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100 World Fiction Classics

Fiction

Nobel laureates are marked with an asterisk (*), original publication date in parentheses ( ).

Achebe, Chinua
Things Fall Apart
(1958)
Modern values challenge tradition in a Nigerian village.
Atwood, Margaret
The Handmaid's Tale
(1985)
A fundamentalist government ends women's rights in a grim future.
Austen, Jane
Pride and Prejudice
(1813)
Two independent spirits tangle with society's expectations in the first Regency romance.
Balzac, Honore de
Pere Goriot
(1833)
A father sacrifices for his ungrateful daughters' dowries.
Bellow, Saul *
Humboldt's Gift
(1975)
The role of power and art in America, framed by a long friendship between two writers.
Borges, Jorge Luis
Collected Fictions
(1935-1983)
Dreamlike labyrinths explore time and memory.
Bronte, Charlotte
Jane Eyre
(1847)
A plain governess finds love in this supenseful gothic melodrama.
Bronte, Emily
Wuthering Heights
(1847)
Passion, revenge and the supernatural arise on the harsh Yorkshire moors.
Calvino, Italo
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
(1979)
What is writing? What is reading? And who is reading this book? Playful and ingenious.
Camus, Albert *
The Plague
(1947)
Deadly disease in an Algerian city forces an existential crisis on French medical workers.
Cather, Willa
My Antonia
(1918)
A Bohemian immigrant woman embodies the spirit of the Nebraska prairies.
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de
Don Quixote
(1615)
The misadventures of a poor elderly knight make for timeless social satire.
Chopin, Kate
The Awakening
(1899)
Stifled by the limits of New Orleans Creole society, a young wife and mother breaks free.
Coetzee, J. M. *
Disgrace
(1999)
In South Africa, a shamed professor faces difficult changes on his daughter's farm.
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness
(1903)
An Englishman's river trip in the Belgian Congo: dark jungle, darker colonial brutality.
Cortazar, Julio
Hopscotch
(1963)
The reader becomes a character in this jazz-flavored story of an Argentine expatriate in Paris.
Crane, Stephen
The Red Badge of Courage
(1895)
A young recruit faces terror and ambiguity in his first Civil War battle.
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe
(1719)
Faith and self-reliance sustain the famous desert-island hero.
Dickens, Charles
Great Expectations
(1861)
A mysterious benefactor helps orphaned Pip toward wealth and status.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
The Brothers Karamazov
(1879)
Self-denial and the spirit are at war with passion and violence in this family tragedy.
Dreiser, Theodore
Sister Carrie
(1900)
A Wisconsin farm girl in Chicago pays a high price for wealth and fame.
Dumas, Alexandre
The Three Musketeers
(1844)
A swashbuckling trio combats sinister schemes in the French court.
Eliot, George
Silas Marner
(1861)
A lonely miser finds comfort in his hoarded gold, until something more precious comes along.
Ellison, Ralph
Invisible Man
(1952)
An African-American's experience is rendered in the literary equivalent of the blues.
Faulkner, William *
The Sound and the Fury
(1929)
The fate of a ruined family of Southern aristocrats, told in a striking four-part narrative.
Fielding, Henry
Tom Jones
(1749)
The early adventures of a flawed English Everyman show the customs of an era.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
The Great Gatsby
(1925)
Self-made tycoon Gatsby, seeking love, embodies a tragic American dream.
Flaubert, Gustave
Madame Bovary
(1857)
Adulterous Emma, bored in the provinces, disastrously plays out her romantic ambitions.
Forster, E. M.
A Passage to India
(1924)
Cultures clash in an ironic social comedy set in the waning years of the British Raj.
Fuentes, Carlos
The Death of Artemio Cruz
(1962)
The narrative of an old revolutionary forms a modernist portrait of Mexico.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel *
One Hundred Years of Solitude
(1967)
Magic realism began with this chronicle of the Colombian fantasy world of Macondo.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Elective Affinities
(1809)
This moving story poses chemistry as a model for romantic relationships.
Gogol, Nikolai
Dead Souls
(1842)
Banality triumphs in this grotesquely comic satire of Russian society.
Grass, Gunter *
The Tin Drum
(1959)
Collective guilt over Nazism's horrors pulses through this incendiary German social satire.
