(From The Observer 100 best novels of all time )

1.Don Quixote   by Miguel De Cervantes
The story of the gentle knight and his servant Sancho Panza has entranced readers for centuries

2.Robinson Crusoe   by Daniel Defoe
The first English novel.

3. Dangerous Liaisons ( Les Liaisons Dangereuses )  by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
An epistolary novel and a handbook for seducers: foppish, French, and ferocious.

4. Emma     by  Jane Austen
Near impossible choice between this and Pride and Prejudice. But Emma never fails to fascinate and annoy.

5. The Count of Monte Cristo    by  Alexandre Dumas
A revenge thriller also set in France after Bonaparte: a masterpiece of adventure writing.

6. Wuthering Heights    by  Emily Bronte
Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff have passed into the language. Impossible to ignore

7. The Scarlet Letter     by   Nathaniel Hawthorne
A classic investigation of the American mind.

8. Madame Bovary    by    Gustave Flaubert
You could summarise this as a story of adultery in provincial France, and miss the point entirely.

9. Anna Karenina    by   Leo Tolstoy
The supreme novel of the married woman’s passion for a younger man

10. Mrs Dalloway   by   Virginia Woolf
Secures Woolf’s position as one of the great twentieth-century English novelists

11. Brave New World    by  Aldous Huxley
Dystopian fantasy about the world of the seventh century AF (after Ford).

12. Nineteen Eighty -Four   by  George Orwell
This tale of one man’s struggle against totalitarianism has been appropriated the world over.

13. Charlotte’s Web   by  E. B. White
How Wilbur the pig was saved by the literary genius of a friendly spider.

14. Lord of the Flies   by   William Golding
Schoolboys become savages: a bleak vision of human nature.

15. Lolita    by  Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert’s obsession with Lolita is a tour de force of style and narrative.

16. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie  by Muriel Spark
A writer who made her debut in The Observer – and her prose is like cut glass.

17. The BFG  by   Roald Dahl
A bestseller by the most popular postwar writer for children of all ages.

18. Les Miserables  by Victor Hugo

A tale of love , loyalty and revolution in France

19. A Portrait of the Artist as a Yong Man    by    James Joyce

Ireland’s best

20. The Odyssey    by   Homer
 Set during the Trojan War, The Iliad combines battle scenes with a debate about heroism

21. The Barchester Chronicles   by Anthony Trollope

A  story set in a fictional cathedral town about the squabbles and power struggles of the clergy ( The Vicar of Dibley before its time )

22. Vanity Fair    by  William Makepeace Thackeray
‘”I’m no Angel,” answered Miss Rebecca. And to tell the truth, she was not.’

23. Bridget Jones’s Diary    by  Helen Fielding

A 30 something single woman living in London, coping with relationships and embarrassing moments.

How many have you read ? Watching the movie doesn’t count.