List :: 100 Novels Everyone Should Read by Telegraph

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  #1

  Middlemarch

  by George Eliot

  (12 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 21

  519 points

  "Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #2

  Moby-Dick

  by Herman Melville

  (17 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 37

  348 points

  "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #3

  Anna Karenina

  by Leo Tolstoy

  (26 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 22

  505 points

  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. (C. Garnett, 1946) and (J. Carmichael, 1960)All happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy..."

  

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  #4

  The Portrait of a Lady

  by Henry James

  (3 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 56

  306 points

  "Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #5

  Heart of Darkness

  by Joseph Conrad

  (18 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 32

  382 points

  "The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it..."

  

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  #6

  In Search of Lost Time

  by Marcel Proust

  (7 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 25

  455 points

  "For a long time, I would go to bed early. [Fr., Longtemps, je me suis couche de bonne heure.]"

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It
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  #7

  Jane Eyre

  by Charlotte Brontë

  (35 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 17

  562 points

  "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the morning; but since dinner (Mrs. Reed, when there was no company, dined..."

  

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  #8

  Disgrace

  by J. M. Coetzee

  (7 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 96

  193 points

  "For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well."

  

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  #9

  Mrs Dalloway

  by Virginia Woolf

  (13 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 33

  365 points

  "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa..."

  

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  #10

  Don Quixote

  by Miguel de Cervantes

  (9 Reviews)

  Overall Rank: 61

  291 points

  "Idle reader, you can believe without any oath of mine that I would wish this book, as the child of my brain, to be the most beautiful, the liveliest and the cleverest imaginable.Prologue: Idle..."

  

  I've Read It I Want To Read It