Tuesday
To present a ranked list of best books to a booklover is like throwing chum to sharks. Suddenly we begin frothing and biting and thrashing around. Which is to say, we are at our entertaining best.
The latest list to send us into a frenzy is the Guardian’s 2026 poll to determine the “top 100 novels of all time,” which it conducts every ten years. To compile this list, the Guardian asked 172 authors, critics, and academic for their ten favorite novels “in English or translated into English.” The results were then tallied and weighted. Among those polled were Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, Anne Enright, Yiyun Li, Elif Shafak, Ian McEwan, Maggie O’Farrell, Colm Tóibín, Lorrie Moore, and Katherine Rundell.
For me, there were more delights than disappointments with the list. The biggest omission was Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a book of titanic imagination that, for me, ranks up there with War and Peace and The Brothers Karamazov. With each of these novels, I was in awe at what human beings are capable of. Each, to borrow a word from Lisa Simpson, embiggened me.
I was pleased to see that the four Jane Austen novels were the three I would have chosen—Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion—and I thought that five by Virginia Woolf were too many (To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway would have done). In past years I wouldn’t have ranked Nineteen Eighty-Four so high but I now agree that it belongs in the top twenty. I’m sorry not to see Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, or anything by Anthony Trollope or Elizabeth Gaskell on the list but appreciated the inclusion of Tristram Shandy and several Dickens novels (with Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Our Mutual Friend as the ones I too would have chosen). I would have chosen one novel, not two, for Nabokov and Ishiguro (Lolita and Remains of the Day respectively), and selected Tess of the d’Urbervilles over Jude the Obscure for Thomas Hardy, but believe that those polled got it right when they awarded three to novels to Toni Morrison.
Which leads me to my two greatest delights. Beloved coming in second was gratifying—it’s a magnificent book, perhaps America’s greatest novel—and George Eliot’s Middlemarch coming in first is testimony to the depth of George Eliot’s masterpiece. My favorite female protagonist in all of literature is the novel’s Dorothea Brooke.
Incidentally, my favorite male protagonist, who appears in the novel that would have topped my list, is Alyosha Karamazov. Obviously I believe that Dostoevsky’s work should be considerably higher than its #28 placement. On the other hand, I was pleased to see Tolstoy place two in the top ten. And then, of course, I loved seeing the prominence accorded to Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice (#8 and #9 respectively). And it’s wonderful to see James Baldwin, Zora Neal Hurston, and Ralph Ellison honored.
If I can be given full credit for only having read the first volume of Proust, I can report that 29 of the top 30 appear on my life list (only Nabokov’s Pale Fire has escaped me). After that, of course, I drop off: I’m missing six of the next 30 and twelve of the final 40. Perhaps my new goal will be to read them all, especially those post-colonial works that I could include in a course I will be teaching at the University of Ljubljana this coming fall (Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, V.S. Naipaul’A House for Mr Biswas). In past iterations of that course I’ve taught other works on the list, including Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
All in all, it’s a great list. I’d love to hear back from readers about their own reactions.
Here’s the list:
Guardian’s 100 Best Novels of All Time (2026)
1.George Eliot, Middlemarch
2. Toni Morrison, Beloved
3. James Joyce, Ulysses
4. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
5. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
6. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
7. Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
8. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
9. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice
10. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
11. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
12. Charles Dickens, Bleak House
13. Jane Austen, Emma
14. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
15. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
16. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
17. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
18. Jane Austen, Persuasion
19. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
20. Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
21. Henry James, Portrait of a Lady
22. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
23. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
24. Kazuo Ishiguro, Remains of the Day
25. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
26. Cervantes, Don Quixote
27. Franz Kafka, The Trial
28. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brother Karamazov
29. Nabakov, Pale Fire
30. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
31. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
32. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
33. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
34. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
35. Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
36. Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
37. Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
38. Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
39. Zora Neal Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
40. Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
41. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
42. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
43. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
44. James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room
45. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
46. Giuseppe de Lampedusa, The Leopard
47. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair
48. Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis
49. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance
50. Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
51. Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
52. Henry James, The Golden Bowl
53. Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus
54. Virginia Woolf, Orlando
55. Virginia Woolf, The Waves
56. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park
57. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
58. 58. J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace
59. Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
60. E.M. Forster, Howards End
61. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
62. Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun
63. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
64. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
65. Alice Walker, The Color Purple
66. Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
67. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities
68. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
69. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
70. Thomas Hardy. Jude the Obscure
71. Octavia Butler, Kindred
72. Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend
73. W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz
74. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
75. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
76. Bram Stoker, Dracula
77. D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
78. V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr Biswas
79. James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain80. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca
81. Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks
82. Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
83. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
84. Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
85. Han Kang, The Vegetarian
86. Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
87. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
88. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime
89. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
90. Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
91. Vassily Grossman, Life and Fate
92. Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
93. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
94. Edward P. Jones, The Known World
95. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native
96. Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo
97. Joseph Heller, Catch 22
98. Jack Kerouac, The Road
99. L.P. Hartley, Go-Between
100. Willa Cather, My Antonia
