This is the list of the best 100 books of all time compiled by the Guardian:
- Chinua Achebe, Nigeria, (b. 1930), Things Fall Apart
- Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark, (1805-1875), Fairy Tales and Stories
- Jane Austen, England, (1775-1817), Pride and Prejudice
- Honore de Balzac, France, (1799-1850), Old Goriot
- Samuel Beckett, Ireland, (1906-1989), Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
- Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy, (1313-1375), Decameron
- Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina, (1899-1986), Collected Fictions
- Emily Bronte, England, (1818-1848), Wuthering Heights
- Albert Camus, France, (1913-1960), The Stranger
- Paul Celan, Romania/France, (1920-1970), Poems
- Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France, (1894-1961), Journey to the End of the Night
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain, (1547-1616), Don Quixote
- Geoffrey Chaucer, England, (1340-1400), Canterbury Tales
- Anton P Chekhov, Russia, (1860-1904), Selected Stories
- Joseph Conrad, England,(1857-1924), Nostromo
- Dante Alighieri, Italy, (1265-1321), The Divine Comedy
- Charles Dickens, England, (1812-1870), Great Expectations
- Denis Diderot, France, (1713-1784), Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
- Alfred Doblin, Germany, (1878-1957), Berlin Alexanderplatz
- Fyodor M Dostoyevsky, Russia, (1821-1881), Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Possessed; The Brothers Karamazov
- George Eliot, England, (1819-1880), Middlemarch
- Ralph Ellison, United States, (1914-1994), Invisible Man
- Euripides, Greece, (c 480-406 BC), Medea
- William Faulkner, United States, (1897-1962), Absalom, Absalom; The Sound and the Fury
- Gustave Flaubert, France, (1821-1880), Madame Bovary; A Sentimental Education
- Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain, (1898-1936), Gypsy Ballads
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Colombia, (b. 1928), One Hundred Years of Solitude; Love in the Time of Cholera
- Gilgamesh, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BC).
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany, (1749-1832), Faust
- Nikolai Gogol, Russia, (1809-1852), Dead Souls
- Gunter Grass, Germany, (b.1927), The Tin Drum
- Joao Guimaraes Rosa, Brazil, (1880-1967), The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
- Knut Hamsun, Norway, (1859-1952), Hunger.
- Ernest Hemingway, United States, (1899-1961), The Old Man and the Sea
- Homer, Greece, (c 700 BC), The Iliad and The Odyssey
- Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906), A Doll’s House
- The Book of Job, Israel. (600-400 BC).
- James Joyce, Ireland, (1882-1941), Ulysses
- Franz Kafka, Bohemia, (1883-1924), The Complete Stories; The Trial; The Castle Bohemia
- Kalidasa, India, (c. 400), The Recognition of Sakuntala
- Yasunari Kawabata, Japan, (1899-1972), The Sound of the Mountain
- Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece, (1883-1957), Zorba the Greek
- DH Lawrence, England, (1885-1930), Sons and Lovers
- Halldor K Laxness, Iceland, (1902-1998), Independent People
- Giacomo Leopardi, Italy, (1798-1837), Complete Poems
- Doris Lessing, England, (b.1919), The Golden Notebook
- Astrid Lindgren, Sweden, (1907-2002), Pippi Longstocking
- Lu Xun, China, (1881-1936), Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
- Mahabharata, India, (c 500 BC).
- Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt, (b. 1911), Children of Gebelawi
- Thomas Mann, Germany, (1875-1955), Buddenbrook; The Magic Mountain
- Herman Melville, United States, (1819-1891), Moby Dick
- Michel de Montaigne, France, (1533-1592), Essays.
- Elsa Morante, Italy, (1918-1985), History
- Toni Morrison, United States, (b. 1931), Beloved
- Shikibu Murasaki, Japan, (N/A), The Tale of Genji Genji
- Robert Musil, Austria, (1880-1942), The Man Without Qualities
- Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States, (1899-1977), Lolita
- Njaals Saga, Iceland, (c 1300).
- George Orwell, England, (1903-1950), 1984
- Ovid, Italy, (c 43 BC), Metamorphoses
- Fernando Pessoa, Portugal, (1888-1935), The Book of Disquiet
- Edgar Allan Poe, United States, (1809-1849), The Complete Tales
- Marcel Proust, France, (1871-1922), Remembrance of Things Past
- Francois Rabelais, France, (1495-1553), Gargantua and Pantagruel
- Juan Rulfo, Mexico, (1918-1986), Pedro Paramo
- Jalal ad-din Rumi, Afghanistan, (1207-1273), Mathnawi
- Salman Rushdie, India/Britain, (b. 1947), Midnight’s Children
- Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran, (c 1200-1292), The Orchard
- Tayeb Salih, Sudan, (b. 1929), Season of Migration to the North
- Jose Saramago, Portugal, (b. 1922), Blindness
- William Shakespeare, England, (1564-1616), Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
- Sophocles, Greece, (496-406 BC), Oedipus the King
- Stendhal, France, (1783-1842), The Red and the Black
- Laurence Sterne, Ireland, (1713-1768), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
- Italo Svevo, Italy, (1861-1928), Confessions of Zeno
- Jonathan Swift, Ireland, (1667-1745), Gulliver’s Travels
- Leo Tolstoy, Russia, (1828-1910), War and Peace; Anna Karenina; The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
- Thousand and One Nights, India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt, (700-1500).
- Mark Twain, United States, (1835-1910), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Valmiki, India, (c 300 BC), Ramayana
- Virgil, Italy, (70-19 BC), The Aeneid
- Walt Whitman, United States, (1819-1892), Leaves of Grass
- Virginia Woolf, England, (1882-1941), Mrs. Dalloway; To the Lighthouse
- Marguerite Yourcenar, France, (1903-1987), Memoirs of Hadrian
