The Modern Library

For Colm Tóibín and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing — there is only the good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their selection of the best 200 novels written since 1950, the editors make a case for the best and the best-loved works and argue why each should be considered a modern classic. Enlightening, often unexpected, and always engaging this tour through the world of fiction is full of surprises, forgotten masterpieces and a valuable guide to what to read next. The complete list of included authors is as follows:

Agatha Christie, Henry Green, Frank Hardy, Georgette Heyer, Sam Hanna Bell, Daphne du Maurier, Patrick Hamilton, Carson McCullers, Anthony Powell, J. D. Salinger, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, R. K. Narayan, Flannery O’Connor, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Mulk Raj Anand, James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Raymond Chandler, L. P. Hartley, Rosamund Lehmann, Amos Tutuola, Kingsley Amis, William Golding, Elizabeth Jenkins, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, Patricia Highsmith, Vladimir Nabokov, Janet Frame, Jack Kerouac, Elizabeth Taylor, Rebecca West, Chinua Achebe, Isak Dineson, John O’Hara, Alan Sillitoe, William Burroughs, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Grace Paley, Harper Lee, Olivia Manning, John Updike, P. G. Wodehouse, Joseph Heller, V. S. Naipaul, Muriel Spark, Patrick White, Maureen Duffy, William Faulkner, Doris Lessing, Edna O’Brien, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, John Le Carré, Mary McCarthy, Sylvia Plath, Wilson Harris, Hubert Selby Jr., Frank Sargeson, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Laurence, Jean Rhys, Paul Scott, John Fowles, Christina Stead, William Styron, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, William H. Gass, Iris Murdoch, B. S. Johnson, Mary Lavin, Mario Puzo, Robertson Davies, Patrick O’Brian, Frederick Forsyth, Mordecai Richler, Francis Stewart, Eudora Welty, J. G. Farrell, Thomas Pynchon, E. L. Doctorow, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, David Lodge, Alistair MacLeod, Anne Rice, David Storey, Beryl Bainbridge, John Cheever, Joan Didion, Margaret Drabble, Jessica Anderson, Maurice Gee, Graham Greene, Roy A. K. Heath, Ian McEwan, Thomas Flanagan, Mavis Gallant, Nadine Gordimer, Elizabeth Hardwick, Norman Mailer, V. S Naipaul, Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, Russell Hoban, Bernard MacLaverty, Marilynne Robinson, John Kennedy Toole, Fay Weldon, William Maxwell, Alasdair Gray, Thomas Harris, Salman Rushdie, Robert Stone, Bruce Chatwin, Thomas Keneally, Alice Walker, Edmund White, Martin Amis, J. G. Ballard, Julian Barnes, Anita Desai, Balraj Khanna, Jayne Anne Phillips, Helen Garner, Anita Brookner, Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry, Brian Moore, Jeanette Winterson, Richard Ford, Kazuo Ishiguro, Peter Taylor, Barbera Vine, Kaye Gibbons, Carl Hiaasen, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Micheal Ondaatje, Francis Wyndham, Peter Carey, Raymond Carver, Pete Dexter, Elizabeth Jolley, Frank Moorhouse, Bapsi Sidhwa, Anne Tyler, Tom Wolfe, John Banville, Oscar Hijuelos, Amy Tan, A. S.Byatt, J. M. Coetzee, Micheal Cunningham, Roddy Doyle, Elmore Leonard, John McGahern, David Malouf, Alice Munro, Pat Barker, Angela Carter, Amit Chaudhuri, Bret Easton Ellis, Timothy Mo, Norman Rush, Iain Sinclair, Jane Smiley, William Trevor, Tim Winton, Eugene McCabe, Patrick McCabe, Donna Tartt, Jeffrey Eugenides, Gita Mehta, E. Annie Proulx, Will Self, Irvine Welsh, Sebastian Faulks, Vikram Seth, Jonathan Coe, Louis de Bernières, Alan Hollinghurst, P. D. James, James Kelman, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Penelope Fitzgerald, Rohinton Mistry, Margaret Atwood, Patrick McGrath, Graham Swift, Tobias Wolff, Jim Crace, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Charles Frazier, V. S Pritchett.

Colm Tóibín is one of the most acclaimed novelists writing today. Both The Master and Brooklyn were shortlisted for the Booker prize and the later won the Costa Prize. He lives in Dublin. Carmen Callil founded the publishers, Virago, and later became Managing Director of Chatto and Windus. She is the author of Bad Faith: A Story of Family and Fatherland (2006), which was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.