What are the essential novels of a country? I surely don’t know, but these are my top 20, for the three nations I’ve read the most (at least 50 authors) and feel the most comfortable sorting. Note: No author appears more than once, so I went for my favorite by each - some had multiple brilliant novels, but I wanted a diversity of voices. The lists are also chronological, not hierarchical. Without further ado, here’s what I think are the 20 best novels for those three nationalities: providing a sampler to familiarize yourself with their literature.
France
Gargantua
and Pantagruel, Rabelais, 1564
Candide,
Voltaire, 1759
Jacques
the Fatalist, Diderot, 1796
The Red
and the Black, Stendhal, 1830
The
Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hugo, 1831
Old
Goirot, Balzac, 1835
Madame
Bovary, Flaubert, 1857
The
Immoralist, Gide, 1902
The
Gods Will Have Blood, France, 1912
Swann’s
Way, Proust, 1913
The
Desert of Love, Mauriac, 1925
Journey
to the End of the Night, Celine, 1932
The
Thibaults, Martin Du Gard, 1940
The
Little Prince, Saint-Exupery, 1943
The
Plague, Camus, 1947
The
Memoirs of Hadrian, Yourcenar, 1951
Missing
Person, Modiano, 1978
Segu,
Conde, 1984
The
Prospector, Le Clezio, 1985
The
Years, Ernaux, 2008
Britain
Pride
and Prejudice, Austen, 1813
Frankenstein,
Shelly, 1818
A Tale
of Two Cities, Dickens, 1859
Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, Carroll, 1865
Middlemarch,
Eliot, 1872
The Way
of All Flesh, Butler, 1903
A
Passage to India, Forster, 1924
Mrs.
Dalloway, Woolf, 1925
Brave
New World, Huxley, 1932
Right
Ho Jeeves, Wodehouse, 1934
Brideshead
Revisited, Waugh, 1945
1984,
Orwell, 1948
The
Lord of the Flies, Golding, 1954
The
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, 1955
The
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Spark, 1961
The Spy
Who Came in from the Cold, Le Carre, 1963
The
French Lieutenant’s Woman, Fowles, 1969
Watchmen,
Moore and Gibbons, 1987
Atonement,
McEwan, 2001
Never
Let Me Go, Ishiguro, 2005
America
Moby
Dick, Melville, 1851
The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain, 1885
The
Ambassadors, James, 1903
The Sun
Also Rises, Hemingway, 1926
Death
Comes for the Archbishop, Cather, 1927
Light
in August, Faulkner, 1932
All the
King’s Men, Warren, 1946
Native
Son, Wright, 1946
Go Tell
It on the Mountain, Baldwin, 1953
On the
Road, Kerouac, 1957
Pale
Fire, Nabokov, 1962
Slaughterhouse-Five,
Vonnegut, 1969
Play It
as It Lays, Didion, 1970
Housekeeping,
Robinson, 1980
Blood
Meridian, McCarthy, 1985
Beloved,
Morrison, 1987
Maus,
Spiegelman, 1991
The
Corrections, Franzen, 2001
Fun
Home, Bechdel, 2006
The
Underground Railroad, Whitehead, 2016
