The debate into the best book ever written has been raging for as long as man put pen to paper. First Gutenberg and his press and subsequently Tim Berners-Lee have not only massively increased the number of books available, but also opened the debate to a whole new global audience. Opinions will always differ, one man’s War and Peace will be another’s Harry Potter. Someone’s The Drowners, another’s Twilight Series…
Throwing the debate wider to embrace the 10 best books or the 100 best books seems equally fraught with difficulties. The same as with polls for the best songs ever written, those that have been released that year, and still hold a place in the nation’s heart will get a disproportionately high ranking.
To get away from this, and to give as definitive answer as you can possibly get to what are the best 100 books ever written, I have created the ultimate list. I have taken as many different 100 top book lists as I can find, from a huge variety of sources. These are both online, and in the print media, from a number of different countries and continents, as well as with a different target audience. The result is as near to the ultimate list of the best 100 books ever written you are ever likely to find.
| 1 | Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell |
| 2 | The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald |
| 3 | Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger |
| 4 | Catch-22 – Joseph Heller |
| 5 | Ulysses – James Joyce |
| 6 | The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck |
| 7 | Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen |
| 8 | To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee |
| 9 | Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte |
| 10 | The Lord Of The Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien |
| 11 | Lolita Vladimir Nabokov |
| 12 | Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy |
| 13 | Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte |
| 14 | Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell |
| 15 | One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
| 16 | Brave New World – Aldous Huxley |
| 17 | Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes |
| 18 | Animal Farm – George Orwell |
| 19 | Lord of the Flies – William Golding |
| 20 | Moby-Dick – Herman Melville |
| 21 | Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain |
| 22 | Beloved – Toni Morrison |
| 23 | The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| 24 | War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy |
| 25 | Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoevsky |
| 26 | Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert |
| 27 | Great Expectations – Charles Dickens |
| 28 | The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner |
| 29 | On the Road – Jack Kerouac |
| 30 | The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien |
| 31 | Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut |
| 32 | To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf |
| 33 | Middlemarch – George Eliot |
| 34 | Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison |
| 35 | Emma – Jane Austen |
| 36 | A Passage to India – E. M. Forster |
| 37 | The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams |
| 38 | David Copperfield – Charles Dickens |
| 39 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce |
| 40 | Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott |
| 41 | Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad |
| 42 | Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy |
| 43 | The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis |
| 44 | The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas |
| 45 | Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck |
| 46 | A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving |
| 47 | The Portrait of a Lady – Henry James |
| 48 | The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame |
| 49 | Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier |
| 50 | Frankenstein – Mary Shelley |
| 51 | Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner |
| 52= | A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens |
| 52= | The Trial – Franz Kafka |
| 54 | A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess |
| 55 | Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll |
| 56 | Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand |
| 57= | Dune – Frank Herbert |
| 57= | Les Miserables – Victor Hugo |
| 59 | The Stand – Stephen King |
| 60 | In Search of Lost Time – Marcel Proust |
| 61 | Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift |
| 62 | Mrs Dalloway – Virginia Woolf |
| 63 | Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne |
| 64 | Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe |
| 65 | Tristram Shandy – Laurence Sterne |
| 66 | Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh |
| 67 | The Odyssey – Homer |
| 68 | The Stranger – Albert Camus |
| 69 | The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne |
| 70 | A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway |
| 71 | Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White |
| 72 | As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner |
| 73 | Tom Jones – Henry Fielding |
| 74 | Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe |
| 75 | The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton |
| 76 | The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand |
| 77 | The Iliad – Homer |
| 78 | The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway |
| 79 | East of Eden – Steinbeck |
| 80 | Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks |
| 81 | The Call of the Wild – Jack London |
| 82 | The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway |
| 83 | Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray |
| 84 | Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence |
| 85 | The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood |
| 86 | Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez |
| 87 | Nostromo – Joseph Conrad |
| 88 | Anne Of Green Gables – LM Montgomery |
| 89 | Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie |
| 90 | His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman |
| 91 | Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson |
| 92 | The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde |
| 93 | Memoirs Of A Geisha – Arthur Golden |
| 94 | Hamlet – William Shakespeare |
| 95 | Native Son – Richard Wright |
| 96 | The Color Purple by Alice Walker |
| 97 | Go Tell it on the Mountain – James Baldwin |
| 98 | Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan |
| 99 | Clarissa – Samuel Richardson |
| 100 | The Divine Comedy – Dante |
Mightier Than The Sword 