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Authors: Colm Tóibín,Carmen Callil

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This idea of a national inheritance is complicated by the great migrations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Was Brian Moore Irish or Canadian? Is Amy Tan American or Chinese? Is V. S. Naipaul Trinidadian or English? Is Oscar Hijuelos Cuban or American? The answer is all are both.

While we differ in our response to literary theory – one of us is hostile to it, the other cannot have enough of it – we were as one in our determination to ignore the distinction between so-called popular fiction and literary fiction (also so-called). This false distinction which is prevalent in literary prizes, in academia and in our educational mores, has been responsible for the treacherous suggestion that reading is a chore, and that the best writing is always difficult and obscure.

For us, the debate as to whether
Interview with the Vampire
is of greater intrinsic merit than
Oscar and Lucinda
is irrelevant, because any decision on the subject – and a decision can be made – alters not at all the fact that both are splendid feats of the human imagination, explains nothing of the pleasure experienced as the novelists’ words lock into the reader’s imagination, but simply reveals a great deal about those arguing. The critical dividing line between popular and literary also ignores the reader and the writer, who rarely contemplate the novel in this way.

There are novelists, of course, who are not interested in the reaction of their readers, who would write for a seagull if that bird praised such a novelist’s self-absorptions. We have, generally, avoided them effortlessly. Not altogether, of course, because some, albeit few, are great writers who have created complex and difficult novels, which require concentration but are worth it.

We chose these books together on the basis that the idea of two people disputing – hotly at times, not at all on other occasions – is always preferable to one person laying down the law. We come from different places. Both of us come from the Free World, i.e. neither of us is English or American, and we have not the slightest interest in political correctness. We have different prejudices and preferences. Any list such as this is entirely personal, but in every choice we’ve looked for the same quality – a certain (or sometimes even an uncertain) genius in the work, a certain (always certain) excitement in the reading, and a feeling that you would love to hand this book to someone else to read. Most of us, these days, are almost imprisoned by choice, as anyone examining the fiction shelves of a large bookshop will notice. We have used our prejudices and preferences to cut a path through this rich jungle, using as our final point of judgement that touch of genius and sense of excitement which connect Patrick White with Ruth Rendell, Georgette Heyer with Don DeLillo, Daphne du Maurier with Katherine Anne Porter, J. D. Salinger with Irvine Welsh.

A large part of the list is common to both of us; some choices, while admired by both, more passionately belong to one or the other. In only two cases we could not agree: V. S. Naipaul and Saul Bellow have two entries, not because we consider them greater than any of the other novelists we have chosen, but because one of us considered
A Bend in the River
and
Herzog
to be the masterworks of Naipaul and Bellow, while the other disliked
Herzog
but argued passionately for Bellow’s
The Adventures of
Augie March
and could not feel
A Bend in the River
to be the equal of
A House for Mr Biswas
. For the rest, and for arguably greater writers, only one entry was necessary. It was often difficult to decide which work by a single writer to include: in the case of Nabokov, for example, between
Ada, Pnin
,
Pale Fire
or
Lolita
; in the case of Nadine Gordimer between
The Conservationist
,
July’s
People
and
Burgher’s Daughter
. We also chose to ignore the ghetto into which short stories are often placed.

Only books published in 1950 or afterwards and only books written in English qualified. We have included some collections of stories but mainly novels. We have included trilogies and single books from trilogies. There are no translations except those done by the author. We did not consider novels which were written in the earlier half of the century, but not published, for various reasons, until the second half. (These include E. M. Forster’s
Maurice
, Hemingway’s
The Garden of Eden
and Flann O’Brien’s
The Third Policeman
.) Many of the novelists we have chosen flourished also in the earlier half of the century – Faulkner, Waugh, Lehmann, du Maurier, Welty, Hemingway, Agatha Christie, P. G. Wodehouse, Patrick Hamilton, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen: we hope to send readers back to earlier years and so trace an enduring tradition.

Why 194 choices, and not 200 as in the title of the book? As we chose and wrote, and agreed and disagreed, we came across novels, often famous novels, which we did not appreciate: Tolkien’s
Lord of the Rings
for instance, science fiction and fantasy novels, and most historical novels. We read and rejected them knowing that even two omnivorous readers cannot represent every taste. Indignation, as well as pleasure, will, we hope, be among the first reactions to this book. We are well aware of our omissions, and want the reader to spot them. This is a book which requires action on the part of the reader, and so six novels have been chosen by the book-reading public and added to this book for all future editions.

We have chosen these novels for readers, readers of every age and taste, for those who have never read a novel before and for experts who want to quarrel with our choice; for school students and undergraduates, grandfathers, priests and nuns, Antarctic explorers. There are short novels and long novels, each kind providing a different kind of pleasure. A twelve-year-old could read Harper Lee’s
To Kill A Mockingbird
, a ninety-year-old Anne Tyler’s
Breathing Lessons
and be very happy; Thomas Flanagan’s historical masterpiece
The Year of the French
and Thomas Harris’s startling
Red Dragon
offer other pleasures, as indeed do Hubert Selby Jr’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn
and William Burroughs’
Naked Lunch.

For surrealists, there is Henry Green and Ivy Compton-Burnett, for romantics Rosamond Lehmann, Louis de Bernières and Sybille Bedford, for wits Muriel Spark, J. G. Farrell, for murder fiends Agatha Christie and Elmore Leonard, Carl Hiaasen and Donna Tartt, Roy Heath and P. D. James, not to speak of Bret Easton Ellis; for Cold War fanatics there is Graham Greene and Don DeLillo; for lovers of Dickens and Eliot there is Mistry, Byatt, Smiley, Storey. There are many crime novels and thrillers. Some of the greatest writers of the period are represented by their short stories – V. S. Prichett, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Mary Lavin, Raymond Carver. Most exciting was the discovery that some novels loved first twenty or thirty years ago have improved with age. For instance, Olivia Manning’s Balkan trilogy, B. S. Johnson’s
The Unfortunates
, Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, John O’Hara’s
From the Terrace
feel ready for reassessment. However good we thought them before, they seem finer now.

There were no quotas for men, women or race in choosing these books. The only constraint on our choice was the lack of availability of books from certain countries. Otherwise, we began and ended with open minds, and the books we chose are here because we loved them.

 

 

We both have memories from childhood and adolescence of being wrapped up in books. Books were a way of escaping the world, and also of entering it in a way that was more intense; a way of discovering feeling; a working out of how to live. Both of us were constantly reminded, as we did our research, of moments from childhood and adolescence – finding a book we hadn’t read or had forgotten, and after a few pages, suddenly being enclosed, cocooned, absorbed and totally involved in its world; finding ourselves anxious and dispossessed until we took it up again.

Books were happiness. We were brought up in places where reading was a passion and a joy. It still is for us. And so here they are: books which we offer wholeheartedly to the reader as you would give to a friend going on a journey; 194 examples of the best novels and stories in English published during the last half of the twentieth century.

How to use this book

All entries are alphabetical under the name of the author. Sometimes we have chosen a novel within a sequence, sometimes the sequence itself: the full work is detailed in both cases.

A note on this edition

Our readers, all over the world, sent us thousands of entries for the final six titles for this book. The four most popular are included here. In order of popularity they read as follows: Sebastian Faulks’
Birdsong
, Charles Frazier’s
Cold Mountain
, John Fowles’
The Magus
– which beat his
French Lieutenant’s Woman
by a whisker – and Vikram Seth’s
A Suitable Boy.

We used our rights as authors to choose the last two: William Maxwell’s
So Long
,
See You Tomorrow
because it was a grave omission and authorial mistake of ours in the hardback edition, and Helen Garner’s
The Children’s Bach
because she topped the poll outside the world of British and American writers, who seem to dominate our readers’ tastes.

