20th century in literature

1901–18

• Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
• The Knights of the Cross by Henryk Sienkiewicz

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum

• Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
• The Inheritors by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
• Kim by Rudyard Kipling

• The Purple Cloud by M. P. Shiel
• The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
• The Immoralist by André Gide
• The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
• The Grand Babylon Hotel by Arnold Bennett

• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling

• Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw

• Romance by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
• The Ambassadors by Henry James
• The Pit by Frank Norris
• In Wonderland by Knut Hamsun

• The Call of the Wild by Jack London
• The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers

• The Golden Bowl by Henry James
• Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
• The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton
• The Peasants by Władysław Reymont

• The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells
• The Sea-Wolf by Jack London
• Green Mansions by William Henry Hudson

• John Bull's Other Island by George Bernard Shaw

• Hadrian the Seventh by Frederick Rolfe aka Baron Corvo
• Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
• Kipps by H. G. Wells
• Songs of Life and Hope by Rubén Darío
• The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
• The Club of Queer Trades by G. K. Chesterton

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil

• Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling
• Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J. M. Barrie
• Time and the Gods by Lord Dunsany
• White Fang by Jack London

• The Aran Islands by John Millington Synge
• The Morality of Mrs. Dulska by Gabriela Zapolska

• The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
• The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster

• The Listener and Other Stories by Algernon Blackwood - contains The Willows, one of the first 'cosmic horror' stories
• The Hill of Dreams by Arthur Machen

• The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge

• Cautionary Tales for Children by Hilaire Belloc

• The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
• A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
• The Iron Heel by Jack London
• Hell by Henri Barbusse
• The Magician by Somerset Maugham - based on the author's meeting with Aleister Crowley

• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

• Personae by Ezra Pound - one of the first examples of 'modernist' poetry

• Martin Eden by Jack London
• by Horace W C Newte
• Tono-Bungay by H. G. Wells
• Three Lives by Gertrude Stein

• Exultations by Ezra Pound
• Poems by William Carlos Williams

• The Blue Bird by Maurice Maeterlinck

• Howards End by E. M. Forster
• The Card by Arnold Bennett
• The History of Mr Polly by H. G. Wells

• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
• In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield - short stories
• Under Western Eyes by Joseph Conrad
• The Tree of Knowledge by Pío Baroja
• The White Peacock by D. H. Lawrence
• Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dreiser
• In Desert and Wilderness by Henryk Sienkiewicz

• Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie

• The Trespasser by D. H. Lawrence
• Death in Venice by Thomas Mann

• Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey
• The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs

• Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw

• Petersburg by Andrei Bely
• Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
• Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Fournier
• Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
• Chance by Joseph Conrad

• A Prisoner in Fairyland by Algernon Blackwood - adapted into a play, it later became the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Starlight Express
• The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu by 'Sax Rohmer'

• Alcools by Guillaume Apollinaire - dada poems
• Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore

• Dubliners by James Joyce - short stories
• The Prussian Officer and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence - short stories
• The Vatican Cellars by André Gide
• Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein
• The Golem by Gustav Meyrink
• Mist by Miguel de Unamuno
• Maurice by E. M. Forster - unpublished
• Sinister Street by Compton Mackenzie
• The Flying Inn by G. K. Chesterton
• The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Noonan

• North of Boston by Robert Frost

• The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
• The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
• The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
• Of Human Bondage by Somerset Maugham
• The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela
• Victory by Joseph Conrad
• Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson
• The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf
• Vainglory by Ronald Firbank
• Rashōmon by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

• The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan

• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence - initially banned, published in 1920

• Greenmantle by John Buchan

• Salt-Water Poems and Ballads by John Masefield
• Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

• Under Fire by Henri Barbusse
• Walpurgis Night by Gustav Meyrink
• Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun
• The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad
• Caprice by Ronald Firbank

