These are the best fiction books of all-time, according to an aggregate of more than 20 lists focused specifically on fiction books and another 50+ general book lists.
Note: this list was originally posted in June 2018 and that version was used as the springboard for the Classic Novels Book Club. Check out the original list here.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925)
- Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
- J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
- George Orwell 1984 (1949)
- Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1615)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings (trilogy: 1954-55)
- Joseph Heller Catch-22 (1961)
- Vladimir Nabokov Lolita (1955)
- John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
- Lewis Carroll Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
- James Joyce Ulysses (1922)
- Gabriel García Márquez One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
- Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)
- Herman Melville Moby-Dick (1851)
- William Golding Lord of the Flies (1954)
- Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights (1847)
- Leo Tolstoy War and Peace (1869)
- Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
- J.K. Rowling Harry Potter (series: 1997-2007)
- J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit (1937)
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky Crime and Punishment (1866)
- Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness (1899)
- Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre (1847)
- Toni Morrison Beloved (1987)
- Aldous Huxley Brave New World (1932)
- Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind (1936)
- Homer The Odyssey (800 B.C.)
- E.B. White Charlotte’s Web (1952)
- C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia (series: 1950-1956)
- Jack Kerouac On the Road (1957)
- Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina (1877)
- Charles Dickens Great Expectations (1861)
- Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
- William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929)
- George Orwell Animal Farm (1945)
- Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
- Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926)
- Ralph Ellison Invisible Man (1952)
- Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time, aka Remembrance of Things Past (A La Recherche du Temps Perdu) (series: 1913-1927)
- Louisa May Alcott Little Women (1869)
- Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince) (1943)
- Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
- Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale (1986)
- Gustave Flaubert Madame Bovary (1857)
- Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979)
- Alice Walker The Color Purple (1982)
- Homer The Iliad (800 B.C.)
- Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
- Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) (1320)
- Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse (1927)
- George Eliot Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1872)
- Daphne Du Maurier Rebecca (1938)
- Charles Dickens David Copperfield (1850)
- Frank Herbert Dune (1965)
- Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
- Richard Adams Watership Down (1972)
- Ayn Rand Atlas Shrugged (1957)
- Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart (1958)
- James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
- Salman Rushdie Midnight’s Children (1981)
- Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows (1908)
- Albert Camus L’Etranger (The Stranger, aka The Outsider) (1942)
- Ken Kesey One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962)
- John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men (1937)
- Ernest Hemingway The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
- Victor Hugo Les Misérables (1862)
- Philip Pullman The Golden Compass (aka Northern Lights) (1995)
- A.A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
- Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence (1920)
- Jack London The Call of the Wild (1903)
- Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games (2008)
- L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables (1908)
- Zora Neale Hurston Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
- Paulo Coelho O Alquimista (The Alchemist) (1987)
- Alexandre Dumas The Count of Monte Cristo (1844)
- Oscar Wilde The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
- Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Lois Lowry The Giver (1993)
- Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island (1883)
- Madeleine L’Engle A Wrinkle in Time (1962)
- Richard Wright Native Son (1940)
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1887)
- Virginia Woolf Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
- E.M. Forster A Passage to India (1924)
- Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales (1387)
- Markus Zusak The Book Thief (2005)
- William Faulkner As I Lay Dying (1930)
- John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989)
- Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929)
- Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
- S.E. Hinton The Outsiders (1967)
- Franz Kafka The Trial (1925)
- Dan Brown The Da Vinci Code (2004)
- William Shakespeare Hamlet (1603)
- Stephen King The Stand (1978)
- Bram Stoker Dracula (1897)
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