The Top 99 Novels and Novellas
This is a stripped-down and ranked version of the much longer and chronologically ordered Greatest Novels and Greatest Novellas lists combined.
The Top 99 Novels and Novellas is based on the same voluminous research and algorithms used by all our Greatest lists. You may also be interested in The Top 99 Works of Literrature.
At least once a year the ranking is updated to reflect current appreciation of literature by readers, writers, critics and scholars. Please note the revision date when citing the list.
Latest update: December 24, 2024
The top 99 novels
1. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1857
2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1878
3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy, novel, 1865–1869
4. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez, novel, 1967
5. Ulysses, James Joyce, novel, 1922
6. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust, novel, 1913–1927
7. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov, novel, 1955
8. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, novel, 1605–1615
9. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, novel, 1949
10. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1866
10. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, novel, 1925
12. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, novel, 1880
13. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, novel, 1818
14. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, novel, 1813
15. Moby Dick, Herman Melville, novel, 1851
16. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, novel, 1985
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, novel, 1884
18. Beloved, Toni Morrison, novel, 1987
19. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë, novel, 1847
20. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel, 1954–1955
21. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe, novel, 1958
22. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie, novel, 1981
23. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, novel, 1847
24. Dracula, Bram Stoker, novel, 1897
25. Middlemarch, George Eliot, novel, 1872
26. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, novel, 1865
27. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, novel, 1939
28. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee, novel, 1960
29. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, novel, 1951
30. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco, novel, 1980
31. The Trial, Franz Kafka, novel, 1925
32. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne, novel, 1759–1767
33 The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner, novel, 1929
34. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, novella, 1902
35. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, novel, 1726
36. The Count of Monte-Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, novel, 1844–1846
37. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison, novel, 1952
38. The Red and the Black, Stendhal, novel, 1831
39. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James, novel, 1881
40. The Outsider, Albert Camus, novella, 1942
41. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann, novel, 1924
42. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka, novella, 1916
43. Les Misérables, Victor-Marie Hugo, novel, 1862
44. The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu, novel, c.1020
45. Animal Farm, George Orwell, novella, 1945
46. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde, novel, 1891
47. Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1925
48. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle, novel, 1902
49. The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells, novel, 1898
50. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, novel, 1932
51. Life of Pi, Yann Martel, novel, 2002
52. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez, novel, 1985
53. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, novel, 1966
54. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce, novel, 1916
55. The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, novella, 1943
56. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens, novel, 1861
57. A Sentimental Education, Gustave Flaubert, novel, 1869
58. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell, novel, 1936
59. Blindness, José Saramago, novel, 1995
60. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier, novel, 1938
61. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett, novel, 1930
62. The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, novel, 1959
63. Emma, Jane Austen, novel, 1815
64. The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith, novel, 1967
65. The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, novel, 1967
66. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, novel, 1940
67. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, novel, 1962
68. Absalom! Absalom!, William Faulkner, novel, 1936
69. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry, novel, 1947
70. Perfume, Patrick Suskind, novel, 1985
71. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, novel
72. The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, novel, 1774
73. Candide, Voltaire, novella, 1759
74. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton, novel, 1920
75. On the Road, Jack Kerouac, novel, 1957
76. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf, novel, 1927
77. The Leopard, Giusseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, novel, 1958
78. Lord of the Flies, William Golding, novel, 1954
79. And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie, novel, 1927
80. The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler, novel, 1939
81. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner, novel, 1930
82. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, novel, 1969
83. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami, novel, 1994–1995
84. Independent People, Halldór Laxness, novel, 1934–1935
85. Dune, Frank Herbert, novel, 1965
86. The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil, novel, 1930–1943
87. Hunger, Knut Hamsun, novel, 1899
88. Bleak House, Charles Dickens, novel, 1853
89. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar, novel, 1951
90. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee, novel, 1999
91. Neuromancer, William Gibson, novel, 1984
92. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark, novel, 1961
93. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, John Le Carré, novel, 1963
94. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, novel, 1719
95. The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, novel, 1937
96. Atonement, Ian McEwan, novel, 2001
97. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, novel, 1957
98. Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro, novel, 2005
99. The Three Musketeers, Alexandre Dumas, novel, 1844
Contenders
For your further reading pleasure, here are a dozen other highly ranked novels that didn't quite make it into the Top 99 this time but may next time:
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens, novel, 1859
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray, novel, 1848
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, novel, 1926
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy, novella, 1886
Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin, novel, 1791–1792
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev, novel, 1862
White Teeth, Zadie Smith, novel, 2000
A Passage to India, E.M. Forster, novel, 1924
The Road, Cormac McCarthy, novel, 2006
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells, novel, 1895
The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal, novel, 1939
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott, novel, 1868–1869
