100 Novels MBR Readers Would Die on a Hill For

A Reader-Curated Canon

You, the readers, have spoken! With the release of the Guardian’s definitive list of 100 best novels of all time, commentary erupted from all quarters, which is the real point of any such literary litany—get the jaws moving and keys clacking.

What counts, what doesn’t, and why? We have opinions, lots. Personally, I found the comparison with the Guardian’s earlier 2003 list by Robert McCrum instructive. Only thirty books sit on both rosters, which indicates little durability or consensus in such judgments.

Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash

And why were certain books missing entirely from both? Neither list gave space to, for instance, Shusaku Endo, author of Silence and many other important novels, or Alessandro Manzoni, whose The Betrothed is every bit as important to the Italian literary tradition as Tolstoy’s War and Peace is to the Russian. Why praise one and snub the other? Since the 2026 list demonstrated more attention to diversity than did the 2003 list, this struck me as irksome.

So I asked you, Miller’s Book Review readers, to weigh in. What if we created our own canon? Having tallied the votes, I think we landed in a great place. There’s nothing scientific about the results, but they are fascinating. Can I say I’m proud of this list? I am. Thank you for your hearty engagement! This little adventure depended entirely on your contributions.

In all, 126 readers named more than 400 different novels, nearly two-thirds of them mentioned only once. Of those novels that received multiple mentions, a clear, defensible, canonical core emerged that would stand up to critical scrutiny—or at least sustain a very interesting conversation.

Where a novel falls on the list is ballpark-accurate to the hard vote with my thumb on the scale based on my subjective impression of cultural importance. People will argue about the priority one novel receives over another, but where’s the fun without that? Deprive us of some literary jousting, and all we can do is argue about politics. God, help us.

I’ve reviewed several books on the list, and Jeff Goins reviewed Nabokov’s Pale Fire. I’ve included the links. Enjoy!

The MBR 100 Best Novels

In reverse order:

100. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy)
99. The House of the Spirits (Isabel Allende)
98. The Way We Live Now (Anthony Trollope)
97. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
96. Song of Solomon (Toni Morrison)
95. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
94. The Plague (Albert Camus)
93. Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)
92. Tom Jones (Henry Fielding)
91. Gulliver’s Travels (Jonathan Swift)
90. Things Fall Apart (Chinua Achebe)
89. As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner)
88. The Scarlet Letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne)
87. The Moviegoer (Walker Percy)
86. Wise Blood (Flannery O’Connor)
85. Peace Like a River (Leif Enger)
84. Island of the World (Michael D. O’Brien)
83. Gilead (Marilynne Robinson)
82. American Pastoral (Philip Roth)
81. Giovanni’s Room (James Baldwin)
80. True Grit (Charles Portis)
79. Silence (Shusaku Endo)
78. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins)
77. Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel)
76. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
75. Gone with the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
74. The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
73. Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier)
72. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
71. Mansfield Park (Jane Austen)
70. Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner)
69. Our Mutual Friend (Charles Dickens)
68. Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)
67. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
66. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez)
65. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)
64. Piranesi (Susanna Clarke)
63. The Blue Flower (Penelope Fitzgerald)
62. Dune (Frank Herbert)
61. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole)
60. Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)
59. Stoner (John Williams)
58. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
57. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)
56. The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov)
55. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov)
54. Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë)
53. Laurus (Eugene Vodolazkin)
52. Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton)
51. My Ántonia (Willa Cather)
50. Pale Fire (Vladimir Nabokov)
49. The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
48. The Portrait of a Lady (Henry James)
47. The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway)
46. A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway)
45. To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
44. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner)
43. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
42. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
41. The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann)
40. Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)
39. Jayber Crow (Wendell Berry)
38. The Code of the Woosters (P.G. Wodehouse)
37. Of Human Bondage (W. Somerset Maugham)
36. Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston)
35. Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes)
34. The End of the Affair (Graham Greene)
33. The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene)
32. Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison)
31. Beloved (Toni Morrison)
30. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
29. The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde)
28. That Hideous Strength (C.S. Lewis)
27. Death Comes for the Archbishop (Willa Cather)
26. Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
25. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
24. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
23. Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy)
22. Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain)
21. Ulysses (James Joyce)
20. 1984 (George Orwell)
19. Kristin Lavransdatter (Sigrid Undset)
18. Moby-Dick (Herman Melville)
17. Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry)
16. Emma (Jane Austen)
15. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
14. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
13. Till We Have Faces (C.S. Lewis)
12. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
11. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
10. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)
9. Persuasion (Jane Austen)
8. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
7. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Brontë)
6. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
5. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)
4. The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
3. Middlemarch (George Eliot)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
1. The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien)

My Initial Commentary

Tolkien. He was on McCrum’s 2003 list but fell off the 2026 list. He’s back—back big. No. 1! And true fact: I’ve never read it, just one of many glaring holes in my formation as a human.

A few other things stand out to me about this list. It’s less diverse than the Guardian’s 2026 list, but it’s also more readerly and less academic. McCrum made room for genre fiction, but the new list purged it. And there’s a large representation of morally serious, realist novels at the top of the list and fewer modernist voices; many appear but take the middle to lower registers, not the top.

The diversity thing is interesting because women do make up a large percentage of the list. Twenty-two women penned thirty of the hundred titles. Several appear more than once. Austen alone accounts for five (Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park, Sense and Sensibility), and Cather, Morrison, Woolf, and Wharton each contributed two.

In terms of race and national identities, however, our list is thin compared to the 2026 Guardian list. It’s great seeing such names as Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison, but this strikes me as a potential blind spot. While partially global, this list is also more distinctly Anglo-American than the 2026 Guardian list, with emphasis on the American. Not sad about the American thing. I was glad to see Larry McMurtry, Charles Portis, and John Kennedy Toole. All very deserving; True Grit is a masterpiece.

There’s also a heavy representation of religiously serious books on the list, which doesn’t surprise me given the MBR audience. Brideshead at 10, Till We Have Faces at 13, the two Greenes, Kristin Lavransdatter, Silence, Laurus, Gilead, Jayber Crow, Wise Blood, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Master and Margarita, Cry, the Beloved Country—every one of these withstands critical appraisal and earns their place. With these books leavening the whole, the entire litany works like a countercanon to a secular outlook.

What frankly did surprise me, given the readerliness of this list, compared to something produced by professional critics and academics? I expected to see some Ayn Rand. No Atlas Shrugged, no Fountainhead. (Hollis Robbins would like a word.) Along similar lines, there’s also a lack of critical favorites like Flaubert, Kafka, Proust, Ferrante, and Naipaul. Is that a failing, or just a representation of readers favoring a different kind of novel?

Also absent: There aren’t many recent novels listed. We’ve got Infinite Jest, Gilead, Wolf Hall, Piranesi, Laurus, but not much else. Maybe we’re just suspicious of fashion. That said, the list does manage to reconcile the popular and the serious in a way I rarely see such lists do.

If I do have a true disappointment—and people, hear me out—it’s that Manzoni still didn’t chart! Oy, my friends. The Betrothed, The Betrothed, The Betrothed! (See my review to get a taste of what you’re missing.) Notwithstanding that one bruise to my very soul and marrow, I commend this humble canon to you wholeheartedly. What’s more, it’s clear I still have a lot of reading to do; I’ve only read thirty-nine of these!

Let me know your thoughts about the final list. What else do you see about the selections?

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The Human Comedy of ‘The Betrothed’

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