Greene, Graham
The Quiet American
(1955)
A journalist in Indochina is eyewitness to a devastating shift of power.
Hardy, Thomas
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(1891)
An English country girl attempts to prevail despite poverty and tragedy.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel
The Scarlet Letter
(1850)
"A" is for adultery in a Puritan Massachusetts not immune to hypocrisy.
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22
(1961)
Outrageous humor exposes war's folly in WWII Italy.
Hemingway, Ernest *
For Whom the Bell Tolls
(1940)
The Spanish Civil War, from the viewpoint of an anti-Fascist volunteer.
Hesse, Hermann *
Siddhartha
(1922)
An Indian nobleman walks a long path towards enlightenment, becoming the Buddha.
Hugo, Victor
Les Miserables
(1862)
An outsized epic melodrama of love and social justice takes place in the streets of Paris.
Hurston, Zora Neale
Their Eyes Were Watching God
(1937)
African-American folk tales and vernacular speech flavor the story of an independent woman.
Ishiguro, Kazuo
The Remains of the Day
(1989)
An elderly butler's life of devotion and self-denial leads to painful reflection.
James, Henry
The Portrait of a Lady
(1881)
Worldly experience vs. idealistic innocence: A young American's Italian stay turns tragic.
Joyce, James
Ulysses
(1922)
A Dublin man's day is rendered extraordinary through wordplay and stream-of-consciousness.
Kafka, Franz
The Metamorphosis
(1915)
Famous, still-shocking tale of Gregor Samsa, who awakens one day as a huge insect.
Kawabata, Yasunari *
Snow Country
(1937)
A beauty-obsessed Tokyo man has a years-long affair with a geisha at a hot springs resort.
Kerouac, Jack
On the Road
(1957)
Spiritual restlessness fuels the cross-country wanderings of the Beat Generation.
Kesey, Ken
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(1962)
The forces of freedom and oppression collide in an Oregon mental hospital.
Kipling, Rudyard *
Kim
(1901)
A street boy in British-ruled India gets caught up in a spy adventure.
Lawrence, D. H.
Lady Chatterley's Lover
(1928)
Can we integrate our social and sexual selves? An erotic bombshell, branded as obscene.
Lee, Harper
To Kill a Mockingbird
(1960)
Ten-year-old Scout sees her lawyer father combat racism with compassion in a Mississippi town.
Lermontov, Mikhail
A Hero of Our Time
(1840)
Duels and doomed affairs await a cynical Russian cavalry officer in the snowy Caucasus.
Lewis, Sinclair *
Babbitt
(1922)
A Midwestern real-estate man finds that the pursuit of prosperity leads to deadly conformity.
London, Jack
The Call of the Wild
(1903)
A sled dog narrates his heroic adventures during the Alaska Gold Rush.
Mahfuz, Najib *
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk (1956); Palace of Desire (1957); Sugar Street (1958)
From the end of WWI to 1935, al-Sayyid Ahmad's family struggles with poverty, faith and change.
Mann, Thomas
The Magic Mountain
(1924)
A young man's prolonged visit to an alpine sanatorium sets the stage for this complex novel of ideas.
Maugham, W. Somerset
Of Human Bondage
(1915)
A clubfooted orphan, though thinking himself a blighted outsider, moves toward love and success.
McCarthy, Cormac
All the Pretty Horses
(1992)
His family's Texas ranch sold, a teenager and his friend ride to Mexico and adventure in 1949.
Melville, Herman
Moby Dick
(1851)
Revenge sends a maimed Nantucket captain and his crew after a diabolical white whale.
Mishima, Yukio
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea
(1963)
A precocious adolescent boy seeks order and meaning through voyeurism and shocking violence.
Mitchell, Margaret
Gone with the Wind
(1936)
Rhett Butler, Scarlet O'Hara and the Civil War: a big romance and a little history.
Morrison, Toni *
Beloved
(1987)
Searing flashbacks tell the Reconstruction-era story of a slave woman's desperate acts.
Murakami, Haruki
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
(1997)
A Tokyo man's search for a lost cat becomes something vastly strange.
Murasaki Shikibu
The Tale of Genji
(c. 1000)
This historical romance of a prince's search for fulfillment is regarded as the world's first novel.
Nabokov, Vladimir
Pale Fire
(1962)
A sometimes funny, astonishingly intricate take on literature, culture and identity.
