TIME's list of 100 Best Novels from 1923 - 2005

Full List

A - B

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
• All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
• An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret(1970), by Judy Blume
• The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
• At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
• Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
• Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
• The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
• The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
• The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
• Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
• Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder

C - D

• Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
• Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
• The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
• The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
• A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
• The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
• A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
• Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
• Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone

F - G

• Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
• The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles
• The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
• Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
• Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
• The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald

H - I

• A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
• The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
• Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
• Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
• I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
• Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
• Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison

L - N

• Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe(1950), by C.S. Lewis
• Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Loving (1945), by Henry Green
• Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
• The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
• Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
• Money (1984), by Martin Amis
• The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
• Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
• Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
• Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
• Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1984 (1948), by George Orwell

O - R

• On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
• The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
• Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
• Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
• Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
• The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
• Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
• Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
• The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
• Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
• Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates

S - T

• The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
• Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
• The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
• The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold(1964), by John le Carre
• The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
• Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
• To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
• Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

U - W

• Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
• Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
• Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
• Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
• White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

GRAPHIC NOVELS

• Berlin: City of Stones (2000), by Jason Lutes
• Blankets (2003), by Craig Thompson
• Bone (2004), by Jeff Smith
• The Boulevard of Broken Dreams (2002), by Kim Deitch
• The Dark Knight Returns (1986), by Frank Miller
• David Boring (2000), by Daniel Clowes
• Ed the Happy Clown (1989), by Chester Brown
• Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth(2000), by Chris Ware
• Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories(2003), by Gilbert Hernandez
• Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons