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The Top 99 Greatest Novels

(See also The Top 99 Greatest Works of Literature)

This Top 99 Novels list shows the consensus of readers, writers, critics and scholars about the most acclaimed works in the novel and novella formats.

The selection of titles is based on the hundreds of sources drawn upon to create our flagship list, The Greatest Literature of All Time. A complex algorithm has been applied to determine the highest rated works and produce this ranked list in descending order.

For a longer and more diverse selection, see our chronological lists: The Greatest Novels of All Time (777 entries) and The Greatest Novellas of All Time (111 entries).

Consensus changes over time, of course, and this ranking will likewise evolve. Updates will be posted periodically.

Latest update: September 5, 2023

1. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, novel, 1605–1615
2. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1865–1869
3. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1874
4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, novel, 1955
5. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1857
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, novel, 1967
7. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, novel, 1949
8. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1866
9. Ulysses, James Joyce, novel, 1922
10. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, novel, 1884
11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, novel, 1925
12. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, novel, 1913–1937
13. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1889
14. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, novel, 1813
15. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, novel, 1958
16. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, novel, 17826
17. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, novel, 1851
18. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, novel, 1818
19. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, prose narrative, 1851
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot, novel, 1872
21. Beloved, Toni Morrison, novel, 1987
22. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, novel, 1885
23. Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel, 1954–1955
24. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, novel, 1759–1767
25. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, novel, 1847
26. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, novel, 1981
27. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, novel, 1881
28. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, novel, 1865
29. The Outsider, Albert Camus, novella, 1942
30. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, novel, 1847
31. Dracula, Bram Stoker, novel, 1897
32. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, novel, 1980
33. Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, novel, 1791–1792
34. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, novella, 1902
35. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, novel, 1960
36. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, novel, 1952
37. Candide, Voltaire, novella, 1759
38. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, novel, 1939
39. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, novel, 1951
40. Les Misérables, Victor-Marie Hugo, novel, 1862
41. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, novel, 1916
42. Animal Farm, George Orwell, novella, 1945
43. Life of Pi, Yann Martel, novel, 2002
44. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, novel, 1891
45. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, novel, 1939
46. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, novel, 1957
47. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Luo Guanzhong, novelc. c.1360–1400
48. The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, novella, 1886
49. The Red and the Black, Stendhal, novel, 1831
50. The Count of Monte-Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, novel, 1844–1846
51. Journey to the West, Wu Cheng'en, novel, 1592
52. Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol, novel, 1842
53. Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, novel, 1936
54. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, novel, 1898
55. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, novel, 1719
56. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, novel, 1916
57. The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, novel, 1774
58. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, novel, 1962
59. The Trial, Franz Kafka, novel, 1925
60. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, novel, 1932
61. Water Margin, Shi Nai'an, Luo Guanzhong, novel, c.1360–1589
62. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Remarque, novel, 1929
63. The Hobbitt, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel, 1937
64. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1925
65. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, novel, 1840
66. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, novel, 1938
67. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966
68. Emma, Jane Austen, novel, 1815
69. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, novel, 1929
70. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy, novel, 1997
71. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Patrick Suskind, novel, 1985
72. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, novel, 1959
73. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, novel, 1848
74. A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1869
75. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, novella, 1943
76. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, novel, 1749
77. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle, novel, 1902
78. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, novel, 1967
79. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens, novel, 1950
80. On the Road, Jack Kerouac, novel, 1957
81. Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, novel, 1862
72. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, Victor Hugo, novel
83. Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, novel, 1924
84. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar, novel, 1951
85. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster, novel, 1924
86. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, novel, 1859
87. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, novel, 1844
88. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1927
89. The Tin Drum, Günter Grass, novel, 1959
90. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett, novel, 1930
91. Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann, novel, 1901
92. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, novel, 1850
93. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho, novel, 1988
94. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, John Le Carré, novel, 1963
95. The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1874
96. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells, novella, 1895
97. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, novel, 1861
98. Dune, Frank Herbert, novel, 1965
99. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt vonnegut, novel, 1969