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Telegraph
08-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Telegraph readers' favourite novels
To nominate the 20 greatest novels of all time, even if you've spent decades reading and writing about fiction, is far from an easy task. The attentive reader will immediately spot omissions from this list – and this is exactly what Telegraph readers did this weekend after Claire Allfree's list of the 20 greatest novels of all time was published. There were more than a thousand comments on the article – here, we've pulled out the top recommendations that should be on your reading list. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (amongst others) by Lewis Carroll War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Les Misérables, Moby-Dick, Pride and Prejudice, All Quiet on the Western Front, Absalom! Absalom!, The Scarlet Letter, The Sound and the Fury, Through the Looking Glass, An American Tragedy, Gone with the Wind, Nineteen Eighty Four, Animal Farm, Washington Square, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Stranger, Treasure Island, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Roderick Guerry Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy Well, you included my favourite novel, The Master and Margarita, and another favourite, Middlemarch. Tolstoy must be included but my choice would have been Anna Karenina. A glaring omission is A Glastonbury Romance by England's own Tolstoy, John Cowper Powys. An amazing novel. Charlotte Cowell Buy the book Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Must haves: Bleak House and/or Great Expectations (with original ending). 100 Years of Solitude. Wuthering Heights. The Iliad and/or The Odyssey. Toby Roberts Buy the book 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez I would have included 100 Years of Solitude. Charlotte Cowell Buy the book Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway? Joe Doherty Buy the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Suggested by Buy the book The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas I am honestly going to try and read as many as I can [from the original list ]. My favourite book is The Count of Monte Cristo. Kerry Rooke Buy the book The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain and Tonio Kröger by Thomas Mann; Herzog by Saul Bellow; Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk. For starters. Linda Sansbury Buy the book David Copperfield by Charles Dickens I'll throw in a few that seem not to have been mentioned: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding; Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome; David Copperfield by Dickens; Don Camillo (all of them) by Giovanni Guareschi; and Catch 22 by Joseph Heller. Martin Bastone Buy the book Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf are wonderful dramas that are beautifully crafted. Michael John Roarty Buy the book The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor Dostoevsky …or Confederacy of Dunces by JK Toole. Eric Grey Buy the book And finally… Graham Greene has been overlooked, too. Barbara Chapman
Telegraph
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The 20 best novels of all time
To nominate the 20 greatest novels of all time, even if you've spent decades reading and writing about fiction, is far from an easy task. I swapped books in and out of the running for weeks; I was haggling with myself over a couple until the end. The project made me think about all of them afresh: to remember why I had enjoyed them, and understand why they spoke to me. The attentive reader will immediately spot omissions. There is, for instance, no Austen, no Dickens, no Forster – and that's just some of the British names. Yet no list can be complete – even if we had 30, or 50, or 100 entries. And in order to avoid an arbitrary list of great novels, or of novels that are obviously canonical, I've tried to opt for books that have changed the way we think about the novel form. Each of the 20 books below, then, has in some way moved the novel forwards, whether stylistically, structurally or politically. The literary tradition would look very different without them. You may disagree with some of my choices, and some of my reasoning. But that's fine; in fact, I hope you do. Let the conversation commence! Jump to a particular era: Middle Ages 17th and 18th centuries 19th century 20th century 21st century Middle Ages The Tale of Genji (1021) by Murasaki Shikibu
