The 100 best novels
Robert McCrum selects the definitive 100 novels written in English
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Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English. Take a look at his list
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Two years in the making, our list of the 100 greatest English-language novels of all time is now complete. Robert McCrum reflects on who got left out, and why
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Test your knowledge of the English language’s greatest fiction – and see if you can guess the identity of Robert McCrum’s final choice
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In his Booker-winning masterpiece, Coetzee’s intensely human vision infuses a fictional world that both invites and confounds political interpretation
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A writer of ‘frightening perception’, Don DeLillo guides the reader in an epic journey through America’s history and popular culture
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This modern Irish masterpiece is both a study of the faultlines of Irish patriarchy and an elegy for a lost world
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Anne Tyler’s portrayal of a middle-aged, mid-American marriage displays her narrative clarity, comic timing and ear for American speech to perfection
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Fitzgerald’s story, set in Russia just before the Bolshevik revolution, is her masterpiece: a brilliant miniature whose peculiar magic almost defies analysis
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel about a retired artist in postwar Japan, reflecting on his career during the country’s dark years, is a tour de force of unreliable narration
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Kazuo Ishiguro’s study of guilt, ageing and solitude in postwar, post-imperial Japan is a tour de force of unreliable narration
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Martin Amis’s era-defining ode to excess unleashed one of literature’s greatest modern monsters in self-destructive antihero John Self
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Marilynne Robinson’s tale of orphaned sisters and their oddball aunt in a remote Idaho town is admired by everyone from Barack Obama to Bret Easton Ellis
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The personal and the historical merge in Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, game-changing novel about a young man born at the very moment of Indian independence
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VS Naipaul’s hellish vision of an African nation’s path to independence saw him accused of racism, but remains his masterpiece
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The novel with which the Nobel prize-winning author established her name is a kaleidoscopic evocation of the African-American experience in the 20th century
The best novels in English: readers' alternative list