50 Best Books

I’ve been considering this all week; it’s a list of the fifty novels I think I could most warmly recommend as some of my all-time best books. As the category of ‘books I’ve most enjoyed’ comprised just too many, I’ve tried to isolate here the books that have made me think, and that have remained longest with me as startling, provocative and yet also entertaining works of literature. They are not all straightforwardly pleasing, indeed some could be considered an acquired taste, but each one achieves something special and makes its own contribution to the rich world of storytelling. I left to one side all the delightful writers whose work I’ve sought out because I want to be in the world they create, but who don’t particularly exercise the mind, like William Maxwell and Anita Brookner, I’ve left out all my favourite comfort novelists, like Nancy Mitford and E. F. Benson, and I’ve had to abandon a lot of famous and renowned writers because the books I’ve read by them that I clearly recall were probably not their best work (Iris Murdoch, and Lawrence Durrell spring to mind). I also had to leave to one side some extremely good and clever writers because they only produced short stories, like Borges and Kleist. Once I started to put the list together, the one thing it really made me feel was insufficiently well-read. There are no Russian authors at all, and the Spanish-speaking world is similarly unrepresented (I loved Roberto Bolano but only read his short stories, and was very intrigued by Javier Marías, but felt All Souls was probably bettered by some of his other books). And let’s not even begin on Eastern literature – it’s just a big, black hole.

At the moment I have left the list higgledy-piggledy, like a jumble sale of books, as it appealed to me that way. But if bloggers were interested, I could revisit it from time to time to give brief synopses of the novels in more coherent groupings. If anyone has suggestions to add for more novels, I’d be glad to hear them as I’m hoping to add to the list over time and eventually reach 100.

Flaubert’s Parrot – Julian Barnes

The Outsider – Albert Camus

Letter to my Father – Frantz Kafka

The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum – Heinrich Boll

Siddhartha – Hermann Hesse

Elective Affinities – Goethe

Dangerous Liaisons – Choderlos de Laclos

Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane

Le Horla – Guy de Maupassant

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge – Rilke

The Age of Reason – Jean-Paul Sartre

Cheri – Colette

Swann’s Way – Proust

Molloy – Samuel Beckett

W or the Memory of Childhood – Georges Perec

The Erl-King – Michel Tournier

Rosie Carpe – Marie Ndiaye

The Princesse of Cleves – Madame de Lafayette

Oscar and Lucinda – Peter Carey

Chatterton – Peter Ackroyd

The Human Stain – Philip Roth

The Chymical Wedding – Lyndsay Clarke

The Group – Mary McCarthy

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Human Voices – Penelope Fitzgerald

The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton

The Accidental Tourist – Anne Tyler

A Thousand Acres – Jane Smiley

Thinks – David Lodge

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

Middlemarch – George Eliot

The French Lieutenant’s Woman – John Fowles

The Years – Virginia Woolf

Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood

The History Man – Malcolm Bradbury

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Everything Passes – Gabriel Josipovici

The Black Book – Orhan Pamuk

The Golden Notebooks – Doris Lessing

The Razor’s Edge – W. Somerset Maugham

The Lover – Marguerite Duras

Honeymoon – Patrick Modiano

Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade – Assia Djebar

The Wild Asses’ Skin – Honoré de Balzac

Sexing The Cherry – Jeanette Winterson

The Mustache – Emmanuel Carrère

The Orchard – Drusilla Modjeska

The Comforters – Muriel Spark

How I Live Now – Meg Rosoff