Waterstone's Books of the Century

Numerical Listing

Copyright Waterstones

During 1997 Waterstone's announced two polls - one to find the Books of the Century, another to decide the Nation's favourite children's books. The results of those polls, one with Channel 4, the other with BBC's Bookworm, have been a source of widespread debate and interest ever since - from Richard and Judy to the New Yorker. By popular request we have now combined the two - so here they are side-by-side. The debate rages on about the relative merits of Dahl and Tolkien, the representation of poetry, writing by women authors, and 'new' books versus old.

1. J.R.R. Tolkien The Lord of the Rings
2. George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four
3. George Orwell Animal Farm
4. James Joyce Ulysses
5. Joseph Heller Catch 22
6. J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye
7. Harper Lee To Kill a Mockingbird
8. Gabriel Garcia Marquez One Hundred Years of Solitude
9. John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
10. Irvine Welsh Trainspotting
11. Jung Chang Wild Swans
12. F.Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby
13. William Golding Lord of the Flies
14. Jack Kerouac On the Road
15. Aldous Huxley Brave New World
16. Kenneth Grahame The Wind in the Willows
17. A.A. Milne Winnie-The-Pooh
18. Alice Walker The Color Purple
19. J.R.R. Tolkien The Hobbit
20. Albert Camus The Outsider
21. C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
22. Franz Kafka The Trial
23. Margaret Mitchell Gone with the Wind
24. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
25. Salman Rusdie Midnight's Children
26. Anne Frank The Diary of Anne Frank
27. Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange
28. D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers
29. Virginia Woolf To the Lighthouse
30. Primo Levi If This is a Man
31. Vladimir Nabokov Lolita
32. Iain Banks The Wasp Factory
33. Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things Past
34. Roald Dahl Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
35. John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
36. Toni Morrison Beloved
37. A.S. Byatt Possession
38. Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness
39. E.M. Forster A Passage to India
40. Richard Adams Watership Down
41. Jostein Gaarder Sophie's World
42. Umberto Eco The Name of the Rose
43. Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love in the Time of Cholera
44. Daphne du Maurier Rebecca
45. Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day
46. Milan Kundera The Unbearable Lightness of Being
47. Sebastian Faulks Birdsong
48. E.M. Forster Howard's End
49. Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited
50. Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy
51. Frank Herbert Dune
52. John Irving A Prayer for Owen Meany
53. Patrick Suskind Perfume
54. Boris Pasternak Doctor Zhivago
55. Mervyn Peake Gormenghast Trilogy
56. Laurie Lee Cider with Rosie
57. Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar
58. Margaret Atwood The Handmaid's Tale
59. Vera Brittain Testament of Youth
60. John Fowles The Magus
61. Graham Greene Brighton Rock
62. Robert Tressell The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists
63. Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita
64. Armistead Maupin Tales of the City
65. John Fowles The French Lieutenant's Woman
66. Louis de Bernières Captain Corelli's Mandolin
67. Kurt Vonnegut Slaughterhouse 5
68. Robert Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
69. E.M. Forster A Room with a View
70. Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim
71. Stephen King It
72. Graham Greene The Power and the Glory
73. Stephen King The Stand
74. Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front
75. Roddy Doyle Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
76. Roald Dahl Matilda
77. Brett Easton Ellis American Psycho
78. Hunter S. Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
79. Stephen Hawking A Brief History of Time
80. Roald Dahl James and the Giant Peach
81. D.H. Lawrence Lady Chatterley's Lover
82. Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities
83. Delia Smith Complete Cookery Course
84. Brian Keenan An Evil Cradling
85. D.H. Lawrence The Rainbow
86. George Orwell Down and Out in Paris and London
87. Arthur C. Clarke 2001 - A Space Odyssey
88. Gunter Grass The Tin Drum
89. Alexander Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
90. Nelson Mandela A Long Walk to Freedom
91. Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene
92. Michael Crichton Jurassic Park
93. Lawrence Durrell The Alexandria Quartet
94. Alan Paton Cry the Beloved Country
95. Nick Hornby High Fidelity
96. Roddy Doyle The Van
97. Roald Dahl The BFG
98. Anthony Burgess Earthly Powers
99. Robert Graves I, Claudius
100. Nicholas Evans The Horse Whisperer