Top 50 Books

by Richard Taylor : 2026-05-16

Introduction

Every once in a while I see a list of the "greatest books of all time" and usually find that I have read about 10% of them. Sometimes I try and compile my own "top 10"; but how can you choose only 10? I mean, I have read all 25 of the Inspector Rebus books by Ian Rankin... which is the best? Also, how can I pick one book from "The Black Magician" or "Quantum Gravity" series?

So, my list, my rules. I have picked my top 50 "fiction books" but included a whole series as one entry where I can't pick one from the series. Also, I've tried to stick to no more than two entries per author (which was hard).

The List

Favourite 50 books, or series with the number of volumes in square brackets.

Alphabetical by author surname.

• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [5] (Douglas Adams)
• Dirk Gently [2] (Douglas Adams)
• Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
• Foundation [3] (Isaac Asimov)
• Crash (JG Ballard)
• The Culture [10] (Iain M Banks)
• Arthur And George (Julian Barnes)
• Rogue Moon (Algis Budrys)
• The Outsider (Albert Camus)
• The Black Magician [3] (Trudi Canavan)
• Don Quixote (Cervantes)
• Berlin Game (Len Deighton)
• A Scanner Darkly (Philip K Dick)
• Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
• The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky)
• Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
• Engelby (Sebastian Faulks)
• American Gods (Neil Gaiman)
• Anansi Boys (Neil Gaiman)
• Neuromancer (William Gibson)
• Rites of Passage (William Golding)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)
• The Woodlanders (Thomas Hardy)
• Door Into Summer (Robert A Heinlein)
• Starman Jones (Robert A Heinlein)
• Dune (Frank Herbert)
• Fever Pitch (Nick Hornby)
• The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
• Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
• The Europeans (Henry James)
• The Trial (Franz Kafka)
• The Lathe of Heaven (Ursula Le Guin)
• The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
• The Pyramid (Henning Mankell)
• Saturday (Ian McEwan)
• The City and The City (China Mieville)
• First Blood (David Morrell)
• Her Fearful Symmetry (Audrey Niffenegger)
• The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)
• The Shipping News (Annie Proulx)
• Inspector Rebus [25] (Ian Rankin)
• Quantum Gravity [5] (Justina Robson)
• The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkein)
• A Gentleman in Moscow (Amor Towles)
• Cryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson)
• Daemon (Daniel Suarez)
• Trainspotting (Irvine Welsh)
• The Picture of Dorian Grey (Oscar Wilde)
• The Book Thief (Markus Zusak)