The 100 best literary novels

No. 11 on this list. The Sound and the Fury · William Faulkner · 1929

Taught in schools: Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Listed on Modern Library 100 Best Novels, TIME All-TIME 100 Novels, Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, and Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature. Wikipedia article exists in 35 languages with dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections and 57,976 characters of editorial content. A fixture of American literature courses and universally regarded as one of the defining works of American modernism — canonical weight comparable to or exceeding The Great Gatsby.

No. 12 on this list. The Peloponnesian War · Thucydides · c. 411 BCE

A foundation text of Western thought, assigned across classics, history, political science and international relations, and a fixture of Great Books programs. The U.S. Naval War College has built its strategy teaching around it since the 1970s.

No. 13 on this list. Beloved · Toni Morrison · 1988

Taught in schools: Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Morrison made the ghost of a murdered child literal — she moves into the house, eats all the food, demands everything — and in doing so found the only form adequate to represent what slavery did to the interior lives of the people who survived it. The novel forced American fiction to reckon with a history it had aestheticized or avoided.

No. 14 on this list. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn · Mark Twain · 1884

Taught in schools: Pearson Edexcel GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is taught in virtually every American high school and university American literature course, and is among the most debated and analyzed works in the American canon. Its Wikipedia article spans 62 languages with a dedicated reception section, reflecting global critical discourse sustained for over 140 years. Ernest Hemingway's declaration that all modern American literature comes from this one book cemented its place as the foundational American novel.

No. 15 on this list. Pride and Prejudice · Jane Austen · 1813

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English (0475), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Appears on 2,313 university syllabi — placing it at the 84th percentile of all taught books globally — and Wikipedia covers the novel in 74 languages. Listed in the BBC Big Read Top 100, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and published in prestige editions by both Penguin Classics and Everyman's Library. One of the most consistently taught novels in English literature.

No. 16 on this list. Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1866

Taught in schools: Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), Lektury obowiązkowe – Polish national reading list (Poland), Lithuanian literature curriculum (lietuvių kalba ir literatūra)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

Crime and Punishment is required reading in virtually every world literature curriculum and Russian literature course. It appears on 711 university syllabi (Open Syllabus) and is available in 82 Wikipedia languages, placing it among the most globally recognized novels ever written. It consistently appears on canonical 'greatest novels' lists, including TIME's All-TIME 100 Novels.

No. 17 on this list. Selected Stories · Anton Chekhov · 1899

Chekhov anchors the short-story unit of virtually every world-literature and creative-writing syllabus in the English-speaking world, and "The Lady with the Dog," "Gooseberries," and "Ward No. 6" are among the most frequently anthologized stories in any language. Our database has no syllabus or Wikipedia-language data recorded against this specific collection entry, but that reflects the absence of one fixed "Selected Stories" edition to track rather than any gap in his standing.

No. 18 on this list. Labyrinths · Jorge Luis Borges · 1962

Labyrinths is the standard English-language anthology through which Borges enters world literature curricula, taught in virtually every major comparative literature, Latin American literature, and 20th-century fiction course at universities worldwide. Published by New Directions in 1962, it established the benchmark for how Borges is read in translation and has remained continuously in print for over six decades as an essential classroom and critical text.

No. 19 on this list. The Great Gatsby · F. Scott Fitzgerald · 1925

Taught in schools: AQA GCSE and A-level English Literature (UK), CAPE Literatures in English – Caribbean Examinations Council, Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US)

Included in: Great Books of the Western World

Fitzgerald distilled the self-invention at the core of American life into 180 pages of lapidary prose, centering it on a man whose dream is so vivid it becomes indistinguishable from delusion. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock entered the language as shorthand for desire that is more beautiful for being unreachable.

No. 20 on this list. Aeneid · Virgil · c. 19 BCE

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

Virgil reverse-engineered Homer to give Rome a founding myth that justified empire, pietas, and destiny — and in the process invented the idea that a national epic could be a deliberate literary construction rather than an inherited oral tradition. Dante, Milton, and every poet who tried to write a civilization into existence started here.

No. 21 on this list. War and Peace · Leo Tolstoy · 1869

Taught in schools: Russian FGOS literature standard, Turkish edebiyat curriculum (Turkey)

Included in: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

War and Peace appears on 120 university syllabi (Open Syllabus) and has Wikipedia articles in 80 languages, placing it among the most globally recognized novels ever written. It features on the BBC Big Read Top 100, the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, and the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature canon, with a prestige NYRB Classics edition. The book is referenced universally as the archetype of the sweeping Russian novel.

No. 22 on this list. Finnegans Wake · James Joyce · 1939

Finnegans Wake appears on 108 university syllabi (Open Syllabus, 50th percentile) and holds a Wikipedia article in 39 languages. It is listed on the Modern Library 100 Best Novels and published by NYRB Classics. Syllabus presence is lower than Ulysses because the book is taught almost exclusively in graduate Joyce seminars and advanced modernism courses — its difficulty makes undergraduate adoption rare.

No. 23 on this list. Madame Bovary · Gustave Flaubert · 1857

Appears on 986 university syllabi according to the Open Syllabus Project, placing it in the top tier of world literature taught in higher education. Wikipedia articles exist in 63 languages with dedicated Reception and Adaptations sections, confirming its status as a global canonical text. Listed on the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die.

No. 24 on this list. Dream of the Red Chamber · Cao Xueqin · 1791

Included in: UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

Cao Xueqin chronicled the decline of an aristocratic Chinese clan through the consciousness of over four hundred distinct characters, weaving Buddhist philosophy, classical poetry, and granular domestic life into a novel of a scope that European fiction would not attempt for another century. It remains the central work of Chinese narrative art.

No. 25 on this list. The Stranger · Albert Camus · 1942

Included in: Bokklubben World Library

The Stranger appears on Le Monde's 100 Books of the Century, the Open Syllabus Top 500 Literature list, and 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. Published in prestige editions by both NYRB Classics and Penguin Modern Classics, it is one of the most assigned existentialist texts in university world literature courses across Europe, North America, and beyond.

No. 26 on this list. The Aleph · Jorge Luis Borges · 1949

Taught in schools: Literatura, Diseño Curricular – Provincia de Buenos Aires (Argentina), UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

Borges and his short fiction appear on university syllabi worldwide — in world literature, Latin American literature, postmodernism, and comparative literature courses. 'The Aleph,' 'The Circular Ruins,' and 'Death and the Compass' are among the most frequently anthologized stories in the Western canon. Though no formal syllabus count is available in the database, Borges is standard reading at virtually every English-language university.

No. 27 on this list. The Canterbury Tales · Geoffrey Chaucer · 1400

Taught in schools: UNAM Escuela Nacional Preparatoria – programas de Literatura (Mexico)

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Great Books of the Western World

Chaucer assembled a cross-section of fourteenth-century English society — knight, pardoner, wife, miller — and let each tell a tale in a voice so particular that the frame story became a laboratory for vernacular English prose and poetry. He proved that the language of London could carry the literary weight that had belonged to Latin and French.

No. 28 on this list. The Tale of Genji · Murasaki Shikibu · 1010

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, UNESCO Collection of Representative Works

Written by a Heian court lady six centuries before Don Quixote, The Tale of Genji traces the emotional life of a prince and his descendants through a world governed by aesthetic refinement, seasonal feeling, and erotic longing — inventing the psychological novel before the concept existed in any other literary tradition.

No. 29 on this list. Things Fall Apart · Chinua Achebe · 1958

Taught in schools: Cambridge IGCSE Literature in English (0475), Common Core text exemplars (Appendix B) (US), CSEC English B – Caribbean Examinations Council

Included in: Bokklubben World Library, Heinemann African Writers Series

Achebe told the story of colonialism from the inside of an Igbo village rather than from a European ship, and in doing so dismantled a century of Western fiction that had treated Africa as scenery. The novel created the template for postcolonial literature in English.

No. 30 on this list. Records of the Grand Historian · Sima Qian · c. 94 BCE

The foundation of Chinese historiography, required in Chinese secondary education and standard in world-history and classical-literature curricula.