Tim's Top Fifty
My favourite great fictions ...
1. James Joyce - Ulysses [1922]
2. Vladimir Nabokov - Ada or Ardor [1969]
3. Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet [c 1910-1935]
4. Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time [1913-1927]
5. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita [1955]
6. Franz Kafka - The Trial [1925]
7. Vladimir Nabokov - Pale Fire [1962]
8. Martin Amis - London Fields [1986]
9. Flann O'Brien - At Swim-two-birds [1939]
10. Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote [1605-1615]
11. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five [1969]
12. Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman [1759-1767]
13. Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being [1984]
14. Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita [1967]
15. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Love In The Time of Cholera [1985]
16. Martin Amis - Money [1984]
17. Vladimir Nabokov - Pnin [1957]
18. Andrei Bely - Petersburg [1913]
19. Italo Calvino - If on a winter's night a traveller [1979]
20. Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary [1857]
21. Saul Bellow - Herzog [1964]
22. Flann O'Brien - The Third Policeman [1967]
23. Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude [1967]
24. Milan Kundera - Immortality [1990]
25. Patrick Sueskind - Perfume [1985]
26. Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night [1961]
27. Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow [1973]
28. Nikolay Gogol - Dead Souls [1842]
29. Saul Bellow - Humboldt's Gift [1975]
30. Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina [1878]
31. James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1917]
32. George Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody [1892]
33. Georges Perec - Life: A User's Manual [1978]
34. Thomas Pynchon - V [1963]
35. Roberto Bolano - 2666 [2008]
36. Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March [1953]
37. Jose Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis [1984]
38. Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim [1954]
39. David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas [2004]
40. Jean-Paul Sartre - The Age of Reason [1945]
41. Franz Kafka - Amerika [1927]
42. Alexander Pushkin - Eugene Onegin [1833]
43. Virginia Woolf - The Waves [1931]
44. Martin Amis - Time's Arrow [1991]
45. Vladimir Nabokov - Despair [1934]
46. Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle [1963]
47. Franz Kafka - The Castle [1926]
48. Martin Amis - Other People [1981]
49. Halldor Laxness - Independent People [1946]
50. Magnus Mills - All Quiet on the Orient Express [1999]
51. Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting [1979]
52. Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano [1947]
Fiction
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Henri Alain-Fournier - Le Grand Meaulnes
Monica Ali - Brick Lane
Kingsley Amis - Lucky Jim, The Old Devils
Martin Amis - The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Other People, Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, Yellow Dog, House of Meetings, Success, The Information, Night Train, Heavy Water and Other Stories, The Pregnant Widow
Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake, The Handmaid's Tale
Julian Barnes - Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
Samuel Beckett - First Love and Other Novellas
Saul Bellow - The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, Mr Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift
Andrei Bely - Petersburg
Roberto Bolano - 2666
Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita, Black Snow, The Heart of a Dog
Anthony Burgess - A Clockwork Orange
William Burroughs - Naked Lunch
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, Numbers In The Dark, Invisible Cities
Albert Camus - The Outsider, The Fall
Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's
Miguel de Cervantes - Don Quixote
Paulo Coelho - The Alchemist
JM Coetzee - Disgrace, Summertime
Wilkie Collins - The Woman in White
Joseph Conrad - Heart of Darkness
Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders
Charles Dickens - A Christmas Carol
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Crime and Punishment
George Eliot - Middlemarch
William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
Henry Fielding - Tom Jones
Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - The Sorrows of Young Werther
Nikolay Gogol - Dead Souls; The Diary of a Madman, The Government Inspector and Selected Stories
William Golding - Lord of the Flies
Gunter Grass - The Tin Drum
Graham Greene - Brighton Rock
George and Weedon Grossmith - The Diary of a Nobody
Joseph Heller - Catch-22
Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go
Jerome K Jerome - Three Men in a Boat
James Joyce - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, Dubliners
Franz Kafka - The Trial, Amerika, The Metamorphosis, The Castle
Jack Kerouac - On The Road
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Immortality
Halldor Laxness - Independent People
Mikhail Lermontov - A Hero of Our Time
Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, Leaf Storm
Yann Martel - Life of Pi
Cormac McCarthy - The Road
Carson McCullers - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Ian McEwan - Atonement, Saturday
Herman Melville - Moby Dick
Magnus Mills - All Quiet On The Orient Express, The Restraint of Beasts, Explorers of the New Century, The Maintenance of Headway
David Mitchell - number9dream, Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten
Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore
Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita, Transparent Things, Pale Fire, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories, Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Despair, Mary, Invitation to a Beheading, Glory, Laughter in the Dark, Bend Sinister, The Gift, The Luzhin Defense; King, Queen, Knave; Look at the Harlequins!