List of titles in order of publication
 
 
1950
A Murder is Announced
Agatha Christie
Nothing
Henry Green
Power Without Glory
Frank Hardy
The Grand Sophy
Georgette Heyer
1951
December Bride
Sam Hanna Bell
My Cousin Rachel
Daphne du Maurier
The West Pier
Patrick Hamilton
The Ballad of the Sad Café
Carson McCullers
A Dance to theMusic of Time (1951–75
) Anthony Powell
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
1952
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway
The Natural
Bernard Malamud
The Financial Expert
R. K. Narayan
Wise Blood
Flannery O’Connor
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
The Sword of Honour Trilogy
(1952–61) Evelyn Waugh
1953
Private Life of an Indian Prince
Mulk Raj Anand
Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow
The Long Good-Bye
Raymond Chandler
The Go-Between
L. P. Hartley
The Echoing Grove
Rosamond Lehmann
The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Amos Tutuola
1954
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis
Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Tortoise and the Hare
Elizabeth Jenkins
The Flint Anchor
Sylvia Townsend Warner
1955
The Molloy Trilogy
(1955–58) Samuel Beckett
The Recognitions
William Gaddis
The Talented Mr Ripley
Patricia Highsmith
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
1956
A Legacy
Sybille Bedford
Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
1957
Owls Do Cry
Janet Frame
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
Angel
Elizabeth Taylor
The Fountain Overflows
Rebecca West
1958
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Anecdotes of Destiny
Isak Dinesen
From the Terrace
John O’Hara
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
Alan Sillitoe
1959
Naked Lunch
William Burroughs
A Heritage and its History
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The Little Disturbances of Man
Grace Paley
1960
To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee
The Balkan Trilogy
(1960–65) Olivia Manning
The Rabbit Quartet
(1960–90) John Updike
Jeeves in the Offing
P. G. Wodehouse
(US:
How Right You Are, Jeeves
)
1961
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
A House for Mr Biswas
V. S. Naipaul
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
Riders in the Chariot
Patrick White
1962
That’s How it Was
Maureen Duffy
The Reivers
William Faulkner
The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
The Lonely Girl
Edna O’Brien
(renamed
Girl with Green Eyes
1964)
Ship of Fools
Katherine Anne Porter
1963
The Little Girls
Elizabeth Bowen
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John Le Carré
The Group
Mary McCarthy
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1964
Herzog
Saul Bellow
Heartland
Wilson Harris
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Hubert Selby Jr.
1965
Memoirs of a Peon
Frank Sargeson
The Interpreters
Wole Soyinka
1966
The Magus
John Fowles
A Jest of God
Margaret Laurence
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
The Jewel in the Crown
Paul Scott
Cotters’ England
Christina Stead
(US:
Dark Places of the Heart
1967)
1967
The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
A Grain of Wheat
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o
1968
In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
William H. Gass
The Nice and the Good
Iris Murdoch
1969
The Unfortunates
B. S. Johnson
Happiness
Mary Lavin
The Godfather
Mario Puzo
1970
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies
Master and Commander
Patrick O’Brian
1971
The Day of the Jackal
Frederick Forsyth
St Urbain’s Horseman
Mordecai Richler
Black List, Section H
Francis Stuart
1972
The Optimist’s Daughter
Eudora Welty
1973
The Siege of Krishnapur
J. G. Farrell
Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon
1975
Ragtime
E. L. Doctorow
Heat and Dust
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
Changing Places
David Lodge
1976
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
Alistair MacLeod
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice
Saville
David Storey
1977
Injury Time
Beryl Bainbridge
Falconer
John Cheever
A Book of Common Prayer
Joan Didion
The Ice Age
Margaret Drabble
1978
Tirra Lirra by the River
Jessica Anderson
Plumb
Maurice Gee
The Human Factor
Graham Greene
The Murderer
Roy A. K. Heath
The Cement Garden
Ian McEwan
1979
The Year of the French
Thomas Flanagan
From the Fifteenth District
Mavis Gallant
Burger’s Daughter
Nadine Gordimer
Sleepless Nights
Elizabeth Hardwick
The Executioner’s Song
Norman Mailer
A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
 
