"What have we done?": The Paying Guests

Sarah Waters in the Divinity School at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, in 2014. Image source: The Independent

As regular readers are aware, the novelist Sarah Waters is an E&I favorite. I've written before about her novels Fingersmith (2002) and Affinity (1999), and the television adaptations of her 1998 novel Tipping the Velvet (BBC, 2002) and Fingersmith (BBC, 2005). 

Waters' novels can evoke not only specific historical periods, but particular novelists. Fingersmith alludes to Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, while Affinity suggests Henry James' Turn of the Screw (1898).

The Paying Guests (2014), set in the early 1920s, reminded me of Patricia Highsmith's novels and Alfred Hitchcock's films. Like Highsmith, Waters does not stint on gruesome details; and as in Hitchcock, feelings of guilt consume the characters. Of course, that means they have something to feel guilty about. . .

Cover of The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters. Image source: Just Well Mixed

Frances Wray lost her two brothers in the Great War; her father also died a few years ago, leaving nothing to provide for Frances and her mother but the South London house in which they live. Frances is approaching 30, and is unmarried. She and her mother are just scraping by. Because they can't afford a maid, unlike their neighbors, Frances' life is a dreary round of cooking and cleaning in the days before vacuum cleaners or automated washing machines. She has just a few pleasures: her nightly cigarette, once a week going "up to Town" with her mother to have tea and see a movie, and occasional visits to her former lover Christina and Christina's new partner. The rest is an endless round of drudgery.

Waters is very good at evoking the domestic privations in a household barely able to cling to middle-class respectability. To take a bath requires going into the scullery off the kitchen where the tub is located, feeding shillings into the gas meter, and lighting the flame of the 50-year-old Vulcan geyser, "which was probably the top of the manufacturer's range in about 1870, but now looked like the sort of vessel in which someone in a Jules Verne novel might make a trip to the moon." But the geyser is "too expensive to light often"; Frances and her mother usually economize instead by using the (no doubt rusty) water from the boiler attached to their cast-iron stove. "They bathed, at most, once a week, frequently taking turns with the same bathwater" (pp. 27-28).

To make ends meet they take a young couple into their home as lodgers, the "paying guests" of the title: Leonard and Lilian Barber. The couple seems to embody the postwar freedoms that Frances has forsworn. They are also emotionally volatile and have tempestuous arguments. Frances is an unwilling eavesdropper on their fights, and also on their make-up sex (Frances sleeps in a second-floor bedroom across the landing from theirs). There's a seaminess to Len, who touches Frances without her invitation, and one night plies the two women with gin to inveigle them into a game of strip Snakes and Ladders. The game doesn't get very far and ends in drunken acrimony.

Spending the days at home together, Frances and Lilian are drawn to one another in sympathetic friendship. They begin to share confidences: Frances confesses to Lilian about her previous relationship with Christina, and Lilian tells Frances about the miscarriage that ended the pregnancy that brought about her marriage. As they grow closer, Lilian begins to bring Frances out of her confining routine: she gives Frances a more modern haircut, the women have a picnic in the park, and she takes her to a family party. Returning home after the party, with both Frances' mother and Lilian's husband in the house, an impulsive embrace and fervent kiss turns into furtive and near-silent lovemaking in the dark scullery.

When Lilian began to tense, the tension communicated itself to her, a muscular charge passing between them. And when Lilian cried out, their mouths were tight together; Frances took in the cry like a breath, and it became her own.

Aside from that they made no sound, did nothing to unsettle the silence of the house; Frances was certain of it. . .Finally they eased themselves apart, Lilian going weakly to the bath-tub, sitting down on the edge of it, pulling up the satin wrapper that had slipped from her shoulders.

'Oh, Frances,' she said, as Frances joined her. . .She was trembling. 'What have we done? We must be mad. We must be drunk. Are we drunk?'

'We aren't drunk,' said Frances. She was trembling too.

'What have we done?'

'You know what we've done. You know what it is. Don't you?'

She saw the curving gleams of wetness at Lilian's eyes and mouth. She saw her nod, heard her whisper. 'Yes.'

'I'm in love with you. I've fallen in love with you.'

'Yes.'

That was all they said.

