The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries.
The one with the Slough of Despond and Vanity Fair.
The first English novel.
A wonderful satire that still works for all ages, despite the savagery of Swift's vision.
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Tom Jones Henry Fielding The adventures of a high-spirited orphan boy: an unbeatable plot and a lot of sex ending in a blissful marriage.
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Clarissa Samuel Richardson One of the longest novels in the English language, but unputdownable.
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Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne One of the first bestsellers, dismissed by Dr Johnson as too fashionable for its own good.
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Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.
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Emma Jane Austen Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.
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Frankenstein Mary Shelley Inspired by spending too much time with Shelley and Byron.
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Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock A classic miniature: a brilliant satire on the Romantic novel.
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The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac Two rivals fight for the love of a femme fatale. Wrongly overlooked.
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The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal Penetrating and compelling chronicle of life in an Italian court in post-Napoleonic France.
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The Count of Monte Christo Alexandre Dumas A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.
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Sybil Benjamin Disraeli Apart from Churchill, no other British political figure shows literary genius.
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David Copperfield Charles Dickens This highly autobiographical novel is the one its author liked best.
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Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore.
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Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte Obsessive emotional grip and haunting narrative
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Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray The improving tale of Becky Sharp.
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The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne A classic investigation of the American mind.
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Moby-Dick Herman Melville 'Call me Ishmael' is one of the most famous opening sentences of any novel.
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Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.
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The Woman in White Wilkie Collins Gripping mystery novel of concealed identity, abduction, fraud and mental cruelty.
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Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll A story written for the nine-year-old daughter of an Oxford don that still baffles most kids.
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Little Women Louisa M. Alcott Victorian bestseller about a New England family of girls.
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The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope A majestic assault on the corruption of late Victorian England.
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Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy The supreme novel of the married woman's passion for a younger man.
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Daniel Deronda George Eliot A passion and an exotic grandeur that is strange and unsettling
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The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky Mystical tragedy by the author of Crime and Punishment.
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The Portrait of a Lady Henry James The story of Isabel Archer shows James at his witty and polished best.
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Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Twain was a humorist, but this picture of Mississippi life is profoundly moral and still incredibly influential.
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Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson A brilliantly suggestive, resonant study of human duality by a natural storyteller.
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Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome One of the funniest English books ever written.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde A coded and epigrammatic melodrama inspired by his own tortured homosexuality.
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The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith This classic of Victorian suburbia will always be renowned for the character of Mr Pooter.
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Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy Its savage bleakness makes it one of the first twentieth-century novels.
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The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers A prewar invasion-scare spy thriller by a writer later shot for his part in the Irish republican rising.
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The Call of the Wild Jack London The story of a dog who joins a pack of wolves after his master's death.
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Nostromo Joseph Conrad Conrad's masterpiece: a tale of money, love and revolutionary politics.
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The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame This children's classic was inspired by bedtime stories for Grahame's son.
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In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust An unforgettable portrait of Paris in the belle epoque. Probably the longest novel on this list.
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The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence Novels seized by the police, like this one, have a special afterlife.
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The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford This account of the adulterous lives of two Edwardian couples is a classic of unreliable narration.
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The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan A classic adventure story for boys, jammed with action, violence and suspense.
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Ulysses James Joyce Also pursued by the British police, this is a novel more discussed than read.
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Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf Secures Woolf's position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists.
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A Passage to India E. M. Forster The great novel of the British Raj, it remains a brilliant study of empire.
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The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald The quintessential Jazz Age novel.
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The Trial Franz Kafka The enigmatic story of Joseph K.
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Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway He is remembered for his novels, but it was the short stories that first attracted notice.
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Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine The experiences of an unattractive slum doctor during the Great War: a masterpiece of linguistic innovation.
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As I Lay Dying William Faulkner A strange black comedy by an American master.
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Brave New World Aldous Huxley Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).
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Scoop Evelyn Waugh The supreme Fleet Street novel.
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USA John Dos Passos An extraordinary trilogy that uses a variety of narrative devices to express the story of America.
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The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler Introducing Philip Marlowe: cool, sharp, handsome - and bitterly alone.
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The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford An exquisite comedy of manners with countless fans.
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The Plague Albert Camus A mysterious plague sweeps through the Algerian town of Oran.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell This tale of one man's struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.
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Malone Dies Samuel Beckett Part of a trilogy of astonishing monologues in the black comic voice of the author of Waiting for Godot.
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Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger A week in the life of Holden Caulfield. A cult novel that still mesmerises.
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Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor A disturbing novel of religious extremism set in the Deep South.
