TIME’S Best Novels 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

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