Guardian 100 Best Novels (2026)

Voting data extracted from the Guardian’s interactive list. 172 writers, critics, and academics each submitted a ranked top 10. A separate reader-voted poll shares only 41 of these 100 books — see how they compare.

Download

• votes.tsv
  One row per vote (1,720 rows). Voter, position in their ranked top 10, book, author, whether it made the 100.
• books_summary.tsv
  One row per unique book (683 rows). Vote count, weighted score, voter names. Includes books outside the final 100.
• top100.tsv
  The ranked 100 with official vote counts, year, and voter names.
• readers_top100.tsv Readers
  The Guardian’s separate reader-voted top 100: rank, tie flag, title, author. Compared against the critics’ list here.

Top 20

Biggest Near-Misses

Books that received multiple votes but didn’t make the top 100.

Most Consensus Voters

Voters whose picks most closely matched the final 100.

Most Idiosyncratic Voters

Voters with the fewest picks in the final 100.

Taste Fault Lines

Author pairs with the most combined votes but zero voter overlap — nobody who voted for one also voted for the other.

Who Voted for Tolkien?

Readers’ Poll vs Critics’ List Readers

The Guardian also ran a reader-voted top 100 — a different list, not this one re-ordered. They share just 41 of 100 books, plotted below by their rank on each list (#1 at top-right, so the top-right corner is loved by both; teal = readers rank it higher, red = critics do). Hover a point for the title.

The widest swings among those shared titles:

Full comparison → — membership, rank deltas, agreement, and author-level view.

Browse

• Authors
  472 authors who received at least one vote. Per-author pages show which books, who voted, and what made the 100.
• Voters
  172 voters with their full ranked ballots, consensus scores, and most similar voters.

Interactive

• Guess the Voter
  Identify any of the 172 voters through yes/no questions about books on their ballot. Typically takes 8 questions.
• A or B?
  Pick your preference between two books at each step to find which voter you match. Typically takes 8 rounds.

Visualisations (Experimental)

• Book clusters
  246 books with 2+ votes, clustered by voter co-occurrence. Interactive scatter plot.
• Voter clusters
  172 voters grouped by shared taste. Hover for full ballots.

Critics’ data extracted from the Guardian’s interactive list (May 2026). Readers’ poll from the Guardian’s reader-voted list (June 2026).