My list of 100 best novels: A lifetime’s treasure trove

In one of the classrooms in the Inst W block, soon to be demolished, there was a small fiction library.  One day in the late 1960s, as I was examining the books on loan, I discovered a flyer announcing a competition to decide on the best novels published by Penguin. A list of 50 titles was proposed. I didn’t enter the competition but kept the flyer and decided to make it my aim to read each of those 50 books.

Recently the Guardian came up with another list, this time of the 100 best novels of all time, chosen by a panel of contemporary authors. I had read half of them, many also included in the 1960s Penguin list. However times and tastes have changed and some titles from the 1960s were missing. T. E Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, a book I never got round to reading, was not included. Surprisingly neither was Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Perhaps the Guardian no longer considers some authors to be politically correct.  Woman authors take up a large part of today’s Guardian list, whereas they accounted for only a quarter of titles in the 1960s. I find that I am reading more woman authors these days, but I don’t think that four novels by Virginia Woolf should be included in the top 100.  

So I’ve been working on my own list of 100 best novels. It’s drawn from the Penguin list of the 1960s, the Guardian list of 2026, with additions of my own. Unlike the Guardian I decided to choose only one title per author. This gave scope to include many more novelists. The titles have not been put in order of merit, although books that are widely recognized as among the best ever written tend to be near the beginning. The novels are named in the language in which I read them. Over the last sixty years I have read every page of all these books, with the exception of Proust, where I have only read the first two volumes. Does he merit the time and effort to read all 4,000 pages?

Of course all lists like this are subjective: there is no such thing as the perfect list of best novels. Each year new novels are written and old ones are forgotten.  I’m not the same reader I was when I was a schoolboy. Books that moved me then, may today leave me cold. My list is unbalanced, prejudiced even, including a disproportionate number of Irish writers. Many amendments have been made to the list since I started it, and no doubt it will change again until I press the publish button on this post. Whatever the final choice, I find something intriguing, magical even, in a list of best novels. It’s like a lifetime’s treasure trove.

Please send me your comments and suggestions. Do you think that I have neglected any first-class authors? If so, who and why?  Have I chosen the best book by each author?  Is there an author or book here that you find poor, pretentious, boring or unreadable?  What’s your favourite?  What about a top ten?

Here goes:

  My best hundred novels

1. George Eliot: Middle-march
2. James Joyce: Ulysses
3. Jane Austen: Persuasion 
4. Marcel Proust:  A la recherche du temps perdu 
5. Joseph Conrad: Nostromo
6. Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
7. Italian Calvino: If On A Winter’s Night 
8. Miguel Cervantes: Don Quixote
9. Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
10. Charles Dickens: A Tale of Two Cities
11. Graham Greene: The Heart of the Matter
12. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: Love in the Time of Cholera
13. Flann O’Brien: The Third Policeman
14. Edna O’Brien: The Country Girls
15. Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace
16. Ernest Hemingway: For Whom The Bell Tolls
17. Eugene Mc Cabe: Death and Nightingales 
18. Kipling: Kim
19. Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway
20. Gustave Flaubert: Madame Bovary
21. Emile Zola: Germinal
22. Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir
23. Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
24. Nabokov: Lolita
25. Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5
26. Heller: Catch 22
27. Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
28. Henry James: Portrait of a Lady
29. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d’Urbervilles
30. Emily Brontë: Wuthering Heights
31. Ian McEwan: Atonement 
32. Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day 
33. Murakami: The Wind-up Bird
34. Brian Moore: Lies of Silence
35. George Orwell: 1984
36. Herman Melville: Moby Dick 
37. Laurence Sterne: The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy 
38. Arundhati Roy: The God of Small Things  
39. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale  
40. William Thackeray: Vanity Fair
41. Rohinton Mistry: A Fine Balance
42. Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide
43. J.M. Coetzee: Disgrace
44. E.M. Forster: Howard’s End
45. Albert Camus: La Peste
46. Chimananda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun 
47. Daphne du Maurier: Rebecca 
48. Iris Murdoch: The Sea, the Sea
49. John Banville: The Sea
50. Irving Welsh: Trainspotting 
51. Elisabeth Bowen: The Last September 
52. Molly Keane: Good Behaviour
53. Anna Burns: Milkman
54. Isabelle Allende: The House of the Spirits
55. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island
56. Walter Scott: Old Mortality
57. Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
58. Herman Hesse: The Glass Bead Game 
59. D.H Lawrence: Sons and Lovers
60. J.G Farrell: The Siege of Krishnapur 
61. Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
62. Igor Turgenev: Fathers and Sons
63. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso sea 
64. Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing
65. Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath
66. Jack Kerouac: On the Road 
67. V.S. Naipaul: A House for Mr Biswas 
68. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels 
69. Alain Fournier: Le Grand Meaulnes
70. Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being
71. Leila Slimani: Chanson Douce
72. Anthony Trollope: Phineas Finn
73. Honoré de Balzac : Père Goriot
74. Harper Lee: To Kill a Mockingbird
75. Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
76. Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
77. Robertson Davies: What’s Bred in the Bone
78. John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath 
79. Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders 
80. Evelyn Waugh: Scoop 
81. Mark Twain: Huckleberry Finn
82. Vikram Seth: A Suitable Boy 
83. Alexandre Dumas: Vingt an après
84. Mario Vargas Llosa: The Bad Girl 
85. Alan Paton: Cry the Beloved Country
86. Jose Saramago: Blindness
87. Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose 
88. Italo Svevo: Zeno’s Conscience 
89. Homer: The Odyssey
90. Pat Barker: Regeneration Trilogy 
91. Nadine Gordimer: The Handgun
92. Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient
93. Jan Carson: The Raptures
94. Carlo Levi: Christ stopped at Eboli
95. William Boyd: The Ice-Cream War
96. Claire Keegan: Foster
97. Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
98. Saul Bellow: Herzog 
99. Bernard McLaverty: Grace Notes 
100. Malcolm Lowry: Under the Volcano

Since first publication I’ve amended this list to take account of a number of suggestions. Several readers quickly pointed out spelling mistakes and doubles. This proves that my list was not a copy/paste effort or one generated by AI. AI has become so all pervasive these days that I think that writers prone to human errors and misspelling (sp ?) will soon make a comeback. Mark Twain and W.B.Yeats spring to mind. The most controversial choice was Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, considered by two readers as one of his weakest books. But I loved it when I first read it, aged 15, and there is no other book whose first and last lines I can remember.

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