Flann O'Brien - At Swim-Two-Birds, The Third Policeman, The Best of Myles
George Orwell - Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Georges Perec - Life: A User's Manual
Fernando Pessoa - The Book of Disquiet
Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time: The Way By Swann's, In the Shadow of Young Girls In Flower, The Guermantes Way
Alexander Pushkin - The Captain's Daughter, Eugene Onegin
Thomas Pynchon - V, Gravity's Rainbow
Philip Roth - Sabbath's Theater
Salman Rushdie - Midnight's Children
Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated
JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
Jose Saramago - The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
Jean-Paul Sartre - The Age of Reason, The Reprieve, Iron In The Soul
F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
Ali Smith - The Accidental, Hotel World
Muriel Spark - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Patrick Sueskind - Perfume, The Pigeon
Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, The Devil
Mark Twain - Diaries of Adam and Eve
John Updike - The Centaur, Rabbit Run
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five, Cat's Cradle, Mother Night, Armageddon In Retrospect, Breakfast of Champions, The Sirens of Titan, God Bless You Mr Rosewater
Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited, Decline and Fall
Oscar Wilde - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway, To The Lighthouse, The Waves
Yevgeny Zamyatin - We
Non-fiction
Martin Amis - The War Against Cliche, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, Experience, The Moronic Inferno
Nick Davies - Flat Earth News
Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, The God Delusion
James Delingpole - How To Be Right
Sam Harris - The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation
Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan
Vladimir Nabokov - Speak, Memory
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spake Zarathustra
Paul-Henri Thiry - Good Sense
Plato - The Republic
Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Svejk
Jose Saramago - Blindness, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Marcel Proust - In Search Of Lost Time Vol 4-6
Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace
William Gaddis - The Recognitions
David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest
John Barth - The Sot-weed Factor
John Steinbeck - East of Eden
Evelyn Waugh - Scoop, Vile Bodies
Roberto Bolano - The Savage Detectives
Homer - The Iliad, The Odyssey
Virgil - The Aenied
Dante - The Divine Comedy
Giovanni Boccaccio - The Decameron
Charles Dickens - Great Expectations, David Copperfield, A Tale Of Two Cities
Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint, The Counterlife
John Updike - Rabbit Redux, Rabbit is Rich, Rabbit at Rest
Robert Tressell - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Ernest Hemingway - For Whom The Bell Tolls
Kazuo Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
Don DeLillo - Underworld
AS Byatt - Possession
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot
Saul Bellow - Seize The Day
Goethe - Faust
Ian McEwan - Amsterdam
Jean-Paul Sartre - Nausea
David Mitchell - Black Swan Green
Andrei Kurkov - Death and the Penguin
Fyodor Dostoevsky - The Brothers Karamazov
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Lampedusa - The Leopard
Knut Hamsun - Hunger
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Hermann Hesse - Steppenwolf
Gustave Flaubert - A Sentimental Education
Samuel Beckett - Trilogy
Thomas Pynchon - Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against The Day
James Kelman - How Late It Was, How Late
Send your book recommendations to tim.duck@hotmail.co.uk