• Dulce et Decorum est and Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen - published posthumously
• Prufrock and Other Observations by T. S. Eliot

• Tarr by Wyndham Lewis
• Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann

• Calligrammes by Guillaume Apollinaire - dada poetry

• Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey

  Interwar period

• Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
• Night and Day by Virginia Woolf
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson - the first 'lost generation' novel
• Valmouth by Ronald Firbank
• Bazaar-e-Husn by Premchand

• Dope by Sax Rohmer - inspired by the true story of Limehouse dope-dealer Brilliant Chang
• Dope Darling by Leda Burke

• We by Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Limbo by Aldous Huxley - short stories
• The Lost Girl by D. H. Lawrence
• This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The London Venture by Michael Arlen
• Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay
• Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
• The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

• Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello
• Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie by Eugene O'Neill - Pulitzer prize winner

• The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
• Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley
• England, My England and Other Stories by D. H. Lawrence - short stories
• The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy - pentalogy, first volume published in 1906
• My Life and Loves by Frank Harris - four volumes of quasi-factual sex gossip, the fifth completed by Alex Trocchi

• Back to Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw
• R.U.R. by Karel Čapek - from which the term 'robot' was coined

• Ulysses by James Joyce
• Jacob's Room by Virginia Woolf
• Sodom and Gomorrah by Marcel Proust
• Croatian God Mars by Miroslav Krleža
• The Enormous Room by E. E. Cummings
• Futility by William Gerhardie
• The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Mortal Coils by Aldous Huxley - short stories
• Aaron's Rod by D. H. Lawrence Kim
• The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield - short stories
• Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
• Peter Whiffle by Carl Van Vechten
• Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
• Lady into Fox by David Garnett

• The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot

• Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo
• The Good Soldier Švejk by Jaroslav Hašek
• The Captive by Marcel Proust
• Kangaroo by D. H. Lawrence
• Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
• Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos
• The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams
• The Devil in the Flesh by Raymond Radiguet
• Aelita by Alexey Tolstoy

• The Shadow of a Gunman by Seán O'Casey

• New Hampshire by Robert Frost
• The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway - short stories
• A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
• The Vortex by José Eustasio Rivera
• Little Mexican by Aldous Huxley - short stories
• Bohemian Lights by Ramón del Valle-Inclán
• The Fox and The Captain's Doll by D. H. Lawrence - short stories
• Miranda by Antoni Lange
• Riddles and Conundrums for All Occasions

• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

• Juno and the Paycock by Seán O'Casey
• The Vortex by Noël Coward

• Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
• The Trial by Franz Kafka - posthumous, first English translation in 1930
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - often described as the epitome of the "Jazz Age" in American literature
• The Green Hat by Michael Arlen - perhaps the epitome of the jazz age in British literature
• Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon
• Albertine disparue by Marcel Proust
• Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos
• In the American Grain by William Carlos Williams
• The Desert of Love by François Mauriac
• Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos
• Those Barren Leaves by Aldous Huxley
• St Mawr by D. H. Lawrence - short stories
• The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein
• Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov

• Beau Geste by P. C. Wren

• The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot

• The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins - introducing ley lines

• The Castle by Franz Kafka - posthumous, first English translation in 1932
• The Counterfeiters by André Gide
• The Sun Also Rises aka Fiesta by Ernest Hemingway
• Moravagine by Blaise Cendrars
• Don Segundo Sombra by Ricardo Güiraldes
• Nigger Heaven by Carl Van Vechten
• Two or Three Graces by Aldous Huxley - short stories
• The Plumed Serpent by D. H. Lawrence
• The Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft

• Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne

• A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by 'Hugh MacDiarmid'

• The Plough and the Stars by Seán O'Casey

• Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence

• To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
• ' by Marcel Proust
• Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
• Men Without Women by Ernest Hemingway - short stories
• Vestal Fire by Compton Mackenzie
• Dusty Answer by Rosamond Lehmann
• Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
• The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence - short stories

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
• The Banquet in Blitva by Miroslav Krleža
• At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien
• Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood
• After Many a Summer by Aldous Huxley
• Coming Up for Air by George Orwell
• On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger
• Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
• The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
• The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth
• ' by Thomas Mann
• The Confidential Agent by Graham Greene
• Mister Johnson by Joyce Cary
• Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
• Pal Joey by John O'Hara

• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household
• The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

• Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice
• The Map of Love by Dylan Thomas

• This Happy Breed by Noël Coward

  World War II

• Native Son by Richard Wright
• Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - published in English 1966
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
• The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas
• Owen Glendower by John Cowper Powys
• You Can't Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe
• And Quiet Flows the Don by Mikhail Sholokhov - two volumes, first published in 1934
• The feeling of the world by Carlos Drummond de Andrade

• Journey into Fear by Eric Ambler
• Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler

• The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill

• To the Finland Station by Edmund Wilson

• Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
• Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers
• The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

• Mildred Pierce by James M. Cain

• Grey Eminence by Aldous Huxley

• The Stranger by Albert Camus
• Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet
• Flight to Arras by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre

• Arrival and Departure by Arthur Koestler
• The Ministry of Fear by Graham Greene
• The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil - trilogy, first volume published 1930

• Double Indemnity by James M. Cain
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• Selected Poems by Keith Douglas

• Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus

• The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges - short stories
• The Razor's Edge by Somerset Maugham
• Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley

• The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

• Black Boy by Richard Wright
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Watt by Samuel Beckett - published in 1953
• Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
• Black Boy by Richard Wright
• Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson - trilogy, first volume in 1939

• If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes
• The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis - first volume published in 1938

• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
• The Miracle of the Rose by Jean Genet
• El Señor Presidente by Miguel Ángel Asturias
• Froth on the Daydream by Boris Vian
• The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

• Deaths and Entrances by Dylan Thomas

• The Winslow Boy by Terence Rattigan

• Alamein to Zem Zem by Keith Douglas
• Memoirs of Hecate County by Edmund Wilson
• This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski

• The Plague by Albert Camus
• Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
• Bend Sinister by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Victim by Saul Bellow
• The Conformist by Alberto Moravia
• The Middle of the Journey by Lionel Trilling
• Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
• Of Love and Hunger by Julian MacLaren-Ross
• Funeral Rites by Jean Genet
• Snow Country by Yasunari Kawabata

• A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams

• The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Confessions of a Mask by 'Yukio Mishima'
• The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
• El Túnel by Ernesto Sabato
• The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal
• Ape and Essence by Aldous Huxley
• Ashes and Diamonds by Jerzy Andrzejewski
• Querelle of Brest by Jean Genet

• No Orchids for Miss Blandish by James Hadley Chase

• The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan

• The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
• The Train Was on Time by Heinrich Böll
• The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Kingdom of this World by Alejo Carpentier
• The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen

• The Trouble with Harry by Jack Trevor Story
• The Mating Season by P. G. Wodehouse

• Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

  Postwar period

• Scenes from Provincial Life by William Cooper - the first of the British 1950s 'kitchen sink' novels
• Canto General by Pablo Neruda

• The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco

• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
• Strangers On a Train by Patricia Highsmith

• The Authoritarian Personality by Theodor Adorno

• Molloy by Samuel Beckett
• Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• The Hive by Camilo José Cela
• Porius by John Cowper Powys
• The Grass Harp by Truman Capote
• Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar
• The Opposing Shore by Julien Gracq

• The Lesson by Eugène Ionesco

• The Rebel by Albert Camus

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
• Go by John Clellon Holmes - the first Beat novel
• The Natural by Bernard Malamud
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
• East of Eden by John Steinbeck

• The Tiger in the Smoke by Margery Allingham
• The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson

