1.

War and Peace (F)

War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in...

Leo Tolstoy1869The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's

Reading List, Wikipedia2.

1984 (F)

George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision of "Negative Utopia" is timelier than ever-and its warnings more powerful.

George Orwell1949The Telegraph, The Guardian, NYPL,

Radcliffe, Modern Library3.

Ulysses (F)

Written over a seven-year period, from 1914 to 1921, this book has survived bowdlerization, legal action and controversy. The novel...

James Joyce1922The Telegraph, The Guardian, NYPL,

Radcliffe, Modern Library4.

Lolita (F)

The hilarious and tragic story of Humbert Humbert, a middle-aged Russian man who feels passion only for young the "nymphet" Dolores...

Vladimir Nabokov1955The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern

Library, Time5.

The Sound and the Fury (F)

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told...

William Faulkner1929The Guardian, Oprah's Book Club,

Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time6. Man (F)

Invisible

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952. A...

Ralph Ellison1952The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern

Library, Time7.

To the Lighthouse (F)

A landmark of modern fiction, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse explores the subjective reality of everyday life in the Hebrides...

Virginia Woolf1927The Guardian, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern

Library, Time8.

The Illiad and The Odyssey (F)

Gripping listeners and readers for more than 2,700 years, The Iliad is the story of the Trojan War and the rage of Achilles....

Homer8th century B.C.The Telegraph, The Guardian, St.

John's Reading List9.

Pride and Prejudice (F)

Few have failed to be charmed by the witty and independent spirit of Elizabeth Bennet. Her early determination to dislike Mr. Darcy...

Jane Austen1813The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's

Reading List10.

Divine Comedy (F)

Dante Alighieri's poetic masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, is a moving human drama, an unforgettable visionary journey through the...

Dante Alighieri1321The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's

Reading List11.

Canterbury Tales (F)

With their astonishing diversity of tone and subject matter, The Canterbury Tales have become one of the touchstones of medieval...

Geoffrey Chaucer15th centuryThe Telegraph, The Guardian,

St. John's Reading List12.

Gulliver's Travels (F)

The voyages of an Englishman carry him to such strange places as Lilliput, where people are six inches tall; Brobdingnag, a land of...

Jonathan Swift1726The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's

Reading List13.

Middlemarch (F)

It was George Eliot's ambition to create a world and portray a whole community--tradespeople, middle classes, country gentry--in...

George Eliot1874The Telegraph, The Guardian, St. John's

Reading List14.

Things Fall Apart (F)

Chinua Achebe's tragic novel of pre-colonial Igbo society was a major literary and cultural event when it was published in 1958....

Chinua Achebe1958Newsweek, The Guardian, Wikipedia,

NYPL, Radcliffe, Time15. Rye (F)

The Catcher in the

Holden, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story...

J. D. Salinger1951Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time16.

Gone with the Wind (F)

Margaret Mitchell's epic novel of love and war won the Pulitzer Prize and went on to give rise to two authorized sequels and one of...

Margaret Mitchell1936The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL,

Radcliffe, Time17. Solitude(F)

One Hundred Years of

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez1967The Telegraph, The Guardian,

Oprah's Book Club, Wikipedia, NYPL18. Gatsby (F)

The Great

A portrait of the Jazz Age in all of its decadence and excess,Gatsby captured the spirit of the author's generation and earned...

F. Scott Fitzgerald1925NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time19.

Catch-22 (F)

Catch-22 is like no other novel. It is one of the funniest books ever written, a keystone work in American literature, and even...

Joseph Heller1961Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time20.

Beloved (F)

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and...

Toni Morrison1987The Telegraph, The Guardian, Radcliffe, Time

The Grapes of Wrath (F)

Forced from their home, the Joad family is lured to California to find work; instead they find disillusionment, exploitation, and...

John Steinbeck1939NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time22.

Midnight's Children (F)

Winner of the Booker of BookersSaleem Sinai is born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, the very moment of India's...

Salman Rushdie1981Newsweek, The Guardian, Radcliffe,

Modern Library, Time23.

Brave New World (F)

Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future where humans are genetically...

Aldous Huxley1932The Telegraph, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern

Library24.

Mrs. Dalloway (F)

This brilliant novel explores the hidden springs of thought and action in one day of a woman's life. Direct and vivid in her...

Virginia Woolf1925The Guardian, St. John's Reading List,

Radcliffe, Time25.

Native Son (F)

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was...

Richard Wright1940NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time26.

Democracy in America (NF)

In the mid-1800s, a French political scientist named Alexis de Tocqueville came to the United States to appraise the meaning and...

Alexis de Tocqueville1835The Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List27.

On the Origin of Species (NF)

In The Origin of Species (1859) Darwin challenged many of the most deeply-held beliefs of the Western world. Arguing for a...

Charles Darwin1859The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List28.

The Histories (NF)

A Greek historian, Herodotus (c.485-425 BC) left his native town of Halicarnassus, a Greek colony, to travel extensively. He...

Herodotus440 B.C.The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List29.

The Social Contract (NF)

The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau1762The Telegraph, St. John's

Reading List30.

Das Kapital (NF)

One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, "Capital" is an incisive critique of...

Karl Marx1867The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List31.

The Prince (NF)

A new edition of the highly exalted and infamous discourse containing observations and instructions on the significance of a rise...

Niccolo Machiavelli1532The Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List32.

Confessions (NF)

When Saint Augustine wrote his Confessions he was facing, and responding to, a growing spread of asceticism in the Roman world.

St. Augustine4th centuryThe Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List33.

Leviathan (NF)

The Leviathan is the vast unity of the State. But how are unity, peace and security to be attained' Hobbes' answer is sovereignty,...

Thomas Hobbes1651The Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List34. War (NF)

The History of the Peloponnesian

Written four hundred years before the birth of Christ, this detailed contemporary account of the struggle between Athens and Sparta...

Thucydides431 B.C.The Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List35.

The Lord of the Rings (F)

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind themIn ancient times the...

J. R. R. Tolkien1954The Telegraph, Wikipedia, Radcliffe,

Time36.

Winnie-the-Pooh (F)

Edward Bear acquires a new name, Winnie-the-Pooh, and a new life with the inhabitants of the Hundred Acre Woods.

A. A. Milne1926The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe37.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (F)

They open a door and enter a world.

C. S. Lewis1950The Telegraph, Wikipedia, NYPL, Time38.

A Passage to India (F)

When Adela and her elderly companion Mrs Moore arrive in the Indian town of Chandrapore, they quickly feel trapped by its insular...

E. M. Forster1924NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time39.

On the Road (F)

First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life...

Jack Kerouac1957NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time40.

To Kill a Mockingbird (F)

Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterwork of honor and injustice in the deep South -- and the heroism of one man in the face...

Harper Lee1960Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe, Time

41.

The Holy Bible. Revised Standard Version.

The beloved and timeless King James Version is made available in an affordable edition for Sunday schools, Bible clubs, church...

NASt. John's Reading List, Wikipedia, NYPL42. Clockwork Orange (F)

Anthony Burgess's modern classic of youthful violence and social redemption, reissued to include the controversial last chapter not...

Anthony Burgess1962NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time43.

Light in August (F)

Joe Christmas does not know whether he is black or white. Faulkner makes of Joe's tragedy a powerful indictment of racism; at the...

William Faulkner1932Oprah's Book Club, Radcliffe, Modern

Library, Time44.

The Souls of Black Folk (NF)

In this founding work in the literature of black protest, first published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868'1963) eloquently affirms...

W. E. B. Du Bois1903St. John's Reading List, NYPL, Modern

Library45.

Wide Sargasso Sea (F)

A sensual and protected young woman, Antoinette Cosway grows up in the lush natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into...

Jean Rhys1966NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time46.

Madame Bovary (F)

Set amid the stifling atmosphere of nineteenth-century bourgeois France, Madame Bovary is at once an unsparing depiction of a...

Gustave Flaubert1857The Telegraph, The Guardian47.

Paradise Lost (F)

Paradise Lost is the great epic poem of the English language, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery,...

John Milton1667The Telegraph, St. John's Reading List48.

Anna Karenina (F)

Anna Karenina tells of the doomed love affair between the sensuous and rebellious Anna and the dashing officer, Count Vronsky....

Leo Tolstoy1877The Guardian, Oprah's Book Club49.

Hamlet (F)
One of the greatest plays of all time, the compelling tragedy of the tormented young prince of Denmark continues to capture the...

William Shakespeare1603The Guardian, St. John's Reading

List50.

King Lear (F)

A king foolishly divides his kingdom between his scheming two oldest daughters and estranges himself from the daughter who loves...

William Shakespeare1608The Guardian, St. John's Reading

List51.

Othello (F)

One of the most powerful dramas ever written for the stage, Othello is a story of revenge, illusion, passion, mistrust, jealousy,...

William Shakespeare1622The Guardian, St. John's Reading

List52.

Sonnets (F)

Shakespeare's sonnets, the greatest of Elizabethan sonnet sequences, were first published in an unauthorized version in 1609....

William Shakespeare1609The Telegraph, St. John's Reading

List53.

Leaves of Grass (F)

I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite...

Walt Whitman1855Newsweek, The Guardian54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (F)

The adventures of a boy and a runaway slave as they travel down the Mississippi River on a raft.

Mark Twain1885Newsweek, The Guardian55. Kim (F)

A white youth in India, becomes friends with an old ascetic priest, the lama. The boy juggles Imperialist life with his spiritual...

Rudyard Kipling1901Newsweek, NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern

Library56.

Frankenstein (F)

Victor Frankenstein is consumed by his desire to discover the secrets of life. After several years of research, Victor feverishly...

Mary Shelley1818Newsweek, The Telegraph57. Song of Solomon (F)

Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest...

Toni Morrison1977Oprah's Book Club, NYPL,

Radcliffe58. Nest (F)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's

Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that...

Ken Kesey1962NYPL, Radcliffe, Time59. Whom the Bell Tolls (F) Ernest Hemingway1940The Telegraph, NYPL,

For

In 1937 Ernest Hemingway traveled to Spain to cover the civil war there for the North American Newspaper Alliance. Three years...

Radcliffe60.

Slaughterhouse-Five (F)

Launched in November, Dell's Kurt Vonnegut reissue program continues with one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the...

Kurt Vonnegut1969Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

61.

Animal Farm (F)

Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the henhouses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the pop-holes. With the...

George Orwell1945Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time62.

Lord of the Flies (F)

The story that never grows old... Lord of the Flies remains as provocative today as when it was first published in 1954,...

William Golding1954Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time63.

In Cold Blood (NF)

On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts...

Truman Capote1965NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library64.

The Golden Notebook (F)

Anna is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one, with a black cover, she reviews the...

Doris Lessing1962The Guardian, NYPL, Time65. Remembrance of Things Past(F)

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing A la recherche du temps perdu. It is an intimate epic,...

Marcel Proust1913The Telegraph, The Guardian,

NYPL66.

The Big Sleep (F)

When a dying millionaire hires Philip Marlowe to handle the blackmailer of one of his two troublesome daughters, Marlowe finds...

Raymond Chandler1939The Telegraph, NYPL, Time67.

As I Lay Dying (F)

One of William Faulkner's finest novels, As I Lay Dying was originally published in 1930, and remains a captivating and...

William Faulkner1930Oprah's Book Club, Radcliffe, Modern

Library68.

The Sun Also Rises (F)

The quintessential novel of the Lost Generation, The Sun Also Rises is one of Ernest Hemingway's masterpieces and a classic example...

Ernest Hemingway1926Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time69.

I, Claudius (F)
Considered an idiot because of his physical infirmities, Claudius survived the intrigues and poisonings of the reigns of Augustus,...

Robert Graves1934The Telegraph, Modern Library, Time70.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter(F)

With the publication of her first novel, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, Carson McCullers, all of twenty-three, became a literary ...

Carson McCullers1940Oprah's Book Club, Modern Library,

Time71.

Sons and Lovers (F)

Sons and Lovers is a highly autobiographical and compelling portrayal of childhood, adolescence, and the price of family bonds....

D. H. Lawrence1913The Guardian, Radcliffe, Modern

Library72.

All the King's Men (F)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It...

Robert Penn Warren1946Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time73.

Go Tell It on the Mountain (F)

James Baldwin's portrayal of black people in Harlem caught up in a dramatic struggle, and of a society confronting inevitable change.

James Baldwin1953Radcliffe, Modern Library,

Time74.

Charlotte's Web (F)

Beloved by generations, Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little are two of the most cherished stories of all time. Now, for the first...

E. B. White1952Wikipedia, NYPL, Radcliffe75. Heart of Darkness (F)

A masterpiece of twentieth-century writing, Heart of Darkness (1902) exposes the tenuous fabric that holds "civilization" together...

Joseph Conrad1902St. John's Reading List, Radcliffe, Modern

Library76.

Night (NF)

Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager...

Elie Wiesel1958Oprah's Book Club, Wikipedia, NYPL77.

Rabbit, Run (F)

Harry Angstrom was a star basketball player in high school and that was the best time of his life. Now in his mid-20s, his work is...

John Updike1960The Telegraph, Radcliffe,

Time78.

The Age of Innocence (F)

Wharton's Pulitzer Prize-winning classic novel of passion and desire. The beautiful Countess Ellen Olenska, fleeing her brutish...

Edith Wharton1920NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library79.

Portnoy's Complaint (F)

Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are...

Philip Roth1969NYPL, Modern Library, Time80. American Tragedy (F)

The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of...

An

Theodore Dreiser1925Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

81.

Nathanael West

1939 NYPL, Modern Library, Time

The Day of the Locust (F)

"Somehow or other I seem to have slipped in between all the 'schools,' " observed Nathanael West the year before his untimely death...

82.

Henry Miller

1934 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

Tropic of Cancer (F)

Banned in America for almost thirty years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of...

83.

Dashiell Hammett 1930 The Telegraph, Radcliffe, Modern Library

The Maltese Falcon (F)

Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, stars in Hammett's detective fiction, a novel...

84.

Philip Pullman

1995 The Telegraph, Wikipedia

His Dark Materials (F)

Published in 40 countries, Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy ' The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber...

85.

Willa Cather

1927 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

Death Comes for the Archbishop (F)

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert.

86.

Sigmund Freud

1900 The Telegraph, NYPL

The Interpretation of Dreams(NF)

Freud's Revolutionary Theory: This ground-breaking work, which Freud considered his most valuable, forever changed the way we...

87.

Henry Adams

1918 NYPL, Modern Library

The Education of Henry Adams(NF)

A scion of the famous Adams family of American statesmen, historian Henry Adams was more drawn to scholarship than to politics. His...

88.

Mao Zedong

1964 Wikipedia, NYPL

Quotations from Chairman Mao (NF)

Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the greatest Marxist-Leninist of our era. He has inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism with...

89.

William James

1902 NYPL, Modern Library

The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (NF)

After completing his monumental work, The Principles of Psychology, William James turned his attention to serious consideration of...

90.

Evelyn Waugh

1945 Radcliffe, Modern Library, Time

Brideshead Revisited (F)

Evelyn Waugh's best-loved novel and the basis for the PBS television production, Brideshead Revisited, the epic story of a great...

91.

Rachel Carson

1962 NYPL, Modern Library

Silent Spring (NF)

First published by Houghton Mifflin in 1962, Silent Spring alerted a large audience to the environmental and human dangers of...

92.

John Maynard Keynes

1936 NYPL, Modern Library

The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (NF)

Keynes profoundly influenced the New Deal and created the basis for classic economic theory. 'I can think of no single book that...

93.

Joseph Conrad

1900 NYPL, Radcliffe, Modern Library

Lord Jim (F)

A bold young English sailor has despised himself ever since an impulsive moment of cowardice. Jim moves East to Patusan, where...

94.

Robert Graves

1929 The Telegraph, Modern Library

Goodbye to All That (NF)

In this autobiography, first published in 1929, poet Robert Graves traces the monumental and universal loss of innocence that...

95.

John Kenneth Galbraith

1958 NYPL, Modern Library

The Affluent Society (NF)

Galbraith's classic on the "economics of abundance" is, in the words of the New York Times, "a compelling challenge to conventional...

96.

Kenneth Grahame

1908 The Telegraph, Wikipedia, Radcliffe

The Wind in the Willows (F)

This is the much-loved classic tales of Ratty, Mole, Badger and Toad. When Mole goes boating with Ratty instead of doing his...

97.

Alex Haley and Malcolm X

1965 NYPL, Modern Library

The Autobiography of Malcolm X (NF)

If there was any one man who articulated the anger, the struggle, and the beliefs of African Americans in the 1960s, that man was...

98.

Lytton Strachey

1918 The Telegraph, Modern Library

Eminent Victorians (NF)

An unparalleled manifesto for the modern biographer, Strachey's razor-sharp essays about 4 prominent Victorians brought him...

99.

Alice Walker

1982 NYPL, Radcliffe

The Color Purple (F)

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and...

100.

Winston Churchill

1948 NYPL, Modern Library

The Second World War (The Gathering Storm; Their Finest Hour; The Grand Alliance; The Hinge of Fate; (NF)
Churchill's six-volume history of World War II -- the definitive work, remarkable both for its sweep and for its sense of personal...