Naipaul, V. S. *
A Bend in the River
(1979)
After colonialism's end, corruption and disillusion beset an imagined Central African nation.
O'Brien, Tim
The Things They Carried
(1990)
In Vietnam, a platoon of young American soldiers struggles for courage and survival.
Orwell, George
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949)
This vision of a nightmare future gave us "Big Brother", "doublethink" and the "Thought Police."
Proust, Marcel
In Search of Lost Time
(1913-27)
Introspective and richly detailed, this multivolume work explores the meaning of memory.
Remarque, Erich Maria
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1928)
A WWI soldier endures the horror and bewilderment of trench warfare.
Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye
(1951)
Expelled from prep school, a sensitive teen misfit spends a weekend wandering New York City.
Sartre, Jean Paul *
Nausea
(1938)
A young French historian experiences existential despair as a strange sickness.
Scott, Walter
Ivanhoe
(1820)
The adventures of a Saxon knight in medieval England.
Shelley, Mary
Frankstein
(1818)
The famous monster comes to life in this 19-year-old author's gothic thriller.
Singer, Isaac Bashevis *
The Magician of Lublin
(1960)
In the Jewish towns of 1970s Poland, a traveling performer and ladies' man faces his demons.
Soyinka, Wole *
The Interpreters
(1965)
Foreign-educated Nigerian intellectuals return home to a country in confusing transition.
Steinbeck, John *
The Grapes of Wrath
(1939)
Dust Bowl devastation sends the Joad family from Oklahoma to California's Central Valley.
Stendhal
The Red and the Black
(1830)
In post-Revolution France, both the army (red) and the church (black) fail an optimistic hero.
Sterne, Laurence
Tristram Shandy
(1760-67)
Satirical, ribald and absurd, Shandy's tale shows human life in all its rich peculiarity.
Stevenson, Robert Louis
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886)
The best and worst of human nature are revealed in a doomed doctor's transformations.
Stoker, Bram
Dracula
(1897)
A young English lawyer travels to the Transylvanian castle of a certain pale, oddly-fanged count.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1852)
This passionate melodrama of brutal plantation life fueled the American anti-slavery movement.
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels
(1726)
Shipwreck sends Gulliver to fantastic lands that sharply satirize English society and politics.
Thackeray, William Makepeace
Vanity Fair
(1847-48)
Poor but shrewd, ambitious Becky Sharp climbs upward in fickle Regency society.
Tolstoy, Leo
War and Peace
(1863-1869)
The Napoleonic Wars in Russia form the backdrop to a vast, romantic family saga.
Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe
The Leopard
(1958)
Garibaldi's 1860s revolution sees the decline of a Sicilian feudal prince.
Trollope, Anthony
Barchester Towers
(1857)
This droll, detailed portrait brings the foibles of Victorian village folk to life.
Turgenev, Ivan
Fathers and Sons
(1862)
Nihilist anti-hero Bazarov confronts the complexities of political upheaval.
Twain, Mark
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
(1884)
A boy's Mississippi raft trip serves as a comic portrait of America in this still-controversial story.
Updike, John
Rabbit, Run
(1960)
A former high school basketball star, now a salesman: Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom wants more.
Vargas Llosa, Mario *
The Green House
(1966)
Interweaving narratives of 40 years in Peru's deserts and jungles.
Voltaire
Candide
(1759)
A simple young man searches for truth and the best of all possible worlds in this picaresque satire.
Walker, Alice
The Color Purple
(1982)
Poor, barely literate and the victim of violence and racism, Celie yet finds a path to joy.
Waugh, Evelyn
Brideshead Revisited
(1945)
An ironic outsider observes the life of an upper-class English Catholic family between two world wars.
Wharton, Edith
The House of Mirth
(1905)
Idealistic, ambitious and beautiful, Lily Bart is doomed by New York society's conventions.
Wilde, Oscar
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1891)
A vain aristocrat pays a grim price for trading places with his youthful portrait.
Woolf, Virginia
To the Lighthouse
(1927)
Luminous moments of a family's seaside vacation are captured in an impressionistic, experimental style.
Wright, Richard
Native Son
(1940)
Oppression leads Bigger Thomas to horrifying violence in a Chicago ghetto.
Zola, Emile
Germinal
(1885)
French coal miners are forced toward a strike in this groundbreaking documentary-style story.

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