But as they sit together silently in the scullery, Lilian puts her hand down on the tub cover, "and there was the muted tap of her wedding-band, a small, chill sound in the darkness" (p. 214). The sound is a foreboding reminder of Lilian's matrimonial bonds, which threaten to keep them apart.

After the first section of the slow deepening of the intimacy between the two women, The Paying Guests suddenly accelerates into a tense crime drama and a highly suspenseful police investigation and trial. This is where the comparisons to Highsmith and Hitchcock come in, and they are fully justified by Waters' descriptive vividness and psychological insight. Readers are forewarned, however, that she does not shy away from the graphic depiction of bodies, whether in the portrayal of the women's passionate encounters or the grisly details of the crime and its aftermath.

The Paying Guests was Waters' sixth novel in 16 years, and she has not published another in the dozen years since. She was 48 when The Paying Guests came out, and will turn 60 in July. Of course, I have no idea what health or other issues she and her long-term partner have faced over the past decade, or whether she simply feels that she's said what she had to say. Waters seems young to retire from writing: Philip Roth published his final novel at 77, Vladimir Nabokov at 75, and Patricia Highsmith at 74. But if The Paying Guests turns out to be Waters' final novel—we certainly hope not—it's a compelling one.

Delightful French films, part 2: The Crime Is Mine

Pauline (Rebecca Marder) and Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) in François Ozon's The Crime is Mine. Image source: RMITV.org

What if pleading guilty to a murder solved all your problems?

In The Crime is Mine (Mon crime, 2023), it's the mid-1930s, jobs in Paris are hard to come by, and everything is going wrong for Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and Pauline (Rebecca Marder). Madeleine is a young actress still waiting for her big break, and Pauline passed the Bar a year ago but is yet to score a client. The roommates owe five months' rent on their 6th-floor walk-up garret and are facing eviction.

Madeleine goes to meet with the big-time theatrical producer Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) and is offered a bit part in his new play—on the condition that she join him two afternoons a week in his bachelor apartment. She has to fight him off before she stalks out. Her weaselly lover André (Édouard Sulpice) visits with the news that he's getting engaged to a rich heiress to pay off his gambling debts, and plans to set Madeleine up as his mistress in an apartment owned by his future in-laws. "No rent!" he tells her enthusiastically.

"A dream life!": André (Édouard Sulpice) tries to convince Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) to become his mistress in François Ozon's The Crime is Mine.

Meanwhile, Pauline is having no better luck. She offers her legal services to a corrupt businessman who is about to be arrested, only to discover that thirteen lawyers have been there before her. And if Madeleine's love life is overcrowded with cads, Pauline's is "a desert."

"Let's be sensible and kill ourselves," Madeleine proposes, and puts a revolver to her head. Pauline ends the mock-suicide by offering Madeleine a ham-and-butter sandwich on baguette and an evening at the movies. In one of the many metacinematic and metatheatrical scenes in The Crime is Mine, they go to see Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed, 1935), the first film directed by Billy Wilder. [1]

But then the producer Montferrand is found shot to death, and suspicion falls on Madeleine as the last person known to have seen him alive. Pauline sees the proceedings as an employment opportunity for Madeleine: after all, witnesses are paid 12 francs a day. The incompetent, pompous investigating judge Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini) interrogates Madeleine by conjuring lurid scenarios, which are visualized as black-and-white silent melodramas: she murdered him in cold blood for money, and she'll be sentenced to 20 years of hard labor; she was his pregnant former mistress who murdered him in desperation when he wouldn't take her back, and she might be sentenced to five years in prison.

Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) threatens Montferrand (Jean-Christophe Bouvet) in the vivid imagination of investigating judge Rabusset (Fabrice Luchini) in The Crime is Mine.

Then Pauline supplies a scenario that comes closest to the truth: Montferrand tried to rape Madeleine, and she killed him with his own gun in self-defense. On learning that if the jury accepts the plea of self-defense she might walk free, Madeleine confesses.

Pauline now has her first client, and plans to turn the courtroom into a theater to whip up a public fervor. Madeleine now has her first starring role. "Since no one will defend us," Pauline tells the all-male jury, "we women must defend ourselves."

"Madeleine Verdier killed to defend herself": Pauline (Rebecca Marder) makes her closing statement to the jury in The Crime is Mine.