1980
Earthly Powers
Anthony Burgess
The Transit of Venus
Shirley Hazzard
Riddley Walker
Russell Hoban
Lamb
Bernard MacLaverty
So Long, See You Tomorrow
William Maxwell
Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Puffball
Fay Weldon
1981
Lanark
Alasdair Gray
Red Dragon
Thomas Harris
Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie
A Flag for Sunrise
Robert Stone
1982
On the Black Hill
Bruce Chatwin
Schindler’s Ark
Thomas Keneally
(US:
Schindler’s List
)
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
A Boy’s Own Story
Edmund White
1984
Money
Martin Amis
Empire of the Sun
J. G. Ballard
Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes
In Custody
Anita Desai
The Children’s Bach
Helen Garner
Nation of Fools
Balraj Khanna
Machine Dreams
Jayne Anne Phillips
1985
Family and Friends
Anita Brookner
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
Black Robe
Brian Moore
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson
1986
The Sportswriter
Richard Ford
An Artist of the Floating World
Kazuo Ishiguro
A Summons to Memphis
Peter Taylor
A Dark-Adapted Eye
Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
1987
Ellen Foster
Kaye Gibbons
Double Whammy
Carl Hiaasen
Misery
Stephen King
Beloved
Toni Morrison
In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
The Other Garden
Francis Wyndham
1988
Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey
Where I’m Calling From
Raymond Carver
Paris Trout
Pete Dexter
The Sugar Mother
Elizabeth Jolley
Forty-Seventeen
Frank Moorhouse
Ice-Candy-Man
Bapsi Sidhwa
Breathing Lessons
Anne Tyler
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
1989
The Book of Evidence
John Banville
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love
Oscar Hijuelos
The Joy Luck Club
Amy Tan
1990
Possession
A. S. Byatt
Age of Iron
J. M. Coetzee
A Home at the End of the World
Michael Cunningham
The Snapper
Roddy Doyle
Get Shorty
Elmore Leonard
Amongst Women
John McGahern
The Great World
David Malouf
Friend of My Youth
Alice Munro
1991
The Regeneration Trilogy
(1991–95) Pat Barker
Wise Children
Angela Carter
A Strange and Sublime Address
Amit Chaudhuri
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
The Redundancy of Courage
Timothy Mo
Mating
Norman Rush
Downriver
Iain Sinclair
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley
Reading Turgenev
William Trevor
Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
1992
Death and Nightingales
Eugene McCabe
The Butcher Boy
Patrick McCabe
The Secret History
Donna Tartt
1993
The Virgin Suicides
Jeffrey Eugenides
Birdsong
Sebastian Faulks
A River Sutra
Gita Mehta
The Shipping News
E. Annie Proulx
My Idea of Fun
Will Self
A Suitable Boy
Vikram Seth
Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
1994
What a Carve Up!
Jonathan Coe
(US:
The Winshaw Legacy
)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
(US:
Corelli’s Mandolin
)
The Folding Star
Alan Hollinghurst
Original Sin
P. D. James
How Late it Was, How Late
James Kelman
1995
The Tortilla Curtain
T. Coraghessan Boyle
The Blue Flower
Penelope Fitzgerald
A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
1996
Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
Asylum
Patrick McGrath
Last Orders
Graham Swift
The Night in Question
Tobias Wolff
1997
Quarantine
Jim Crace
Underworld
Don DeLillo
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
American Pastoral
Philip Roth
1998
The Lady From Guatemala
V. S. Pritchett
 
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