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    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
    Ebook230 pages1 hour

    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time

    By Centaur Classics

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Here you can find our list of the 100 greatest novels of all time.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCentaur Editions
    Release dateMar 8, 2016
    ISBN9788892564442
    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time

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    Reviews for The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time

    3.5/5

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    • 1/5
      Terrible and predictable list. No salman Rushdie or Graham Greene or Michael Ondaatje or Lawrence Durrell
    • 5/5
      A great place to start a long reading adventure. I had to laugh at the reviewer who called it "imperialist". Books, like character, should be judged on their merits, not skin color. I might not agree with all of the choices, but it's a good list.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I didn't like the piece of junk at all. Its imperialist bullshit. The best thing to have tagged it would have been the 100 Greatest Western novel. The list sucks for being one sided

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    The 100 Greatest Novels of All Time - Centaur Classics

    centaur.editions@gmail.co

    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

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