List of the 100 Best Books of All Time[edit]

Title	Author	Year	Country	Language
Epic of Gilgamesh	Unknown	18th – 17th century BCE	Sumer and Akkadian Empire	Akkadian
Mahabharata	Vyasa	9th century BCE – 5th century BCE	India	Sanskrit
Iliad	Homer	760–710 BC	Greece	Greek
Odyssey	Homer	8th century BCE	Greece	Greek
Book of Job	Unknown	6th – 4th century BCE	Achaemenid Empire	Hebrew
Ramayana	Valmiki	5th century BCE - 4th century BCE	India	Sanskrit
Medea	Euripides	431 BCE	Greece	Greek
Oedipus the King	Sophocles	430 BCE	Greece	Greek
Aeneid	Virgil	29–19 BCE	Roman Empire	Classical Latin
Shakuntala	Kālidāsa	1st century BCE – 4th century CE	India	Sanskrit
Metamorphoses	Ovid	1st century CE	Roman Empire	Classical Latin
One Thousand and One Nights	Unknown	700–1500	India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt/Tajikistan	Persian
The Tale of Genji	Murasaki Shikibu	11th century	Japan	Japanese
Njál's Saga	Unknown	13th century	Iceland	Old Norse
Bostan	Saadi	1257	Persia, Persian Empire	Persian
Masnavi	Rumi	1258–73	Persia, Persian Empire	Persian
The Divine Comedy	Dante Alighieri	1265–1321	Italy	Italian
The Canterbury Tales	Geoffrey Chaucer	14th century	England	English
The Decameron	Giovanni Boccaccio	1349–53	Ravenna	Italian
The Life of Gargantua and of Pantagruel	François Rabelais	1532–34	France	French
Essays	Michel de Montaigne	1595	France	French
Hamlet	William Shakespeare	1603	England	English
Don Quixote	Miguel de Cervantes	1605 (part 1), 1615 (part 2)	Spain	Spanish
King Lear	William Shakespeare	1608	England	English
Othello	William Shakespeare	1609	England	English
Gulliver's Travels	Jonathan Swift	1726	Ireland	English
Tristram Shandy	Laurence Sterne	1760	England	English
Jacques the Fatalist	Denis Diderot	1796	France	French
Tales	Edgar Allan Poe	19th century	United States	English
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	1813	United Kingdom	English
Poems	Giacomo Leopardi	1818	Italy	Italian
The Red and the Black	Stendhal	1830	France	French
Faust	Johann Wolfgang von Goethe	1832	Saxe-Weimar	German
Le Père Goriot	Honoré de Balzac	1835	France	French
Fairy tales	Hans Christian Andersen	1835–37	Denmark	Danish
Dead Souls	Nikolai Gogol	1842	Russia	Russian
Wuthering Heights	Emily Brontë	1847	United Kingdom	English
Moby-Dick	Herman Melville	1851	United States	English
Leaves of Grass	Walt Whitman	1855	United States	English
Madame Bovary	Gustave Flaubert	1857	France	French
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	1861	United Kingdom	English
War and Peace	Leo Tolstoy	1865–1869	Russia	Russian
Crime and Punishment	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1866	Russia	Russian
The Idiot	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1869	Russia	Russian
Sentimental Education	Gustave Flaubert	1869	France	French
Middlemarch	George Eliot	1871	United Kingdom	English
The Possessed	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1872	Russia	Russian
Anna Karenina	Leo Tolstoy	1877	Russia	Russian
A Doll's House	Henrik Ibsen	1879	Norway	Norwegian
The Brothers Karamazov	Fyodor Dostoevsky	1880	Russia	Russian
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn	Mark Twain	1884	United States	English
Stories	Anton Chekhov	1886	Russia	Russian
The Death of Ivan Ilyich	Leo Tolstoy	1886	Russia	Russian
Hunger	Knut Hamsun	1890	Norway	Norwegian
Buddenbrooks	Thomas Mann	1901	Germany	German
Nostromo	Joseph Conrad	1904	United Kingdom	English
Sons and Lovers	D. H. Lawrence	1913	United Kingdom	English
In Search of Lost Time	Marcel Proust	1913–27	France	French
A Madman's Diary	Lu Xun	1918	China	Chinese
Ulysses	James Joyce	1922	Irish Free State	English
Confessions of Zeno	Italo Svevo	1923	Italy	Italian
Stories	Franz Kafka	1924	Austria	German
The Magic Mountain	Thomas Mann	1924	Germany	German
The Trial	Franz Kafka	1925	Austria	German
Mrs Dalloway	Virginia Woolf	1925	United Kingdom	English
The Castle	Franz Kafka	1926	Austria	German
To the Lighthouse	Virginia Woolf	1927	United Kingdom	English
Gypsy Ballads	Federico García Lorca	1928	Spain	Spanish
The Book of Disquiet	Fernando Pessoa	1928	Portugal	Portuguese
Berlin Alexanderplatz	Alfred Döblin	1929	Germany	German
The Sound and the Fury	William Faulkner	1929	United States	English
The Man Without Qualities	Robert Musil	1930–32	Austria	German
Journey to the End of the Night	Louis-Ferdinand Céline	1932	France	French
Independent People	Halldór Laxness	1934–35	Iceland	Icelandic
Absalom, Absalom!	William Faulkner	1936	United States	English
The Stranger	Albert Camus	1942	Algeria, French Empire	French
Ficciones	Jorge Luis Borges	1944–86	Argentina	Spanish
Pippi Longstocking	Astrid Lindgren	1945	Sweden	Swedish
Zorba the Greek	Nikos Kazantzakis	1946	Greece	Greek
Nineteen Eighty-Four	George Orwell	1949	United Kingdom	English
Memoirs of Hadrian	Marguerite Yourcenar	1951	France	French
Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, a trilogy	Samuel Beckett	1951–53	Republic of Ireland	French, English
Poems	Paul Celan	1952	Romania, France	German
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison	1952	United States	English
The Old Man and the Sea	Ernest Hemingway	1952	United States	English
The Sound of the Mountain	Yasunari Kawabata	1954	Japan	Japanese
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	1955	Russia/United States	English
Pedro Páramo	Juan Rulfo	1955	Mexico	Spanish
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands	João Guimarães Rosa	1956	Brazil	Portuguese
Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe	1958	Nigeria	English
The Tin Drum	Günter Grass	1959	Germany	German
Children of Gebelawi	Naguib Mahfouz	1959	Egypt	Arabic
The Golden Notebook	Doris Lessing	1962	United Kingdom	English
Season of Migration to the North	Tayeb Salih	1966	Sudan	Arabic
One Hundred Years of Solitude	Gabriel García Márquez	1967	Colombia	Spanish
History	Elsa Morante	1974	Italy	Italian
Midnight's Children	Salman Rushdie	1981	United Kingdom, India	English
Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel García Márquez	1985	Colombia	Spanish
Beloved	Toni Morrison	1987	United States	English
Blindness	José Saramago	1995	Portugal	Portuguese

Chronological list[edit]

The one hundred most influential books, according to Seymour-Smith, in the approximate chronological order he gives: