The 25 Greatest Novels Ever Written

The first modern novel, the first novel about a novel, and the first comic masterpiece — Cervantes invented prose fiction's self-awareness in 1605 and no one has surpassed him since.

Tolstoy's twelve-hundred-page panorama of Russia under Napoleon — the largest, fullest, most generous novel ever written, and the standard against which all later epics are measured.

Dostoevsky's final novel and his summation — a murder mystery, a theological argument, and a portrait of human freedom that Freud called the most magnificent novel ever written.

Joyce's eighteen-chapter remake of The Odyssey set in Dublin on a single day in 1904 — the most ambitious and most quoted novel of the twentieth century.

Melville's vast meditation on obsession, God, and the white whale — the great American novel, ignored in its time, recovered as a masterpiece in the twentieth century.

Dostoevsky's psychological novel of a murder and its aftermath — the work that inaugurated the modern novel of conscience and inspired everyone from Nietzsche to Kafka.

Proust's four-thousand-page novel of memory, time, and Parisian society — the most thorough and exquisite act of self-examination ever set down in prose.

Orwell's dystopia gave the language Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, and Newspeak — the most useful political vocabulary the twentieth century produced.

García Márquez's novel of seven generations in a fictional Colombian town — the founding masterpiece of magical realism and the most influential Spanish-language novel of the twentieth century.

The frame-tale collection that gave the West Aladdin, Sinbad, Scheherazade, and Ali Baba — and gave the Arabic-speaking world its most famous popular literature.

Tolstoy's other masterpiece — a portrait of adultery, family, and faith whose opening sentence is the most famous first line in fiction.

Faulkner's Mississippi masterpiece tells one story four times, each from a different consciousness — American modernism's most ambitious formal experiment.

Borges's short stories invented most of postmodern fiction before it existed — labyrinths, infinite libraries, books that contain all other books.

Tolkien's trilogy invented modern fantasy as a genre — a fully imagined world with its own languages and twenty centuries of history, still the most popular novel of the twentieth century.

McCarthy's novel of scalp-hunters in the 1850s borderlands — the most violent and most beautifully written American novel of the late twentieth century.

Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century Heian-court novel is arguably the first novel in world history — psychologically deeper than anything in Europe until Austen.

Mary Shelley invented science fiction at age nineteen — the Promethean parable of a scientist who creates life he cannot control still frames every debate about biotechnology.

The gateway to Balzac's Comédie humaine — ninety interconnected novels that together map French society more completely than any fiction ever attempted before or since.

Flaubert's 1857 novel set the standard for literary realism — precision, psychological detachment, and the obsessive search for le mot juste that every later novelist has envied.

Dickens's greatest novels — the most popular English novelist of any era, whose characters (Pip, Scrooge, Miss Havisham) have outlived most literary criticism of his work.

Hugo's 1862 thousand-page French epic of justice, mercy, and redemption — Jean Valjean and Javert remain two of the most enduring figures in popular fiction.

Dostoevsky's 1864 novella — the first existentialist work in fiction; the Underground Man's corrosive monologue is the taproot of Nietzsche, Kafka, and Camus.

Dostoevsky's attempt to portray a "positively beautiful man" — a Christ-like prince destroyed by the corrupt society into which he enters.

Eliot's novel of provincial English life — the book Virginia Woolf called "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," and the deepest novel of nineteenth-century English fiction.

Dostoevsky's darkly prophetic 1872 novel foresaw, with uncanny precision, the revolutionary nihilism that would produce the totalitarian horrors of the twentieth century.