My selection of the best Best Novels

To determine the 100 “Best Novels of All Time,” the Guardian asked 170 novelists, critics and academics to rank their top 10 choices and compiled them into an overall 100.  The judges did not choose novels based on literary excellence, but on political correctness and diversity.  They emphasised modern and contemporary writers, embracing many mediocre books by minorities and women.  Many of the greatest authors — from Stendhal and Turgenev to Malraux and Camus — were simply ignored.  Ranking the novels for 10 days (beginning backwards with number 100) was arbitrary and pointless.

My list, by contrast, includes the greatest books in chronological order, with the names of authors and dates of publication, and places an asterisk (*) next to 64 superior books the Guardian failed to recognise.  My more intellectual and serious list is based purely on literary merit, on great characters, style and themes with universal appeal.  It shows the history of the novel and works that appeared at the same time, and introduces many readers to the cultural and historical significance of important novels they may never have heard of and may wish to read.

*Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719

*Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, 1749

Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 1759-67

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, 1813

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 1818

*Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, 1824

*Stendhal, The Red and the Black, 1830

*Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839

*Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, 1842

Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, 1847

Charlotte Brontë, Wuthering Heights, 1847

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, 1850

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, 1851

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1856

Dickens, Great Expectations, 1861

*Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons, 1862

*Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, 1864

*Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865

Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, 1867

*Dostoyevsky, The Possessed, 1872

George Eliot, Middlemarch, 1872

*Eça de Queirós, The Crime of Father Amaro, 1875

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880

Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

*Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn, 1884

*Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890

Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 1895

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899

*Rudyard Kipling, Kim, 1901

Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks, 1901

*Henry James, The Wings of the Dove, 1902

*André Gide, The Immoralist, 1902

*Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903

Henry James, The Golden Bowl, 1904

*Conrad, Nostromo, 1904

*D. H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 1913

*Conrad, Victory, 1915

Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, 1915

*Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage, 1915

Lawrence, The Rainbow, 1915

*James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916

*Lawrence, Women in Love, 1920

Joyce, Ulysses, 1922

*Melville, Billy Budd, 1924

Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924

*E. M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924

*Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925

Franz Kafka, The Trial, 1925

Scott Fizgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925

*Kafka, The Castle, 1926

*Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, 1926

Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 1913-27

*Ford, Parade’s End, 1924-28

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929

*Erich Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1929

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929

Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932

*André Malraux, Man’s Fate, 1933

*Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night, 1934

*Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust, 1934

*Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, 1939

*Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1940

Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940

*Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon,1941

*Albert Camus, The Stranger, 1942

*Malraux, The Walnut Trees of Altenburg, 1943

*Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, 1945

*Mann, Doctor Faustus, 1947

*Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, 1947

*Camus, The Plague, 1947

Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter, 1948

*Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, 1948

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949

Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952

L. P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953

*Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March, 1953

*Wyndham Lewis, Self Condemned, 1954

Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, 1955

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard, 1958

*Günter Grass, The Tin Drum, 1959

*Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus, 1959

*Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Magician of Lublin, 1960

Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961

Nabokov, Pale Fire, 1962

*J. F. Powers, Morte d’Urban, 1962

*Bellow, Herzog, 1964

*Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy, 1960-65

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward, 1968

*Bellow, Humboldt’s Gift, 1975

*James Salter, Light Years, 1975

*V. S. Naipaul, Guerrillas, 1975

*Iris Murdoch, The Sea, The Sea, 1978

*William Styron, Sophie’s Choice, 1979

*Naipaul, A Bend in the River, 1979

*Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers, 1980

*Olivia Manning, The Levant Trilogy, 1977-81

*Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day, 1989

*Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient, 1992

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace, 1999

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