She frames Montferrand's murder as an act of protest and resistance against a French society "dominated and corrupted by men." The proceedings in the courtroom are frequently interrupted by applause (from the women in attendance) and booing (from the men). Madeleine's trial is now front-page news, and she an overnight succès de scandale. But then the prosecutor turns their feminist defense against them: Madeleine must be made an example of, or every man must fear being killed in cold blood by the women in his life. He calls for the death penalty. . .

All the actors clearly relish their roles, and amid the fast-paced farce there are some quieter, subtler moments. There's a scene during the trial when it comes out that Madeleine and Pauline share a bed. "The lawyer and the criminal are strange bedfellows," Inspector Brun (Régis Laspalès) notes slyly, while the prosecutor (Michel Fau) exclaims that the murder is now explained by their "unnatural pairing" and "hatred of men." Pauline leaps to her feet to defend herself and her client. The men making these accusations have never known hardship or poverty. Yes, the two women share a bed—to keep warm and save space in their tiny apartment. "Forget the banal insinuations of these pathetic men," Pauline tells the jury.

We begin to suspect, though, that there's a reason beyond her poverty and rather severe fashion sense for the lack of men in Pauline's life. When Madeleine calls her "darling" and kisses her forehead, Marder shows us Pauline's sudden flush of embarrassment; the kiss and endearment clearly mean something far different to her than to Madeleine. And when the two women take a bath together and Madeleine unselfconsciously gets out and dons a robe, the camera lingers on Pauline's wistful face as she gazes after her.

"Silence is far more eloquent": Pauline (Rebecca Marder) in The Crime is Mine.

Based on the 1934 play Mon Crime by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, The Crime is Mine has a brilliantly clever script by François Ozon and his frequent collaborator Philippe Piazzo (they also co-wrote Frantz, one of my favorite films of 2017) and is wittily directed by Ozon. There's a reason Billy Wilder is invoked: with its sequence of surprising reversals, The Crime is Mine plays like one of Wilder's classic Hollywood comedies, which is high praise indeed. Many thanks to the dear friends who recommended this movie to us; let me pass on the favor by urging anyone who likes sparkling comedy to put it at the top of their watchlist.

Last time: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

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1. Mauvaise Graine has several plot parallels with The Crime is Mine, including an impulsively committed crime and a rich father who disowns his displeasing son.

Delightful French films, part 1: Jane Austen Wrecked My Life

Agathe (Camille Rutherford) failing to make progress on her novel in Jane Austen Wrecked My Life. Image source: Film Obsessive

The French seem to do certain things better than almost anyone else: food, wine, women's fashion, perfume, not to mention political protests and universal healthcare. To this list we can add charming romantic comedies. We recently saw two excellent French films at the recommendation of dear friends; neither is flawless, but both are delightful.

Agathe (Camille Rutherford) reading outside Shakespeare and Company, Paris. Image source: Cinemaclock.com

Indeed, part of the message of Jane Austen Wrecked My Life (Jane Austen a gâché ma vie, 2024) is that nothing is, or should be, flawless, because then it would not be real. (By the way, the movie is not based on Beth Patillo's 2009 novel Jane Austen Ruined My Life; instead, it's an original film written and directed by Laura Piani.)

Agathe (Camille Rutherford) is a huge Jane Austen fan who works in the legendary Paris literary mecca Shakespeare and Company; somehow in the film the bookstore is never mobbed with tourists as it is in real life. Inspired by her love of Austen's writing, Agathe wants to follow in her footsteps and become a novelist. But as with many another would-be writer, she finds it almost impossible to actually put words to paper; she's too daunted by her model and too afraid of proving her lack of talent to herself.

Then her friend and coworker Félix (Pablo Pauly) finds the opening pages of a novel that Agathe has recently begun but made little progress on. Unbeknownst to Agathe, Félix applies on her behalf to a writing retreat, and sends her unfinished pages as a sample. To Agathe's astonishment she is awarded a two-week Jane Austen Residency on an English country estate owned by descendants of the Austen family. Filled with trepidation, but with Félix's encouragement/insistence, Agathe decides to go.

On her arrival on the other side of the channel Agathe is met by Oliver (Charlie Anson). The son of the couple who run the residency and a professor of literature, Oliver has been tasked with driving Agathe to the house.

