. Arundhati Roy
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman. John Fowles
- The Grand Hotel. Vicki Baum
- Between Clay and Dust. Musharraf Ali Farooqi
- Frankenstein. Mary Shelley
- Winesburg, Ohio. Sherwood Anderson
- We Need to Talk About Kevin. Lionel Shriver
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain
- No Great Mischief. Alistair Macleod
- The Line of Beauty. Alan Hollinghurst
- Memento Mori. Muriel Spark
- Women in Love. D. H. Lawrence
- 1Q84. Haruki Murakami
- The Man Without Qualities. Robert Musil