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.

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*, 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 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*, Nikolai Gogol, Nadine Gordimer*, Abdulrazak Gurnah*, Naguib Mahfouz*, Alexander Pushkin, 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— 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 it 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."

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1. David Lodge, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Penguin, 1975, p. 136.