Oliver (Charlie Anson) and Agathe (Camille Rutherford). Image source: RogerEbert.com

As the journey begins he immediately gets on her wrong side. Despite being a descendant of the Austens, Oliver tells her that he doesn't think much of great-great-great-great Aunt Jane's novels: who cares which rich man the heroine marries? Agathe is angered by his dismissal of Austen's work, finding him arrogant and far too sure of his ill-informed opinions. Austen's novels, she tells him, were the first to depict women as fully realized human beings with both virtues and flaws, rather than as idealized beings or symbols.

(Brief aside: It's not quite true that Austen was the first to depict flawed but sympathetic women in fiction, as long-time readers of this blog know well. See posts on Fanny Burney, Charlotte Smith and Maria Edgeworth as some earlier examples; Burney and Edgeworth novels are mentioned (along with those by Ann Radcliffe) in Northanger Abbey, and the title of Pride and Prejudice may have been suggested to Austen by novels of Smith or Burney.)

We may begin to suspect that Oliver's resemblance to a certain handsome but haughty Austen character means that he and Agathe are meant to be together, once he allows himself to be a little more open and vulnerable. But the ardent yet unreliable Félix presents a complication, especially when he shows up at the residency's concluding Regency costume ball to dance with (and seduce?) Agathe.

Félix (Pablo Pauly) surprises Agathe (Camille Rutherford) at the Regency costume ball. Image source: CultureFly.com

But does Félix take love seriously enough? Will Oliver recognize that he has a few things still to learn, and not only about Jane Austen? And will Agathe choose to embrace romance, or will she give herself the space to make progress on her writing and sort out her feelings?

Had Piani's movie been only funny, literate, well-written and -acted, with an appealing heroine facing a difficult romantic dilemma, it would have been entertaining enough (though, of course, not flawless). But the final scenes of the film are extraordinary.

Back at Shakespeare and Company, Agathe organizes a reading by the San Francisco poet Jack Hirschman.

Poet Jack Hirschman at Caffe Trieste, San Francisco, 2016. Photo credit: Christopher Michel. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Hirschman is not a fictional character, although he passed away before the film was made and is portrayed by the renowned director Frederick Wiseman (!). (Wiseman himself passed away in February of this year, at age 96.) I encountered Hirschman on the page for the first time because he edited (and did much of the translation for) the Artaud Anthology published by San Francisco's City Lights Books. And I encountered him in person because he frequented the Caffe Trieste in North Beach, just a few blocks away from City Lights, where he could often be found distributing his drawings for free to the other customers.

I was astonished to see Hirschman appear as a character at the dénouement of a French romantic comedy. Hirschman (Wiseman) recites the poem "Path," which urges the reader or auditor to "learn sincerity of intent by letting/life enter," perhaps the lesson that Agathe (and we) have needed reminding of all along.

https://youtu.be/R1-f0EdHhT4

Path, by Jack Hirschman

Go to your broken heart.
If you think you don’t have one, get one.
To get one, be sincere.
Learn sincerity of intent by letting
life enter because you're helpless, really,
to do otherwise.
Even as you try escaping, let it take you
and tear you open
like a letter sent
like a sentence inside
you've waited for all your life
though you’ve committed nothing.
Let it send you up.
Let it break you, heart.
Broken-heartedness is the beginning
of all real reception.
The ear of humility hears beyond the gates.
See the gates opening.
Feel your hands going akimbo on your hips,
your mouth opening like a womb
giving birth to your voice for the first time.
Go singing whirling into the glory
of being ecstatically simple.
Write the poem.

Next time: The Crime is Mine

Ella Fitzgerald: Like Someone in Love

Cover of Ella Fitzgerald's Like Someone in Love, Verve Records, 1957. Photo credit: Phil Stern. Image source: Goatless

Technology can revolutionize not only artistic form, but content. The advent of the 12-inch 33 1/3 RPM long-playing record in the late 1940s and early 1950s is a case in point. The LP could hold up to 25 minutes of music on a side, in comparison to the 12 minutes of the 10-inch 45 RPM or the four minutes of the 78 RPM records that were then the standard formats. With its greater duration, the LP made possible whole albums of sustained moods or overarching themes.

A key early example is Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours (1955), an album of meditations on lost love that was precipitated by his failing marriage to Ava Gardner. Filled with melancholy ballads in arrangements by the brilliant Nelson Riddle, the album's mood is reflected in the cover art featuring a pensive Sinatra smoking a cigarette late at night under a lamppost on a deserted urban street.

Cover of Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours, Capitol Records, 1955. Image source: Amazon.ca

Sinatra wasn't the only one exploring the possibilities of the longer format. The year after the release of In the Wee Small Hours, jazz producer Norman Granz began showcasing Ella Fitzgerald on his new Verve label in a thematic project enabled by the LP: the Song Book series. Each entry in the series was devoted to the work of a single songwriter or songwriting team of the Great American Songbook. Ultimately the series consisted of eight releases comprising 15 hours of music on 19 LPs: double albums for Cole Porter (1956), Rodgers & Hart (1956), Irving Berlin (1958), and Harold Arlen (1961); a four-LP boxed set for Duke Ellington in both big band and small ensemble modes (1957); a five-LP set for George & Ira Gershwin (1959); and single albums for Jerome Kern (1963) and Johnny Mercer (1964).

Cover of Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book, Verve Records, 1956. Image source: "Celebrating Ella Fitzgerald's Life Through the Objects That Defined Her Career" by Lily Rothman and Liz Ronk, Time, 25 April 2017.

The first albums in the Song Book series were immediate successes. But in the middle of recording the series—in fact, in the same month she recorded The Duke Ellington Song Book—Ella went back into the studio with an orchestra playing arrangements and conducted by Frank DeVol. On 15 October 1957 they recorded eleven tracks (!), four with Stan Getz on tenor sax; returning almost two weeks later on 28 October, they recorded another eight tracks with Ted Nash on alto sax. Fifteen of the nineteen tracks recorded in these sessions were released as the album Like Someone in Love in early December of the same year. Thirty-four years later the album would be released on CD, with the addition of the remaining four tracks from the 28 October session. And thirty-five years after that, I would come across the CD at my local public library sale and discover anew the brilliance of Ella Fitzgerald at her peak.

Like Someone in Love is Ella's In the Wee Small Hours, an album of torch songs that creates a hushed mood. The songs express anticipation and yearning; the joys of dawning love and the sorrow of inevitable loss. Ella's inimitable voice had gained warmth but lost little of its purity as she entered her 40s. Cushioned by DeVol's lush string arrangements and accompanied on four of the tracks by Stan Getz's understated soloing, Ella's singing is seductive, caressing, and sometimes mournful.

Another notable aspect of the album is its song choice. Where each album in the Song Book series focuses on one songwriter, the expanded CD version of Like Someone in Love features songs by seventeen different lyricists and eighteen different composers (Johnny Mercer and Johnny Burke are the two lyricists each represented by two songs, and Jimmy Van Heusen the only composer represented by two songs). I had never before knowingly heard the work of many of the songwriters, as with the first track, "There's a Lull in My Life," with lyrics by Mack Gordon and music by Harry Revel:

https://youtu.be/b3Q3FD2Tdko

Some of the songwriters who would later feature in the Song Book series are also represented here: Mercer, of course, supplying lyrics for Lionel Hampton and Sonny Burke's "Midnight Sun" (re-recorded for the Johnny Mercer Song Book arranged and conducted by Nelson Riddle) and Van Heusen's "I Thought About You"; George & Ira Gershwin's "How Long Has This Been Going On" (re-recorded for the Gershwin Song Book, also arranged and conducted by Riddle); and Irving Berlin's "I Never Had A Chance" (which was not re-recorded for the Irving Berlin Song Book):

https://youtu.be/PBu7cKEjdoE

For me, among the delightful new discoveries on the album is "Then I'll Be Tired Of You," with music by Arthur Schwartz (composer of "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" and "Dancing In The Dark") and words by Yip Harburg (lyricist of "April In Paris" and "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"):

https://youtu.be/BdaXz-Du7XU

I'll never be tired of hearing Ella Fitzgerald. Like Someone in Love is 70 minutes of Ella captured in the era of her peak vocal artistry: pure pleasure.

