rank tie title author 1 The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien 2 Middlemarch George Eliot 3 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen 4 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck 5 To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee 6 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy 7 Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell 8 yes Catch-22 Joseph Heller 8 yes One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez 10 Ulysses James Joyce 11 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy 12 Moby-Dick Herman Melville 14 yes Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel 14 yes Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë 15 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust 16 yes East of Eden John Steinbeck 16 yes Persuasion Jane Austen 16 yes The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald 19 Gravity’s Rainbow Thomas Pynchon 20 Beloved Toni Morrison 21 yes Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut 21 yes The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky 23 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes 24 Les Misérables Victor Hugo 25 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky 26 yes Bleak House Charles Dickens 26 yes Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë 28 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy 29 yes Great Expectations Charles Dickens 29 yes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain 31 yes Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace 31 yes The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov 31 yes The Poisonwood Bible Barbara Kingsolver 31 yes The Remains of the Day Kazuo Ishiguro 35 A Confederacy of Dunces John Kennedy Toole 36 The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas and Auguste Maquet 37 yes A Prayer for Owen Meany John Irving 37 yes The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger 39 yes Frankenstein Mary Shelley 39 yes Stoner John Williams 41 yes A Fine Balance Rohinton Mistry 41 yes A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth 41 yes Heart of Darkness Joseph Conrad 41 yes The Handmaid’s Tale Margaret Atwood 41 yes The Secret History Donna Tartt 46 yes Lolita Vladimir Nabokov 46 yes The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams 46 yes Watership Down Richard Adams 49 yes A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens 49 yes Atonement Ian McEwan 49 yes David Copperfield Charles Dickens 52 yes Birdsong Sebastian Faulks 52 yes Emma Jane Austen 52 yes Lonesome Dove Larry McMurtry 52 yes The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy 52 yes The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann 57 yes 2666 Roberto Bolaño 57 yes Cloud Atlas David Mitchell 57 yes Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro 60 yes A Gentleman in Moscow Amor Towles 60 yes Possession AS Byatt 62 Midnight’s Children Salman Rushdie 63 yes Demon Copperhead Barbara Kingsolver 63 yes Germinal Émile Zola 63 yes Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert 63 yes Neapolitan Quartet Elena Ferrante 63 yes Rebecca Daphne du Maurier 63 yes The Outsider Albert Camus 63 yes The Tin Drum Günter Grass 70 yes Piranesi Susanna Clarke 70 yes The Dispossessed Ursula K Le Guin 70 yes To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf 73 yes On the Road Jack Kerouac 73 yes The Unbearable Lightness of Being Milan Kundera 75 yes Brave New World Aldous Huxley 75 yes Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh 75 yes The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway 75 yes The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway 75 yes Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John le Carré 80 yes Absalom, Absalom! William Faulkner 80 yes Dune Frank Herbert 80 yes For Whom the Bell Tolls Ernest Hemingway 80 yes Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell Susanna Clarke 80 yes Memoirs of Hadrian Marguerite Yourcenar 80 yes Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy 80 yes The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman Laurence Sterne 80 yes The Name of the Rose Umberto Eco 80 yes The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde 80 yes The Plague Albert Camus 80 yes The Red and the Black Stendhal 80 yes The Road Cormac McCarthy 80 yes The Stand Stephen King 93 yes A Little Life Hanya Yanagihara 93 yes All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr 93 yes Animal Farm George Orwell 93 yes Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel García Márquez 93 yes Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf 93 yes Of Human Bondage William Somerset Maugham 93 yes The Magus John Fowles 100 A Dance to the Music of Time Anthony Powell