Saturday, March 16, 2024

The Essential French, British, and American Novels

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

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