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Classic fiction is not a literary genre as such. It is best understood as works that over a long time have gathered much critical judgement and praise. These novels are among the best that has been written anywhere, at any time. They are books we should probably all read, but know they will always be available when we do get around to reading them. They are books that can be read many times, and enjoyed greatly each time.

We have divided the classic novels into three groups for easier access: Pre-1900 Classics, Early 20th Century Classics and Modern Classics.

Austen, Jane, (1775-1817)
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)

Balzac, Honore de, (1799-1850)
Pere Goriot (1835)
The Human Comedy (1853)

Bronte, Anne, (1820-1849)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Bronte, Charlotte, (1816-1855)
Jane Eyre (1847)

Bronte, Emily, (1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights (1847)

Butler, Samuel, (1835-1902)
Erewhon (1872)
The way of all flesh (1903)

Collins, (William) Wilkie, (1824-1889)
The Woman in White (1860)
The Moonstone (1868)

Cooper, James Fenimore, (1789-1851)
The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
The Pathfinder (1840)
The Deerslayer (1841)

Defoe, Daniel, (1660-1731)
Robinson Crusoe (1719-1720)
Moll Flanders (1722)

Dickens, Charles, (1812-1870)
Bleak House (1852-1853)
A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, (1821-1881)
The Brothers Karamozov (1880)

Dumas, Alexandre, (1802-1870)
The Count of Monte Cristo (1846)
The Three Musketeers (1846)
The Black Tulip (1854)

Eliot, George, (1819-1880)
Adam Bede (1859)
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Fielding, Henry, (1707-1754)
The history of Tom Jones, a foundling (1749)

Flaubert, Gustave, (1821-1880)
Madame Bovary (1857)

Gaskell, Mrs Elizabeth, (1810-1865)
Cranford (1853)

Hardy, Thomas, (1840-1928)
Desperate Remedies (1871)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, (1804-1928)
The Scarlett Letter

Hugo, Victor, (1802-1885)
The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
Les Miserables (1862)

James, Henry, (1843-1916)
Portrait of a Lady (1879)
The Bostonians (1886)

Melville, Herman, (1819-1891)
Moby Dick (1851)

Meredith, George, (1828-1909)
The Egotist (1879)
Diana of the Crossways (1885)

Peacock, Thomas Love, (1785-1866)
Nightmare Abbey (1818)

Richardson, Samuel, (1689-1761)
Pamela (1740)
Clarissa or the History of a Young Lady (1748)

Scott, Sir Walter, (1771-1831)
Waverley (1814)
Ivanhoe (1820)

Shelley, Mary Wollstoncraft, (1797-1851)
Frankenstein (1818)

Sterne, Laurence, (1713-1768)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shanty (1760)

Sienkiewicz, Henryk, (1846-1916)
The Deluge (1892)

Stowe, Harriet Beecher, (1811-1863)
Uncle Tom's Cabin

Swift, Jonathan, (1667-1745)
Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William Makepeace, (1811-1863)
Vanity Fair (1848)

Tolstoy, Count Leo Nikolayevich, (1828-1910)
War and Peace (1866)

Trollope, Anthony, (1815-1882)
Barchester Towers (1857)
The Palliser Novels (1864-1880)

Twain, Mark, (1835-1910)
Tom Sawyer (1880)
Huckleberry Finn

Verne, Jules, (1828-1905)
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869)
Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)

Wilde, Oscar, (1854-1900)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)

Zola, Emile (1840-1902)
Nana (1880)

Bagnold, Enid, (1889-1981)
National Velvet

Bennett, (Enoch) Arnold, (1867-1931)
Clayhanger Series (1910-1916)

Bernanos, Georges, (1888-1948)
The Diary of a Country Priest (1936)

Buchan, John, (1875-1940)
The Thirty-nine Steps (1915)

Buck, Pearl, (1892-1973)
The Good Earth (1931)

Cather, Willa Sibert, (1873-1947)
One of ours (1922)

Chevallier, Gabriel, (1895-1969)
Clochemerle (1934)

Conrad, Joseph, (1857-1924)
Lord Jim (1900)

Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, (1859-1930)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1890-1902)

Dreiser, Theodore Herman Albert, (1871-1945)
An American Tragedy (1925)

Du Maurier, Dame Daphne, (1907-1989)
Rebecca (1938)

Farrell, James (Thomas), (1904-1979)
Young Lonigan (1932)

Faulkner, William, (1897-1962)
The Sound and the Fury (1929)

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, (1896-1940)
The Great Gatsby (1925)

Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan), (1879-1970)
Howard's End (1910)

Galsworthy, John, (1867-1933)
The Forsyte Saga Series (1920-1928)

Gibbons, Stella, (1902-1989)
Cold Comfort Farm (1933)

Gide, Andre, (1869-1951)
The Immoralist (1902)

Graves, Robert, (1895-1985)
I Claudius (1934)

Greene, (Henry) Graham, (1904-1991)
Brighton Rock (1938)

Hasek, Jaroslav, (1883-1923)
The Good Soldier Schweik (1912)

Hesse, Hermann, (1877-1962)
Steppenwolf (1927)

Huxley, Aldous Leonard, (1894-1963)
After Many a Summer (1939)

Joyce, James, (1882-1941)
Ulysses (1922)

Kafka, Franz, (1883-1924)
Metamorphosis (1933)

Lawrence, D. H. (David Herbert), (1885-1930)
Sons and Lovers (1913)

London, Jack, (1876-1916)
Call of the Wild (1903)

McCullers, Carson, (1917-1967)
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

Mann, Thomas, (1875-1955)
Buddenbrooks : The Decline of Family (1924)

MacKenzie, Sir Compton, (1883-1972)
Sinister Street (1913-1914)

Maugham, (William) Somerset, (1874-1965)
Cakes and Ale (1930)

Mauriac, Francois, (1885-1970)
Vipers Tangle (1932)

Miller, Henry Valentine, (1891-1980)
Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Mitchell, Margaret, (1900-1949)
Gone with the Wind (1936)

O'Brien, Flann, (1911-1966)
At Swim-two-birds (1936)

Priestley, J. B. (John Boynton), (1894-1984)
The Good Companions (1929)

Rand, Ayn, (1905-1982)
The Fountainhead (1943)

Remarque, Erich Maria, (1898-1970)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

Saint-Exupery, Antoine de, (1900-1944)
The Little Prince (1943)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, (1905-1980)
Nausea (1938)

Sholokhov, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, (1905-1984)
And Quiet Flows the Don (1934)

Steinbeck, John Ernest, (1902-1968)
The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Toomer, Jean. (1894-1967)
Cane (1923)

Wells, H. G. (Herbert George), (1866-1946)
The War of the Worlds (1898)

West, Dame Rebecca, (1892-1983)
The Return of the Soldier (1918)

Wharton, Edith Newbold, (1861-1937)
The Age of Innocence (1920)

Wilder, Thorton Niven, (1897-1975)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927)

Woolf, (Adeline) Virginia, (1882-1941)
To the Lighthouse (1927)

Achebe, Chinua, (1930-)
Things Fall Apart (1958)

Andric, Ivo, (1892-1975)
The Bridge on the Drina (1959)

Baldwin, James Arthur, (1924-1987)
Another Country (1962)

Bassani, Giorgio, (1916-)
The Gardens of the Finzi-Continis (1965)

Bellow, Saul, (1915-)
Humboldt's Gift (1975)

Boll, Heinrich, (1917-1985)
Acquainted with the Night (1953)

Brink, Andre, (1935-)
Rumours of Rain (1978)

Bulgakov, Mikhail, (1891-1940)
The Master and Margarita (1966)

Burgess, Anthony, (1917-1993)
A Clockwork Orange (1962)

Camus, Albert, (1913-1960)
The Outsider (1946)

Davies, (William) Robertson, (1913-)
The Deptford Trilogy (1970-1975)

De Beauvoir, Simone, (1908-1986)
The Mandarins (1954)