• The Chairs by Eugène Ionesco

• The Unnameable by Samuel Beckett
• Junkie and Queer by William S. Burroughs
• Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
• The Outsider by Richard Wright
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
• The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz
• Hurry on Down by John Wain - the first 'angry young man' novel

• Casino Royale by Ian Fleming - first James Bond novel
• The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
• Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
• Foundation by Isaac Asimov - trilogy, first volume published in 1951
• Prelude to a Certain Midnight by Gerald Kersh

• Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett

• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis - the most famous 'angry young man' novel
• Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
• Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

• Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
• Story of O by Pauline Réage

• Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas
• The Quare Fellow by Brendan Behan

• The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• One by David Karp
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene
• The Bread of Those Early Years by Heinrich Böll
• The Tree of Man by Patrick White
• The Inheritors by William Golding
• Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
• The Genius and the Goddess by Aldous Huxley
• The Deer Park by Norman Mailer
• The Recognitions by William Gaddis
• Memed, My Hawk by Yaşar Kemal

• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, first volume in 1954
• The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams
• Bus Stop by William Inge

• The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin

• The Fall by Albert Camus
• The Devil to Pay in the Backlands by João Guimarães Rosa
• Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
• The Lonely Londoners by Samuel Selvon
• A Walk on the Wild Side by Nelson Algren

• The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis - seven volumes, first in 1950
• Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
• The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith

• Look Back In Anger by John Osborne - the first 'angry young man' play

• Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg

• Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley

• On the Road by Jack Kerouac
• Young Adam by Alexander Trocchi
• Room at the Top by John Braine
• Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
• Voss by Patrick White
• The Assistant by Bernard Malamud
• Second Thoughts by Michel Butor
• Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
• Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
• Gimpel the Fool by Isaac Bashevis Singer - short stories, originally published in Yiddish years earlier
• Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

• On the Beach by Nevil Shute

• The Room and The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter
• Endgame by Samuel Beckett
• The Entertainer by John Osborne
• Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams
• The Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt

• Calling Out to Yeti by Wisława Szymborska

• If This Is a Man by Primo Levi
• Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote
• The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
• A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• The Bell by Iris Murdoch
• Fowlers End by Gerald Kersh
• Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene
• Candy by Terry Southern

• Exodus by Leon Uris
• Zimiamvian Trilogy by E. R. Eddison - first volume in 1935
• Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle - tetrology, first book in 1954

• Krapp's Last Tape by Samuel Beckett
• Suddenly, Last Summer by Tennessee Williams

• The Theatre and Its Double by Antonin Artaud
• Borstal Boy by Brendan Behan

• A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
• The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
• Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
• The Last of the Just by André Schwarz-Bart
• Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
• Zazie in the Metro by Raymond Queneau
• In the Labyrinth by Alain Robbe-Grillet
• The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner by Alan Sillitoe
• Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
• The Long Day Wanes by Anthony Burgess - trilogy, first volume published in 1956
• The Magic Christian by Terry Southern

• The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake - first volume in 1946
• The Getaway by Jim Thompson

• The Dumb Waiter and The Caretaker by Harold Pinter
• Rhinoceros by Eugène Ionesco

  Cold War period 1960–89

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The London Trilogy by Colin MacInnes - first volume, Absolute Beginners, published in 1957
• Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi
• This Sporting Life by David Storey
• A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene
• Hiroshima Mon Amour by Marguerite Duras
• The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark
• The Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller - trilogy, first volume published 1949
• The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
• The Magician of Lublin by Isaac Bashevis Singer

• The Morning of the Magicians by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier - the 1960s obsession with the occult starts here. Published in English 1963
• A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.

• Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
• A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
• Riders in the Chariot by Patrick White
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• A Severed Head by Iris Murdoch
• Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh - trilogy, first volume published in 1952
• Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
• Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place by Malcolm Lowry - posthumous

• Solaris by Stanisław Lem
• Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
• The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• A Clockwork Orange and The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess
• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• Island by Aldous Huxley
• The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
• The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell - first volume published 1957
• Big Sur by Jack Kerouac - the last of the Lost Generation at the end of the Beat Generation

• The IPCRESS File by Len Deighton - first of the Harry Palmer novels

• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson - the first major popular study on the deterioration of the environment

• V. by Thomas Pynchon
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
• The Collector by John Fowles
• The Lowlife by Alexander Baron
• Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

• Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle
• The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré
• The Grifters by Jim Thompson

• The Truce by Primo Levi)

• Herzog by Saul Bellow
• A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
• Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby
• The Spire by William Golding
• Nothing Like the Sun by Anthony Burgess

• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick
• Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

• Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan

• The Magus by John Fowles
• The Interpreters by Wole Soyinka
• Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
• The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinski
• Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush by Hunter Davies - the kitchen sink novel mutates into the swinging 1960s novel

• The Cyberiad by Stanisław Lem

• Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss
• Tango by Sławomir Mrożek

• Briggflatts by Basil Bunting

• The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe
• The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

• A Man of the People by Chinua Achebe
• Alfie by Bill Naughton
• The Comedians by Graham Greene
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• Tremor of Intent by Anthony Burgess

• Pavane by Keith Roberts
• The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis

• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• ' by Hunter S. Thompson
• Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me by Richard Fariña

• Watership Down by Richard Adams
• The Choirboys by Joseph Wambaugh
• Shōgun by James Clavell
• Salem's Lot by Stephen King

• Ragtime by EL Doctorow

• Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice

• ' by Alex Haley
• Another Day of Life by Ryszard Kapuściński

• Success by Martin Amis
• The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch
• ' by Alasdair Gray
• Life A User's Manual by Georges Perec
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis
• The World According to Garp by John Irving
• 1985 by Anthony Burgess
• Horatio Stubbs by Brian Aldiss - trilogy, first volume published in 1970

• The Emperor by Ryszard Kapuściński

• Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer

• A Bend in the River by V. S. Naipaul
• The Unlimited Dream Company by J. G. Ballard
• Sophie's Choice by William Styron

• The White Album by Joan Didion
• The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Pascali's Island by Barry Unsworth
• Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
• The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan
• The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas
• Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver - short stories

• The Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
• Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith

• Conversations with an Executioner by Kazimierz Moczarski

• Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
• An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami

• Prizzi's Honor by Richard Condon
• Limes Inferior by Janusz A. Zajdel

• Waterland by Graham Swift
• Shame by Salman Rushdie
• Erev by Eli Schechtman

• The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett - first book of the Discworld series

• Money by Martin Amis
• Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Enderby by Anthony Burgess - tetrology, first volume published in 1963
• The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

• Empire of the Sun by J. G. Ballard

• White Noise by Don DeLillo
• Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson
• The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
• Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
• Illywhacker by Peter Carey
• The Kingdom of the Wicked by Anthony Burgess

• L.A. Quartet by James Ellroy - tetrology, first volume published 1984
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood -

• Slaves of New York by Tama Janowitz
• The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis
• An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

• by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
• Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

• Presumed Innocent by Scott Turow

• Mother London by Michael Moorcock
• Libra by Don DeLillo
• Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

• Sprawl by William Gibson - trilogy, first volume published 1984

• London Fields by Martin Amis
• Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• To the Ends of the Earth by William Golding - trilogy, first volume published 1980
• The Book of Evidence by John Banville
• The Trick of It'' by Michael Frayn

  1990s

• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
• Slam poetry

• The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster - first volume published 1985
• The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
• Restoration by Rose Tremain
• Possession by A. S. Byatt
• The Buddha of Suburbia by Hanif Kureishi
• Dirty Weekend by Helen Zahavi

• Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
• Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

• by Douglas Coupland

• Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowski

• Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

• Underworld by Don DeLillo
• American Pastoral by Philip Roth
• Nightmare by Zlatko Topčić
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J. K. Rowling - first in series