A list published by The Guardian on 5/16/2026, as voted on by authors, critics, and academics worldwide.
created by alanaleigh
last updated May, 2026
My Ántonia
Willa Cather
The Go-Between
L.P. Hartley
The Road
Cormac McCarthy
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
The Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy
The Known World
Edward P. Jones
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
Sentimental Education
Gustave Flaubert
Life and Fate
Vasily Grossman
Jacob's Room
Virginia Woolf
The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow
The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
The Turn of the Screw
Henry James
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
The Talented Mr. Ripley (Ripley, #1)
Patricia Highsmith
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
The End of the Affair
Graham Greene
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family
Thomas Mann
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
A House for Mr Biswas
V.S. Naipaul
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence
Dracula
Bram Stoker
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald
Our Mutual Friend
Charles Dickens
Kindred
Octavia E. Butler
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