Donleavy, J. P. (James Patrick), (1926-)
The Ginger Man (1955)

Duras, Marguerite, (1914-1996)
The Lover (1985)

Eco, Umberto, (1932-)
The Name of the Rose (1980)

Fowles, John Robert, (1926-)
The Magus (1965)

Garcia Marquez, Gabriel, (1927-)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)

Genet, Jean (1910-1986)
Our Lady of the Flowers (1949)

Golding, William Gerald, (1911-1993)
Lord of the Flies (1954)

Grass, Gunter Wilhelm, (1927-)
The Tin Drum (1953)

Hartley, L. P. (Leslie Poles), (1895-1972)
The Go-between (1953)

Heller, Joseph, (1923-)
Catch-22 (1964)

Hemingway, Ernest Millar, (1899-1961)
The Old Man and the Sea (1952)

Ishiguro, Kazuo, (1954-)
Remains of the Day (1989)

Kosinski, Jerzy Nikodem, (1933-1991)
The Painted Bird (1965)

Kundera, Milan (1929-)
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980)

Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomasi di, (1896-1957)
The Leopard (1959)

Lessing, Doris May, (1919-)
The Golden Notebook (1962)

Mahfouz, Naguib (aka Najib Mahfuz), (1911-2006)
The Cairo Trilogy (1956-1957)

Mailer, Norman Kingsley, (1923-)
The Naked and the Dead (1948)

Malouf, David, (1934-)
Remembering Babylon (1993)

Monsarrat, Nicholas John Turney, (1910-1979)
The Cruel Sea (1951)

Moravia, Alberto, (1907-1990)
The Woman of Rome (1947)

Nabokov, Vladimir, (1899-1977)
Lolita (1959)

Narayan, R. K. (Rasipuram Krishnaswamy), (1906-)
The Guide (1958)

Okri, Ben, (1959-)
The Famished Road (1991)

Ondaatje, (Philip) Michael, (1943-)
The English Patient (1991)

Orwell, George, (1903-1950)
Nineteen Eighty Four (1949)

Paton, Alan, (1903-1988)
Cry the Beloved Country (1948)

Powell, Anthony Dymoke, (1905-)
Dance to the Music of Time 12 Vols.

Puig, Manuel, (1932-1990)
Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976)

Roth, Philip Milton, (1932-)
Portnoy's Complaint (1969)

Rushdie, (Ahmed) Salman, (1947-)
Midnight's Children (1981)

Sagan, Francoise, (1935-)
Bonjour Tristesse (1954)

Salinger, J. D. (Jerome David), (1919-)
The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Seth, Vikram, (1952-)
A Suitable Boy (1993)

Sillitoe, Alan, (1928-)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)

Simon, Claude Eugene, (1913-)
The Flanders Road (1962)

Singer, Isaac Bashevis, (1904-1991)
The Family Moskat (1950)

Smith, Iain Crichton, (1928-)
Consider the Lilies (1968)

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, (1918-)
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)

Soyinka, Wole, (1934-)
The Interpreters (1970)

Spark, Dame Muriel Sarah, (1918-)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)

Swift, Graham, (1949-)
The Waterland (1983)

Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel), (1892-1973)
The Lord of the Rings 3 vols. (1954-1955)

Unsworth, Barry, (1930-)
The Sacred Hunger (1992)

Uris, Leon (Marcus), (1924-)
Exodus (1958)

Walker, Alice, (1944-)
The Color Purple (1982)

Waugh, Evelyn, (1903-1966)
Brideshead Revisited (1945)

West, Morris Langlo, (1961-)
The Shoes of the Fisherman (1963)

White, Patrick Victor Martindale, (1912-1990)
The Tree of Man (1954)

Wilson, Sir Angus Frank Johnstone, (1913-1991)
The Old Men at the Zoo (1961)

Wouk, Herman, (1915-)
The Caine Mutiny (1951)

Yourcenar, Marguerite, (1903-1987)
Memoirs of Hadrian (1954)