Time 100 Best Novels

This list, of the best novels from 1923 (when Time magazine began) to 2005, was compiled by Richard Lacayo and Lev Grossman. There is no ranking.

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra by John O'Hara
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
Atonement by Ian McEwan
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
A Death in the Family by James Agee
The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance by James Dickey
Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone
Falconer by John Cheever
The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius by Robert Graves
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving by Henry Green
Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
Money by Martin Amis
The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Naked Lunch by William Burroughs
Native Son by Richard Wright
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
1984 by George Orwell On the Road by Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth
Possession by A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions by William Gaddis
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
The Sportswriter by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carre
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
White Noise by Don DeLillo
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys