Reading list
The best classic novels of all time
A classic novel is one people keep choosing to read long after anyone is making them. This list ranks the novels that pass that test most convincingly: the ones readers still finish and still argue about, from three centuries and seven languages.
25 books, all free to read
Every book here is complete and free. Where one is long, the length is given honestly, along with a note on why it is worth the hours.
-
1. Pride and Prejudice
by Jane Austen
Two proud people misjudge each other for three hundred pages, and it is the most satisfying romance in English. The wit is the plot.
-
2. Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë
Love as a force of nature, revenge across two generations, and the moors. Nothing else reads like it.
-
3. Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
A woman leaves her marriage for love in a society that will not forgive her, and beside her a man learns how to live. Tolstoy's most perfect book.
-
4. Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë
An orphan governess who will not be pitied, a house with a secret and a voice that still feels modern. The first great first-person heroine.
-
5. Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A murder in the first part and a mind coming apart for the rest. Dostoevsky's fastest and most gripping novel.
-
6. Moby Dick
by Herman Melville
A captain hunting a white whale, and a book that swallows everything: whaling, God, obsession and a great deal about rope. Skip the cetology if you must.
-
7. Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens
A poor boy, a convict on the marshes and a jilted bride who stopped the clocks. Dickens's tightest plot and his best ending.
-
8. Middlemarch
by George Eliot
A whole English town and four marriages, written with more understanding of people than any novel before it.
-
9. The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Betrayal, prison, treasure and the slowest revenge ever served. The most purely enjoyable long novel on the list.
-
10. Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
A country doctor's wife who read too many romances. Flaubert wrote it a sentence at a time, and you can tell.
-
11. War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Five families through Napoleon's wars. It is long, but it is a book of short scenes, and few novels are as alive.
-
12. Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
An old man reads too many knight stories and sets out to be one. The first modern novel, and still funny.
-
13. Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley
Written by a nineteen-year-old in a ghost-story contest, and the novel that invented science fiction.
-
14. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain
A boy and an escaped slave on a raft down the Mississippi. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from it.
-
15. The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The shortest great novel here: a party, a green light and a man who believes he can repeat the past.
-
16. Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict, the inspector who hunts him and the whole of nineteenth-century France. Hugo's great book of mercy.
-
17. The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A family murder becomes an argument about God, freedom and guilt. Many writers call it the greatest novel ever written.
-
18. The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
A woman in Puritan Boston wears a scarlet A and refuses to name the father. Short, severe and beautifully written.
-
19. Little Women
by Louisa May Alcott
Four sisters growing up during the Civil War. Jo March has been every bookish girl's favourite character for 150 years.
-
20. The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
A portrait ages so a beautiful young man does not. Wilde's epigrams on top, decay underneath.
-
21. Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Becky Sharp climbs Regency society by any means available. A novel without a hero, as its subtitle says, and wickedly funny.
-
22. A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
London and Paris before and during the Terror. Famous first line, famous last line, and a great deal of plot in between.
-
23. Tess of the d’Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A poor girl claims kinship with a grand family and is destroyed by the men she meets. Hardy's most moving novel.
-
24. Emma
by Jane Austen
A clever, spoilt young woman matchmakes for everyone and gets it all wrong. Austen's funniest and most daring book.
-
25. Ulysses
by James Joyce
A single day in Dublin, the novel that changed what novels could do. Read it after the others, with patience and a sense of humour.
More lists
Read them free
Every book on this list is free in Doomreader: open one and it reads as short posts you scroll, with your place kept and its best pages a tap away. You can listen to any of them free too, read aloud by your device.