The 100 best novels of all time

Cover of the first edition of Middlemarch, Book 1 — Miss Brooke (1872), by George Eliot. Middlemarch is ranked first on the 2026 Guardian list of "The 100 best novels of all time." Image source: New York Public Library Digital Collections

In the essay "Why we shouldn't feel guilty for not being extremely well read," Ed Simon describes the game "Humiliation," invented (we hope) by David Lodge in his 1975 novel Changing Places (honorable mention in my Favorite Books of 2025). Introduced at a Euphoric State (a fictionalized UC Berkeley) English Department dinner party by Philip Swallow, a visiting professor from England, the "elegant sadism of the game" (in Simon's words) involves each player naming a well-known literary work they haven't read, and receiving a point for every person who has read it. You win, in other words, by humiliating yourself in front of your colleagues. An assistant professor named Howard Ringbaum gets so caught up in the spirit of the competition that he blurts out "Hamlet!," wins the game, and three days later loses his bid for tenure. Because what self-respecting English Department could "give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet"? [1]

Last week The Guardian published its periodic exercise in readerly humiliation: its list of the 100 best novels of all time. The current list is the latest in a series that includes the list of the 100 best novels written in English created in 2015 by the Observer's then-editor Robert McCrum, which was itself a sequel to his 2003 list of the 100 greatest novels of all time. I want to be clear that in my comments below, I'm coming from a position of partial knowledge. I've read in their entirety 52, or barely half, of the novels on the Guardian's 2026 list, and 57, or only slightly more, of the novels on the 2003 list. I think I could win quite a number of games of "Humiliation" just confining myself to the books on these lists.

As I've pointed out before, "best novels" lists have a long history, and of course say more about the literary tastes and familiarity of the people who put them together than they do about lasting merit. McCrum's lists were deliberately idiosyncratic, but at least had the virtue of being unabashedly personal. They also had the virtue of being listed chronologically, rather than ranked by attempted judgment of quality or significance.

Title page of The History of Don Quichote: The first parte, the second (1620) edition of the first English translation of Cervantes' masterpiece, by Thomas Shelton. Don Quixote is the earliest book on both Guardian lists. Image source: Christie's

To compile the new Guardian list, 172 "authors, critics and academics" were asked for ranked lists of their top 10 novels of all time, and then points were awarded to each title for the number of mentions weighted by the author rankings. [2]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the radically different methods used to generate them, there are significant differences between the 2026 and 2003 lists.

Greater diversity: Comparing the 2026 list to that of 2003, it's good to see that women authors are better represented this time: 37 titles by 28 women authors are on the list, compared to 16 titles by 16 authors in 2003 (for that list each author was limited to one entry).

In the 2026 list there are also more African-American authors: ten titles by seven authors, versus one title by one author in 2003. That lonely author was the 1993 Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, with Song of Solomon.

Toni Morrison. Beloved is ranked second on the 2026 Guardian list. Image credit: Timothy Greenfield-Sanders. Image source: PBS.org

In the 2026 list Morrison has three titles, The Bluest Eye (75), Song of Solomon (40), and Beloved (2), and is joined by Edward Jones (The Known World (94)), Octavia Butler (Kindred (71)), Alice Walker (The Color Purple (65)), James Baldwin (Go Tell It On The Mountain (79) and Giovanni's Room (44)), Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God (39)), and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man (37)).

The 2026 list also has greater international scope. In 2026, for example, there are four African writers (Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria, Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe, and J.M. Coetzee from South Africa), compared to two (Achebe and Coetzee) in 2003. The 2026 list includes three writers born in South Asia (Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, and Rohinton Mistry), while the 2003 list had one (Rushdie). And in 2026 there are two writers who were born in East Asia (Kazuo Ishiguro and Han Kang), as compared to one (Ishiguro) in 2003; both, of course, have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Han Kang. Image source: Wikimedia Commons

Same author, different book: There are ten authors on the two lists that are represented by different books:

Author	2003 title	2026 title	2026 rank
George Eliot	Daniel Deronda	Middlemarch	1
Salman Rushdie	Haroun and the Sea of Stories	Midnight's Children	23
Kazuo Ishiguro	An Artist of the Floating World	Remains of the Day	24
		Never Let Me Go	59
Joseph Conrad	Nostromo	Heart of Darkness	41
William Faulkner	As I Lay Dying	The Sound and the Fury	57
J.M. Coetzee	Waiting for the Barbarians	Disgrace	58
E.M. Forster	A Passage to India	Howard's End	60
V.S. Naipaul	A Bend in the River	A House for Mr. Biswas	78
Ernest Hemingway	Men Without Women (short stories)	A Farewell To Arms	83
Italo Calvino	If on a winter's night a traveler	Invisible Cities	93