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Charlotte's Web E. B. White How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.
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The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien Enough said!
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Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis An astonishing debut: the painfully funny English novel of the Fifties.
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Lord of the Flies William Golding Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.
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The Quiet American Graham Greene Prophetic novel set in 1950s Vietnam.
68 On the Road Jack Kerouac The Beat Generation bible.
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Lolita Vladimir Nabokov Humbert Humbert's obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.
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The Tin Drum Gunter Grass Hugely influential, Rabelaisian novel of Hitler's Germany.
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Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe Nigeria at the beginning of colonialism. A classic of African literature.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark A writer who made her debut in The Observer - and her prose is like cut glass.
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To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee Scout, a six-year-old girl, narrates an enthralling story of racial prejudice in the Deep South.
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Catch-22 Joseph Heller '[He] would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.'
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Herzog Saul Bellow Adultery and nervous breakdown in Chicago.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez A postmodern masterpiece.
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Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor A haunting, understated study of old age.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre A thrilling elegy for post-imperial Britain.
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Song of Solomon Toni Morrison The definitive novelist of the African-American experience.
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The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge Macabre comedy of provincial life.
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The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer This quasi-documentary account of the life and death of Gary Gilmore is possibly his masterpiece.
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino A strange, compelling story about the pleasures of reading.
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A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul The finest living writer of English prose. This is his masterpiece: edgily reminiscent of Heart of Darkness.
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Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee Bleak but haunting allegory of apartheid by the Nobel prizewinner.
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Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson Haunting, poetic story, drowned in water and light, about three generations of women.
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Lanark Alasdair Gray Seething vision of Glasgow. A Scottish classic.
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The New York Trilogy Paul Auster Dazzling metaphysical thriller set in the Manhattan of the 1970s.
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The BFG Roald Dahl A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.
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The Periodic Table Primo Levi A prose poem about the delights of chemistry.
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Money Martin Amis The novel that bags Amis's place on any list.
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An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro A collaborator from prewar Japan reluctantly discloses his betrayal of friends and family.
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Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey A great contemporary love story set in nineteenth-century Australia by double Booker prizewinner.
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The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera Inspired by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, this is a magical fusion of history, autobiography and ideas.
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Haroun and the Sea of Stories Salman Rushdie In this entrancing story Rushdie plays with the idea of narrative itself.
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La Confidential James Ellroy Three LAPD detectives are brought face to face with the secrets of their corrupt and violent careers.
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Wise Children Angela Carter A theatrical extravaganza by a brilliant exponent of magic realism.
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Atonement Ian McEwan Acclaimed short-story writer achieves a contemporary classic of mesmerising narrative conviction.
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Northern Lights Philip Pullman Lyra's quest weaves fantasy, horror and the play of ideas into a truly great contemporary children's book.
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American Pastoral Philip Roth For years, Roth was famous for Portnoy's Complaint . Recently, he has enjoyed an extraordinary revival.
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Austerlitz W. G. Sebald Posthumously published volume in a sequence of dream-like fictions spun from memory, photographs and the German past.
Hughes charts the story of modern art, from cubism to the avant garde
The most popular art book in history. Gombrich examines the technical and aesthetic problems confronted by artists since the dawn of time
A study of the ways in which we look at art, which changed the terms of a generation's engagement with visual culture
Biography mixes with anecdote in this Florentine-inflected portrait of the painters and sculptors who shaped the Renaissance
Boswell draws on his journals to create an affectionate portrait of the great lexicographer
"Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health," begins this extraordinarily vivid diary of the Restoration period
Strachey set the template for modern biography, with this witty and irreverent account of four Victorian heroes
Graves' autobiography tells the story of his childhood and the early years of his marriage, but the core of the book is his account of the brutalities and banalities of the first world war
Stein's groundbreaking biography, written in the guise of an autobiography, of her lover
Sontag's proposition that the modern sensibility has been shaped by Jewish ethics and homosexual aesthetics
Barthes gets under the surface of the meanings of the things which surround us in these witty studies of contemporary myth-making
Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) Said argues that romanticised western representations of Arab culture are political and condescending
Environment Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) This account of the effects of pesticides on the environment launched the environmental movement in the US
The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock (1979) Lovelock's argument that once life is established on a planet, it engineers conditions for its continued survival, revolutionised our perception of our place in the scheme of things
History The Histories by Herodotus (c400 BC) History begins with Herodotus's account of the Greco-Persian war
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon (1776) The first modern historian of the Roman Empire went back to ancient sources to argue that moral decay made downfall inevitable
The History of England by Thomas Babington Macaulay (1848) A landmark study from the pre-eminent Whig historian
Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt (1963) Arendt's reports on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, and explores the psychological and sociological mechanisms of the Holocaust
The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963) Thompson turned history on its head by focusing on the political agency of the people, whom most historians had treated as anonymous masses
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (1970) A moving account of the treatment of Native Americans by the US government
Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970) Terkel weaves oral accounts of the Great Depression into a powerful tapestry
Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuściński (1982) The great Polish reporter tells the story of the last Shah of Iran
The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 by Eric Hobsbawm (1994) Hobsbawm charts the failure of capitalists and communists alike in this account of the 20th century
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Familes by Philip Gourevitch (1999) Gourevitch captures the terror of the Rwandan massacre, and the failures of the international community
Postwar by Tony Judt (2005) A magisterial account of the grand sweep of European history since 1945
Journalism The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm (1990) An examination of the moral dilemmas at the heart of the journalist's trade
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968) The man in the white suit follows Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters as they drive across the US in a haze of LSD
Dispatches by Michael Herr (1977) A vivid account of Herr's experiences of the Vietnam war
Literature The Lives of the Poets by Samuel Johnson (1781) Biographical and critical studies of 18th-century poets, which cast a sceptical eye on their lives and works
An Image of Africa by Chinua Achebe (1975) Achebe challenges western cultural imperialism in his argument that Heart of Darkness is a racist novel, which deprives its African characters of humanity
The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976) Bettelheim argues that the darkness of fairy tales offers a means for children to grapple with their fears
Mathematics Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) A whimsical meditation on music, mind and mathematics that explores formal complexity and self-reference
Memoir Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782) Rousseau establishes the template for modern autobiography with this intimate account of his own life
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass (1845) This vivid first person account was one of the first times the voice of the slave was heard in mainstream society
De Profundis by Oscar Wilde (1905) Imprisoned in Reading Gaol, Wilde tells the story of his affair with Alfred Douglas and his spiritual development
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by TE Lawrence (1922) A dashing account of Lawrence's exploits during the revolt against the Ottoman empire
The Story of My Experiments with Truth by Mahatma Gandhi (1927) A classic of the confessional genre, Gandhi recounts early struggles and his passionate quest for self-knowledge
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell's clear-eyed account of his experiences in Spain offers a portrait of confusion and betrayal during the civil war
The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947) Published by her father after the war, this account of the family's hidden life helped to shape the post-war narrative of the Holocaust
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov (1951) Nabokov reflects on his life before moving to the US in 1940
The Man Died by Wole Soyinka (1971) A powerful autobiographical account of Soyinka's experiences in prison during the Nigerian civil war
The Periodic Table by Primo Levi (1975) A vision of the author's life, including his life in the concentration camps, as seen through the kaleidoscope of chemistry
Bad Blood by Lorna Sage (2000) Sage demolishes the fantasy of family as she tells how her relatives passed rage, grief and frustrated desire down the generations
Mind The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1899) Freud's argument that our experiences while dreaming hold the key to our psychological lives launched the discipline of psychoanalysis and transformed western culture
Music The Romantic Generation by Charles Rosen (1998) Rosen examines how 19th-century composers extended the boundaries of music, and their engagement with literature, landscape and the divine
Philosophy The Symposium by Plato (c380 BC) A lively dinner-party debate on the nature of love
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (c180) A series of personal reflections, advocating the preservation of calm in the face of conflict, and the cultivation of a cosmic perspective
Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1580) Montaigne's wise, amusing examination of himself, and of human nature, launched the essay as a literary form
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton (1621) Burton examines all human culture through the lens of melancholy
Meditations on First Philosophy by René Descartes (1641) Doubting everything but his own existence, Descartes tries to construct God and the universe
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion by David Hume (1779) Hume puts his faith to the test with a conversation examining arguments for the existence of God
Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781) If western philosophy is merely a footnote to Plato, then Kant's attempt to unite reason with experience provides many of the subject headings
Phenomenology of Mind by GWF Hegel (1807) Hegel takes the reader through the evolution of consciousness
Walden by HD Thoreau (1854) An account of two years spent living in a log cabin, which examines ideas of independence and society
On Liberty by John Stuart Mill (1859) Mill argues that "the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others"
Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (1883) The invalid Nietzsche proclaims the death of God and the triumph of the Ubermensch
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962) A revolutionary theory about the nature of scientific progress
