Explore the list of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World

Identity

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Days Without End – Sebastian Barry

Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi

Small Island – Andrea Levy

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Read more: Ten remarkable novels about identity.

Love, Sex & Romance

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

Forever – Judy Blume

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Riders – Jilly Cooper

The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye

The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

The Passion – Jeanette Winterson

The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

Read more: Get passionate over these ten stories of Love, Sex & Romance

Adventure

City of Bohane – Kevin Barry

Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman

Ivanhoe – Walter Scott

Mr Standfast – John Buchan

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien

Read more: Spine-tingling tales: Ten of the best adventure stories ever told

Life, Death & Other Worlds

A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin

Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri

Dune – Frank Herbert

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis

The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett

The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman

Politics, Power & Protest

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman

Strumpet City – James Plunkett

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Unless – Carol Shields

V for Vendetta – Alan Moore

Class & Society

A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul

Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

Poor Cow – Nell Dunn

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Read more: Living together: What ten classic novels tell us about society

Coming of Age

Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery

Golden Child - Claire Adam

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan

The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien

The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling

The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ - Sue Townsend

The Twilight Saga – Stephenie Meyer

Family & Friendship

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild

Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Middlemarch – George Eliot

Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë

The Witches – Roald Dahl

Crime & Conflict

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

American War – Omar El Akkad

Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Regeneration – Pat Barker

The Children of Men – P.D. James

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

The Quiet American – Graham Greene

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid

The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

Rule Breakers

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville

Habibi – Craig Thompson

How to be Both – Ali Smith

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

Orlando – Virginia Woolf

Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse

The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde