The 100 greatest novels of all time: The list

                
                
不知道该读什么书了吗？下面是由英国《卫报》the Guardian的作者Robert McCrum给出的一份个人清单，当然不可能全面，仅仅作为一份参考。喜欢的读者可以挑选出一些经典作品来阅读。最近正在阅读简奥斯汀的小说《爱玛》Emma名列榜单第九位。选择《爱玛》还是《傲慢与偏见》来上榜确实很难选择。但我个人更偏爱《爱玛》一些，BBC的四集剧集Emma非常推荐。
下一期为大家推荐非小说类的100个伟大的作品列表，敬请期待。
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Looking for great book recommendations? Our critics and experts pick the best books, and give the definitive subject lists. And don't forget to look at our list of the 100 greatest non-fiction books
1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
• Harold Bloom on Don Quixote – the first modern novel
2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: The Pilgrims Progress
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Robinson Crusoe
4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Gulliver's Travels
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Tom Jones
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
• Robert McCrum's 10 best novels: Clarissa
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
• Jason Cowley on the many incarnations of Dangerous Liaisons
9. Emma Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Emma
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Frankenstein
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Nightmare Abbey
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
• The Charterhouse of Parma - review
14. The Count of Monte Christo Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
• Dumas's five best novels
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Sybil
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickens
This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: David Copperfield
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Wuthering Heights
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte
Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Jane Eyre
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Vanity Fair
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: The Scarlet Letter
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
• Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Moby-Dick
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
• Julian Barnes rerwrites th eending to Madame Bovary
• The Everest of translation, by Adam Thorpe
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
• The Woman in White's 150 years of sensation
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll
A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
•Robert McCrum's 100 best novels: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling.
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James
The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
One of the funniest English books ever written.
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
45. Ulysses James Joyce
Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
49. The Trial Franz Kafka
The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
A strange black comedy by an American master.
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
The supreme Fleet Street novel.
55. USA John Dos Passos
An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
58. The Plague Albert Camus
A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
Enough said!
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac
The Beat Generation bible.
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass
Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee
Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller
'[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A postmodern masterpiece.
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
A haunting, understated study of old age.
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
Macabre comedy of provincial life.
81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.
90. Money Martin Amis
The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.
94. Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie
In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.
95. La Confidential James Ellroy
Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman
Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald
Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.
Who did we miss?
So, are you congratulating yourself on having read everything on our list or screwing the newspaper up into a ball and aiming it at the nearest bin?
Are you wondering what happened to all those American writers from Bret Easton Ellis to Jeffrey Eugenides, from Jonathan Franzen to Cormac McCarthy?
Have women been short-changed? Should we have included Pat Barker, Elizabeth Bowen, A.S. Byatt, Penelope Fitzgerald, Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch?
What's happened to novels in translation such as Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Hesse's Siddhartha, Mishima's The Sea of Fertility, Süskind's Perfume and Zola's Germinal?
Writers such as J.G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anthony Burgess, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, John Fowles, Nick Hornby, Russell Hoban, Somerset Maugham and V.S. Pritchett narrowly missed the final hundred. Were we wrong to lose them?