George Eliot by Sir Frederic William Burton, chalk on paper, 1865. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG 669

Authors with multiple titles: Meanwhile, on the 2026 list Virginia Woolf has five entries; Jane Austen and Charles Dickens have four entries; Henry James and Toni Morrison have three entries; James Baldwin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Hardy, Kazuo Ishiguro, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, W.G. Sebald, and Leo Tolstoy have two entries. So these 16 authors account for 41 of the 100 entries. (And not to take anything away from McCarthy, but does he really belong in the company of the other multi-title authors? Calvino and Garcia Marquez, both represented by only one novel, surely do.)

Virginia Woolf. Image source: New York Public Library

The absurdity of ranking: The 2026 list points up the absurdity of ranking creative works. Is Jane Eyre (8) really better than Persuasion (18)? Is The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (19) better than Don Quixote (26)? Is The Portrait of a Lady (21) greater than The Brothers Karamazov (28)? The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (31) than Vanity Fair (47)?

What's missing? The books that weren't chosen by the 2026 Guardian survey as one of the 100 best novels of all time written in or translated into English would include anything by:

• The English and Irish authors Samuel Beckett*, John Berger, Fanny Burney, Lewis Carroll, Angela Carter, Wilkie Collins, Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, John Galsworthy*, Elizabeth Gaskell, William Golding*, Flann O'Brien, or Anthony Trollope;
• The French-language authors Honoré de Balzac, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus*, Alexandre Dumas, Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux*, André Gide*, Victor Hugo, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, J.M.G. Le Clézio*, Guy de Maupassant, François Mauriac*, Patrick Modiano*, Jan Potocki, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Jean-Paul Sartre*, Claude Simon*, Stendahl, Voltaire, Marguerite Yourcenar, or Émile Zola;
• The German-language authors Thomas Bernhard, Heinrich Böll*, Elias Canetti*, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Günter Grass*, Peter Handke*, Herman Hesse*, Elfride Jelinek*, Joseph Roth, Robert Walser, or Christa Wolf;
• The Italian authors Giorgio Bassani, Umberto Eco, Natalia Ginzburg, Dacia Maraini, Alessandro Manzoni, Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Luigi Pirandello*, Leonardo Sciascia, or Italo Svevo;
• The Japanese authors Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, Osamu Dazai, Yasunari Kawabata*, Yukio Mishima, Haruki Murakami, Kenzaburō Ōe*, Natsume Sōseki, or Junichirō Tanizaki;
• The Latin American authors Jorge Amado, Reinaldo Arenas, Miguel Ángel Asturias*, Roberto Bolaño, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, José Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Clarice Lispector, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Álvaro Mutis, Elena Poniatowska, or Mario Vargas Llosa*;
• The Russian authors Andrei Bely, Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, or Yevgeny Zamyatin;
• The Scandinavian authors Knut Hamsun*, Selma Lagerlöf*, Halldór Laxness*, or Sigrid Undset*;
• The South Asian authors Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Kiran Desai, Amitav Ghosh, R.K. Narayan, Mirza Hadi Ruswa, or Rabindranath Tagore*;
• The U.S. authors Saul Bellow*, Raymond Chandler, Percival Everett, Louise Erdrich, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis*, Flannery O'Connor, Sylvia Plath, Richard Powers, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, John Steinbeck*, Mark Twain, Jesmyn Ward, or Richard Wright; 
• and also Camilio José Cela*, Gao Xingjian*, Nadine Gordimer*, Abdulrazak Gurnah*, Naguib Mahfouz*, José Saramago*, Wole Soyinka*, Isaac Bashevis Singer*, Olga Tokarczuk*, Patrick White*, or Mo Yan*.

In the list above an asterisk (*) marks a Nobel laureate.

Olga Tokarczuk in her bookstore in Wałbrzych, Poland, in the late 1980s. Image credit: Olga Tokarczuk. Image source: Paris Review

This is obviously a very incomplete list of omissions, and points up the hopelessness of trying to encapsulate the best novels of all time by writers across the world (even the small proportion that have been published in English) in a mere 100 entries. Not to mention that fully 70% of the titles that made the 2003 greatest novels list are absent from the 2026 list. So much for "all time"—most of the selections made in 2003 lasted barely two decades.

For me the most surprising of the entries on the 2003 list for which there was no room in 2026 are:

• Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, one of the most entertaining novels in English;
• Pierre Choderlos de Laclos' Dangerous Liaisons, a shockingly modern tale of sexual predation;
• Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, whose logical paradoxes and language games are not just for precocious children;
• Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, a book often given to adolescent girls that is full of pain, suffering, sibling rivalry and emotional trauma;
• Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book often given to adolescent boys in which Huck learns the sobering adult lesson that his freedom has come at the cost of Jim's slavery;
• Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, his aphoristic masterpiece of decadence and amorality;
• Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, in which a boy who determines never to grow up finds himself in the midst of the horrors of World War II;
• Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, in which a character finds romance with another book lover as they each discover that every time they try to read an eagerly anticipated new novel it has been misprinted with a different beginning.

Cover of Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy (1868), by Louisa May Alcott. Image source: Britannica.com

Some other titles that were included on the 2003 list that are missing from the 2026 list made me wonder whether the literary reputations of their authors might be undergoing some change: books such as Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, the New York Trilogy by Paul Auster, Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera, and American Pastoral by Philip Roth. All of these authors died after 2003, and it may be that some posthumous reassessment is taking place.

Missing from both lists: Here are ten books which seem to have been overlooked entirely on both lists, in roughly chronological order:

• The Arabian Nights: magical stories within stories told by Scheherazade to allay King Shahryar's rage against womankind and left unfinished each night to delay his plan to execute her in the morning. This is more than a collection of folktales or stories; like The Decameron (see below), it has a frame story that recurs throughout and so, in my view, qualifies as long-form fiction, or, as we might say, a novel.
• The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki: The life and loves of Prince Genji in the intrigue-riven Heian court at the turn of the 11th century.
• The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio: Ten aristocrats, seven women and three men, flee plague-infested Florence for the countryside, where they while away the hours by recounting amusing, tender, and sometimes bawdy stories.
• Evelina by Fanny Burney: Burney was one of Jane Austen's favorite authors, and Evelina, with its story of a young woman finding herself out of her depth in a world of predatory men, was a model for Austen's first versions of Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice.
• The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki: A series of Arabian Nights-like stories within stories whose chief elements are the supernatural and the erotic.
• Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin: Designated by its author as a "novel in verse," it features as an anti-hero a jaded man of fashion who rejects the love of an earnest young woman, only to recognize his mistake years later when she has become a leading woman in society and is married to another.
• Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis: a 19th-century novel narrated by a dead man and which employs metafictional strategies, self-referentiality, irony, and typographical playfulness—in other words, it could have been published yesterday.
• Wives and Daughters by Elizabeth Gaskell: A young woman risks her own reputation in order to save her incautious step-sister's—but her selfless action may doom her chances with the squire's son whom she has loved from childhood.
• Last Nights of Paris by Philippe Soupault: One of the few Surrealist novels that is truly dreamlike, Last Nights follows the narrator's pursuit of a femme mystèrieuse through the nocturnal landscape of 1920s Paris.
• The Magic Toyshop by Angela Carter: Like a Victorian toy theater, this novel displays many of Carter's recurrent themes in exquisite miniature: fairy- and folktales, orphans, the patent falsity and psychological truth of theater, incest both symbolic and actual, twins, adolescence and sexual initiation, and a catastrophic but cleansing fire that obliterates everything that has gone before.

Angela Carter, 1980. Image credit: Fay Godwin. Image source: National Portrait Gallery NPG x68245

As with all "best of" lists, I hope you read the Guardian's 2026 and 2003 lists, along with my suggestions, as recommendations for further exploration rather than a confirmation of humiliating inadequacy or a checklist to be gotten through with grim determination. As Simon concludes his essay, the best part about having not read one of the greatest novels ever written is that you still have something wonderful to encounter for the first time: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a reader in possession of curiosity must be in want of another great book."

Update 27 May 2026: The brilliant Elle Cordova's homage to the author with the most titles on The Guardian's 2026 list of the best novels of all time. 

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1. David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Penguin, 1975, p. 136.
2. To see all the voters and their votes, go to The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time, scroll to Middlemarch at the bottom of the reverse-numbered list, and click the "See all the votes" button.