The Guardian's 100 Best Novels
In May 2026, The Guardian published a ranked list of the 100 best novels of all time, voted on by writers, critics, and academics. This page cross-references that list with the LibriVox audiobook catalog, so you can listen to whichever of them are in the public domain.
26 of 100 have free LibriVox audiobooks. The remainder either are still under copyright or have not yet been recorded by LibriVox volunteers.
| # | Title | Author | Year | Free audiobook |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Middlemarch | George Eliot | 1871 | LibriVox |
| 2 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 | — |
| 3 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 | LibriVox |
| 4 | To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | 1927 | — |
| 5 | In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 1913-27 | — |
| 6 | Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1878 | LibriVox |
| 7 | War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 1869 | LibriVox |
| 8 | Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | 1847 | LibriVox |
| 9 | Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | 1813 | LibriVox |
| 10 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1856 | LibriVox |
| 11 | The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 | LibriVox |
| 12 | Bleak House | Charles Dickens | 1852-3 | LibriVox |
| 13 | Emma | Jane Austen | 1815 | LibriVox |
| 14 | Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 | — |
| 15 | Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | 1851 | LibriVox |
| 16 | Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell | 1949 | — |
| 17 | One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | — |
| 18 | Persuasion | Jane Austen | 1817 | LibriVox |
| 19 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman | Laurence Sterne | 1759 | LibriVox |
| 20 | Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | 1847 | LibriVox |
| 21 | The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | 1881 | LibriVox |
| 22 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 | — |
| 23 | Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 | — |
| 24 | The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | 1989 | — |
| 25 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 | — |
| 26 | Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 1605/15 | LibriVox |
| 27 | The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 | — |
| 28 | The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1879-80 | LibriVox |
| 29 | Pale Fire | Vladimir Nabokov | 1962 | — |
| 30 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 1818 | LibriVox |
| 31 | The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie | Muriel Spark | 1961 | — |
| 32 | The God of Small Things | Arundhati Roy | 1997 | — |
| 33 | David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | 1849-50 | LibriVox |
| 34 | Wolf Hall | Hilary Mantel | 2009 | — |
| 35 | Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | 1861 | LibriVox |
| 36 | The Handmaid's Tale | Margaret Atwood | 1985 | — |
| 37 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 | — |
| 38 | The Age of Innocence | Edith Wharton | 1920 | — |
| 39 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 | — |
| 40 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 | — |
| 41 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 | LibriVox |
| 42 | The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | 1924 | — |
| 43 | Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson | 1980 | — |
| 44 | Giovanni's Room | James Baldwin | 1956 | — |
| 45 | The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | 1962 | — |
| 46 | The Leopard | Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa | 1958 | — |
| 47 | Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | 1848 | LibriVox |
| 48 | The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka | 1915 | LibriVox |
| 49 | A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | 1995 | — |
| 50 | Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | 1966 | — |
| 51 | My Brilliant Friend | Elena Ferrante | 2011 | — |
| 52 | The Golden Bowl | Henry James | 1904 | — |
| 53 | The Transit of Venus | Shirley Hazzard | 1980 | — |
| 54 | Orlando | Virginia Woolf | 1928 | — |
| 55 | The Waves | Virginia Woolf | 1931 | — |
| 56 | Mansfield Park | Jane Austen | 1814 | — |
| 57 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 | — |
| 58 | Disgrace | JM Coetzee | 1999 | — |
| 59 | Never Let Me Go | Kazuo Ishiguro | 2005 | — |
| 60 | Howards End | EM Forster | 1910 | — |
| 61 | The Rings of Saturn | WG Sebald | 1995 | — |
| 62 | Half of a Yellow Sun | Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie | 2006 | — |
| 63 | White Teeth | Zadie Smith | 2000 | — |
| 64 | The Good Soldier | Ford Madox Ford | 1915 | — |
| 65 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 1982 | — |
| 66 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1966-67 | — |
| 67 | The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil | 1930-43 | — |
| 68 | Blood Meridian | Cormac McCarthy | 1985 | — |
| 69 | Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1866 | LibriVox |
| 70 | Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy | 1895 | — |
| 71 | Kindred | Octavia E Butler | 1979 | — |
| 72 | Our Mutual Friend | Charles Dickens | 1864-5 | — |
| 73 | Austerlitz | WG Sebald | 2001 | — |
| 74 | Nervous Conditions | Tsitsi Dangarembga | 1988 | — |
| 75 | The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison | 1970 | — |
| 76 | Dracula | Bram Stoker | 1897 | LibriVox |
| 77 | The Rainbow | DH Lawrence | 1915 | — |
| 78 | A House for Mr Biswas | VS Naipaul | 1961 | — |
| 79 | Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | 1953 | — |
| 80 | Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | 1938 | — |
| 81 | Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann | 1901 | — |
| 82 | The End of the Affair | Graham Greene | 1951 | — |
| 83 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 | — |
| 84 | The Talented Mr Ripley | Patricia Highsmith | 1955 | — |
| 85 | The Vegetarian | Han Kang | 2007 | — |
| 86 | The Turn of the Screw | Henry James | 1898 | LibriVox |
| 87 | The Line of Beauty | Alan Hollinghurst | 2004 | — |
| 88 | Ragtime | EL Doctorow | 1975 | — |
| 89 | The Left Hand of Darkness | Ursula K Le Guin | 1969 | — |
| 90 | Jacob's Room | Virginia Woolf | 1922 | — |
| 91 | Life and Fate | Vasily Grossman | 1980 | — |
| 92 | Sentimental Education | Gustave Flaubert | 1869 | — |
| 93 | Invisible Cities | Italo Calvino | 1972 | — |
| 94 | The Known World | Edward P Jones | 2003 | — |
| 95 | The Return of the Native | Thomas Hardy | 1878 | — |
| 96 | Pedro Páramo | Juan Rulfo | 1955 | — |
| 97 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 | — |
| 98 | The Road | Cormac McCarthy | 2006 | — |
| 99 | The Go-Between | LP Hartley | 1953 | — |
| 100 | My Ántonia | Willa Cather | 1918 | — |