The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time E-Book

Centaur Classics

• Herausgeber: Centaur Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Here you can find our list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.

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Centaur Editions

THE 100 GREATEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME

2016 © Centaur Editions

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1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy



Tolstoy’s epic masterpiece intertwines the lives of private and public individuals during the time of the Napoleonic wars and the French invasion of Russia. The fortunes of the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys, of Pierre, Natasha, and Andrei, are intimately connected with the national history that is played out in parallel with their lives. Balls and soirees alternate with councils of war and the machinations of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles with everyday human passions in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed.

The prodigious cast of characters, seem to act and move as if connected by threads of destiny as the novel relentlessly questions ideas of free will, fate, and providence. Yet Tolstoy’s portrayal of marital relations and scenes of domesticity is as truthful and poignant as the grand themes that underlie them.

The last word of the landlord’s literature and the brilliant one at that.—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The best ever Russian historical novel.—Nikolai Leskov

One of the most remarkable books of our age.—Ivan Turgenev

This is the first class work!… This is powerful, very powerful indeed.—Gustave Flaubert

The best novel that had ever been written.—John Galsworthy

This work, like life itself, has no beginning, no end. It is life itself in its eternal movement.—Romain Rolland

The greatest ever war novel in the history of literature.—Thomas Mann

There remains the greatest of all novelists — for what else can we call the author of “War and Peace”?—Virginia Woolf

Tolstoy is the greatest Russian writer of prose fiction. —Vladimir Nabokov

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2.Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes



Don Quixote has become so entranced by reading chivalric romances, that he determines to become a knight-errant himself. In the company of his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, his exploits blossom in all sorts of wonderful ways. While Quixote’s fancy often leads him astray — he tilts at windmills, imagining them to be giants — Sancho acquires cunning and a certain sagacity. Sane madman and wise fool, they roam the world together, and together they have haunted readers’ imaginations for nearly four hundred years.

With its experimental form and literary playfulness, Don Quixote generally has been recognized as the first modern novel. The book has had enormous influence on a host of writers, from Fielding and Sterne to Flaubert, Dickens, Melville, and Faulkner, who reread it once a year, “just as some people read the Bible.”

Only Shakespeare comes close to Cervantes’ genius.—Harold Bloom

The highest creation of genius has been achieved by Shakespeare and Cervantes, almost alone. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What a monument is this book! How its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age! —Thomas Mann

‘Don Quixote’ looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through his sheer vitality...The parody has become a paragon. —Vladimir Nabokov

A more profound and powerful work than this is not to be met with...The final and greatest utterance of the human mind. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Cervantes is the founder of the Modern Era. The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes. ‘Don Quixote’ is practically unthinkable as a living being, and yet, in our memory, what character is more alive? —Milan Kundera

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3. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo



It has been said that Victor Hugo has a street named after him in virtually every town in France. A major reason for the singular celebrity of this most popular and versatile of the great French writers is Les Misérables (1862). In this story of the trials of the peasant Jean Valjean — a man unjustly imprisoned, baffled by destiny, and hounded by his nemesis, the magnificently realized, ambiguously malevolent police detective Javert — Hugo achieves the sort of rare imaginative resonance that allows a work of art to transcend its genre.

Les Misérables is at once a tense thriller that contains one of the most compelling chase scenes in all literature, an epic portrayal of the nineteenth-century French citizenry, and a vital drama — highly particularized and poetic in its rendition but universal in its implications — of the redemption of one human being.

One of the half-dozen greatest novels of the world. —Upton Sinclair

The greatest of all novels. —Leo Tolstoy

Hugo is unquestionably the most powerful talent that has appeared in France in the nineteenth century. —Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I sobbed and wailed and thought [books] were the greatest things. —Susan Sontag

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4. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen



Since its immediate success in 1813, Pride and Prejudice has remained one of the most popular novels in the English language. Jane Austen called this brilliant work “her own darling child” and its vivacious heroine, Elizabeth Bennet, “as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print.” The romantic clash between the opinionated Elizabeth and her proud beau, Mr. Darcy, is a splendid performance of civilized sparring. And Jane Austen’s radiant wit sparkles as her characters dance a delicate quadrille of flirtation and intrigue, making this book the most superb comedy of manners of Regency England.

Among the writers who have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.—Thomas Macaulay

‘Pride and Prejudice’ is the best novel in the language. —Anthony Trollope

I used to think that men did everything better than women, but that was before I read Jane Austen. I don’t think any man ever wrote better than Jane Austen.—Rex Stout

Elizabeth Bennet has but to speak, and I am at her knees.—Robert Louis Stevenson

Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very finely written novel of ‘Pride and Prejudice.’ That young lady has a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful I ever met with.—Sir Walter Scott

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5. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville



A masterpiece of storytelling, this epic saga pits Ahab, a brooding and fantastical sea captain, against the great white whale that crippled him. In telling the tale of Ahab’s passion for revenge and the fateful voyage that ensued, Melville produced far more than the narrative of a hair-raising journey; Moby-Dick is a tale for the ages that sounds the deepest depths of the human soul.

Interspersed with graphic sketches of life aboard a whaling vessel, and a wealth of information on whales and 19th-century whaling, Melville’s greatest work presents an imaginative and thrilling picture of life at sea, as well as a portrait of heroic determination. The author’s keen powers of observation and firsthand knowledge of shipboard life (he served aboard a whaler himself) were key ingredients in crafting a maritime story that dramatically examines the conflict between man and nature.

