Best 100 Novels
The Vestibule declares!
It is, I think, a mark of Substack respectability that one should have a booklist. It needn’t be 100, necessarily, but that is a good number. Modern Library has 100. The Art of Manliness (great podcast) has 100. Chris Williamson, bless his heart, has 100. And now I have 100.
I thought I’d read a lot - a former student was genuinely shocked to learn that I read over 70 books p.a. - but prepping this list made me slightly despondent. There’s so much I haven’t read, such as any novel from the 18th century or (apparently) anything by a Spaniard, that this list must be slightly suspect. And many of you will be horrified at the omissions. Where is Hemingway? Where Virginia Woolf? Charlotte Bronte? Where (says my brother-in-law) is Wodehouse? WHERE IS GEORGE ELIOT??
To take the last objection first, I read Middlemarch earlier this year and found it a disappointment. My other option is Silas Marner, but I fear my readers would then think I hadn’t read Middlemarch and they would sneer. I’m on the fence about Jane Eyre and Mrs Dalloway and I just don’t get Hemingway. And Hardy… I couldn’t possibly include Jude, I’m not excited about Mayor of Casterbridge and I once lost Tess in Hay-on-Wye without yet recovering the desire to pick up a new copy. Wodehouse I enjoy once in a while.
To avoid the list being dominated by a handful of favourites, I’ve chosen 100 authors rather than 100 novels. Occasionally I’ve cheated and included a series, so the list is rather more than 100 actual books. I was tempted to add other books - A Handful of Dust, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Go Tell It On The Mountain, 1984 - but it might have become silly and you can always express your exasperation; indeed, I encourage you to do so.
There are a handful of short-story collections as there would otherwise have been no place for M.R. James or J.F. Powers. Joyce would have been there anyway but I’m going with Dubliners over Portrait as I haven’t (yet) read Ulysses.1 Whether In Parenthesis is best described as a novel is one for the committee, but I’ve included it anyway as it belongs even less in the (coming!) non-fiction list. My apologies to Robert Graves, Dodie Smith, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Adams, Iris Murdoch and J.R.R. Tolkien. And Maurice Baring. And Nathanael West. Et al. So here is The List:
Douglas Adams, The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke
Ivo Andric, The Bridge Across the Drina
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
James Baldwin, Another Country
Georgio Bassani, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
George Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest
Louis de Bernieres, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
John Buchan, Sick Heart River
John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Pierre de Calan, Cosmas, or the Love of God
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday
Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising [5 volumes]
E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady
R.F. Delderfield, To Serve Them All My Days
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Fyodor Dostoevskii, Crime and Punishment
Edward Eager, Half Magic
Alice Thomas Ellis, Unexplained Laughter
Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Shusaku Endo, Silence
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier
E.M. Forster, Howard’s End
Jostein Gaarder, The Christmas Mystery
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Julien Green, Each Man in His Darkness
Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between
Hermann Hesse, The Glass-Bead Game
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought
Michael Innes, The Journeying Boy
Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
M.R. James, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary [short stories]
P.D. James, The Children of Men
Tove Jansson, Finn Family Moomintroll
James Joyce, Dubliners [short stories]
Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark
Rudyard Kipling, Kim
Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel
D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
Richard Llewellyn, How Green Was My Valley
David Jones, In Parenthesis
Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
David Malouf, Fly Away Peter
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
Frederic Manning, Her Privates We
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
Flannery O’Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge [short stories]
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast [3 volumes]
Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time [12 volumes]
J.F. Powers, Prince of Darkness [short stories]
H.F.M. Prescott, The Man on a Donkey
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Mary Renault, The Charioteer
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
Hjalmar Søderberg, Doctor Glas
Muriel Spark, Memento Mori
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
R.L. Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Bram Stoker, Dracula
Josef Skvorecky, The Cowards
Allen Tate, The Fathers
Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time
D.M. Thomas, The White Hotel
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now
Ivan Turgenev, Spring Torrents
Sigrid Undset, Kristin Lavransdatter
Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Charles Williams, All Hallows’ Eve
Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity
That might be for 2025. Or 2025 might be Don Quixote or it might be War and Peace.