Politics The Art of War by Sun Tzu (c500 BC) A study of warfare that stresses the importance of positioning and the ability to react to changing circumstances
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (1532) Machiavelli injects realism into the study of power, arguing that rulers should be prepared to abandon virtue to defend stability
Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651) Hobbes makes the case for absolute power, to prevent life from being "nasty, brutish and short"
The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791) A hugely influential defence of the French revolution, which points out the illegitimacy of governments that do not defend the rights of citizens
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) Wollstonecraft argues that women should be afforded an education in order that they might contribute to society
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848) An analysis of society and politics in terms of class struggle, which launched a movement with the ringing declaration that "proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains"
The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois (1903) A series of essays makes the case for equality in the American south
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (1949) De Beauvoir examines what it means to be a woman, and how female identity has been defined with reference to men throughout history
The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon (1961) An exploration of the psychological impact of colonialisation
The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan (1967) This bestselling graphic popularisation of McLuhan's ideas about technology and culture was cocreated with Quentin Fiore
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (1970) Greer argues that male society represses the sexuality of women
Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman (1988) Chomsky argues that corporate media present a distorted picture of the world, so as to maximise their profits
Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky (2008) A vibrant first history of the ongoing social media revolution
Religion The Golden Bough by James George Frazer (1890) An attempt to identify the shared elements of the world's religions, which suggests that they originate from fertility cults
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902) James argues that the value of religions should not be measured in terms of their origin or empirical accuracy
Science On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859) Darwin's account of the evolution of species by natural selection transformed biology and our place in the universe
The Character of Physical Law by Richard Feynmann (1965) An elegant exploration of physical theories from one of the 20th century's greatest theoreticians
The Double Helix by James Watson (1968) James Watson's personal account of how he and Francis Crick cracked the structure of DNA
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976) Dawkins launches a revolution in biology with the suggestion that evolution is best seen from the perspective of the gene, rather than the organism
A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (1988) A book owned by 10 million people, if understood by fewer, Hawking's account of the origins of the universe became a publishing sensation
Society The Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan (1405) A defence of womankind in the form of an ideal city, populated by famous women from throughout history
Praise of Folly by Erasmus (1511) This satirical encomium to the foolishness of man helped spark the Reformation with its skewering of abuses and corruption in the Catholic church
Letters Concerning the English Nation by Voltaire (1734) Voltaire turns his keen eye on English society, comparing it affectionately with life on the other side of the English channel
Suicide by Émile Durkheim (1897) An investigation into protestant and catholic culture, which argues that the more vigilant social control within catholic societies lowers the rate of suicide
Economy and Society by Max Weber (1922) A thorough analysis of political, economic and religious mechanisms in modern society, which established the template for modern sociology
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (1929) Woolf's extended essay argues for both a literal and metaphorical space for women writers within a male-dominated literary tradition
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans (1941) Evans's images and Agee's words paint a stark picture of life among sharecroppers in the US South
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963) An exploration of the unhappiness felt by many housewives in the 1950s and 1960s, despite material comfort and stable family lives
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966) A novelistic account of a brutal murder in a town in Kansas, which propelled Capote to fame and fortune
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion (1968) Didion evokes life in 1960s California in a series of sparkling essays
The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973) This analysis of incarceration in the Soviet Union, including the author's own experiences as a zek, called into question the moral foundations of the USSR
Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault (1975) Foucault examines the development of modern society's systems of incarceration
News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996) Colombia's greatest 20th-century writer tells the story of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar's Medellín cartel
Travel The Travels of Ibn Battuta by Ibn Battuta (1355) The Arab world's greatest medieval traveller sets down his memories of journeys throughout the known world and beyond
Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (1869) Twain's tongue-in-cheek account of his European adventures was an immediate bestseller
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West (1941) A six-week trip to Yugoslavia provides the backbone for this monumental study of Balkan history
Venice by Jan Morris (1960) An eccentric but learned guide to the great city's art, history, culture and people
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977) The first volume of Leigh Fermor's journey on foot through Europe - a glowing evocation of youth, memory and history
Danube by Claudio Magris (1986) Magris mixes travel, history, anecdote and literature as he tracks the Danube from its source to the sea
China Along the Yellow River by Cao Jinqing (1995) A pioneering work of Chinese sociology, exploring modern China with a modern face
The Rings of Saturn by WG Sebald (1995) A walking tour in East Anglia becomes a melancholy meditation on transience and decay
Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000) Raban sets off in a 35ft ketch on a voyage from Seattle to Alaska, exploring Native American art, the Romantic imagination and his own disintegrating relationship along the way
Letters to a Young Novelist by Mario Vargas Llosa (2002) Vargas Llosa distils a lifetime of reading and writing into a manual of the writer's craft