“A valuable addition to the literature of the day,” said American journalist Horace Greeley on the publication of Moby-Dick in 1851 — a classic piece of understatement about a literary classic now considered by many as “the great American novel.” Read and pondered by generations, the novel remains an unsurpassed account of the ultimate human struggle against the indifference of nature and the awful power of fate.

One of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world. —D. H. Lawrence

‘Moby-Dick’ is the book which I put down with the unqualified thought, “I wish I had written that”… —William Faulkner

What a book Melville has written! It gives me an idea of much greater power than his preceding ones. It hardly seemed to me that the review of it, in the ‘Literary World’, did justice to its best points. —Nathaniel Hawthorne

The greatest novel in American literature. —Elizabeth Hardwick

‘Moby-Dick’ is more than the greatest American novel ever written; it is a metaphysical survival manual — the best guidebook there is for a literate man or woman facing an impenetrable unknown: the future of civilization in this storm-tossed 21st century. —Nathaniel Philbrick

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6. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas



Set against the turbulent years of the Napoleonic era, Alexandre Dumas’s thrilling adventure story is one of the most widely read romantic novels of all time. In it the dashing young hero, Edmond Dantès, is betrayed by his enemies and thrown into a secret dungeon in the Chateau d’If — doomed to spend his life in a dank prison cell. The story of his long, intolerable years in captivity, his miraculous escape, and his carefully wrought revenge creates a dramatic tale of mystery and intrigue and paints a vision of France — a dazzling, dueling, exuberant France — that has become immortal.

Began to read ‘Monte Cristo’ at six one morning and never stopped till eleven at night. —William Makepeace Thackeray

The most popular man of the century... More than French... European; more than European... universal. —Victor Hugo

No novelist since Dumas has been more irreverent of the conventions of well-made fiction or any more determined to tell stories without identifiable centers. —Terrence Rafferty

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7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë



Considered lurid and shocking by mid-19th-century standards, Wuthering Heights was initially thought to be such a publishing risk that its author, Emily Brontë, was asked to pay some of the publication costs.

Wuthering Heights is a wild, passionate story of the intense and almost demonic love between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, a foundling adopted by Catherine’s father. After Mr Earnshaw’s death, Heathcliff is bullied and humiliated by Catherine’s brother Hindley and wrongly believing that his love for Catherine is not reciprocated, leaves Wuthering Heights, only to return years later as a wealthy and polished man. He proceeds to exact a terrible revenge for his former miseries. The action of the story is chaotic and unremittingly violent, but the accomplished handling of a complex structure, the evocative descriptions of the lonely moorland setting and the poetic grandeur of vision combine to make this unique novel a masterpiece of English literature.

A fiend of a book — an incredible monster... The action is laid in hell, — only it seems places and people have English names there. —Dante Gabriel Rossetti

A monument of the most striking genius that nineteenth-century womanhood has given us. —Clement Shorter

The greatest work of fiction by any man or woman Europe has produced to date. —Anthony Ludovici

There is no “I” in ‘Wuthering Heights’. There are no governesses. There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. —Virginia Woolf

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8. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky



The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky’s crowning achievement, is a tale of patricide and family rivalry that embodies the moral and spiritual dissolution of an entire society (Russia in the 1870s). It created a national furor comparable only to the excitement stirred by the publication, in 1866, of Crime and Punishment. To Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov captured the quintessence of Russian character in all its exaltation, compassion, and profligacy. Significantly, the book was on Tolstoy’s bedside table when he died. Readers in every language have since accepted Dostoyevsky’s own evaluation of this work and have gone further by proclaiming it one of the few great novels of all ages and countries.

The most magnificent novel ever written. —Sigmund Freud

‘The Brothers Karamazov’ made a deep impression on me... —James Joyce

Dostoyevsky is the only psychologist from whom I have anything to learn. —Friedrich Nietzsche

‘The Brothers Karamazov’ is maybe the greatest novel of all time. —Walker Percy

Dostoyevsky is one who has not only influenced me a lot, but that I have got a great deal of pleasure out of reading. —William Faulkner

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9. Ulysses by James Joyce



In the past, Ulysses has been labeled dirty, blasphemous, and even unreadable. None of these adjectives, however, do the slightest justice to the novel. To this day it remains the modernist masterpiece, in which the author takes both Celtic lyricism and vulgarity to splendid extremes. It is funny, sorrowful, and even (in a close-focus sort of way) suspenseful. And despite the exegetical industry that has sprung up in the last 75 years, Ulysses is also a compulsively readable book.

William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand. Joyce saw it in Dublin, Ireland, on June 16, 1904, a day distinguished by its utter normality. Two characters, Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom, go about their separate business, crossing paths with a gallery of indelible Dubliners. We watch them teach, eat, stroll the streets, argue, and (in Bloom’s case) masturbate. And thanks to the book’s stream-of-consciousness technique — which suggests no mere stream but an impossibly deep, swift-running river — we’re privy to their thoughts, emotions, and memories. The result? Almost every variety of human experience is crammed into the accordian folds of a single day, which makes Ulysses not just an experimental work but the very last word in realism.

I hold this book to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape. —T. S. Eliot

What is so staggering about “Ulysses” is the fact that behind a thousand veils nothing lies hidden; that it turns neither toward the mind nor toward the world, but, as cold as the moon looking on from cosmic space, allows the drama of growth, being, and decay to pursue its course. —Carl Jung

The greatest novel of the 20th century. —Anthony Burgess

“Ulysses” is extraordinarily interesting to those who have patience (and they need it). —John Middleton Murry

It is difficult not to acclaim a masterpiece. —Virginia Woolf

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10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald