My Favourite Novels

I suppose the first day of the year is a good day for recording my favourite novels. I have set for myself some strict rules; only one book per author, and they must be novels only. They aren't particularly in order of preference, although the top ten really are my top ten.

1. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
2. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
3. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
4. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
5. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
6. The Moon Shone Down by John Steinbeck
7. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
11. The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham
12. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
13. The Black Book by Orhan Pamuk
14. Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn
15. Schinder's List by Thomas Keneally
16. Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Checalier
17. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
18. War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
19. Crime and Punishment by Doestoevesky
20. Anna Karenina by Tolstoy
21. The Time-Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
22. Possession by A. S. Byatt
23. Busman's Honeymoon by Dorothy L Sayers
24. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde
25. Pale Fire by Nabokov
26. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
27. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowls
28. My Brother Michael by Mary Steward
29. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
30. Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M.Coetzee
31. An Imaginary Life by David Malouf
32. If you can walk, you can dance, by Monica Molteno
33. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
34. The Handmaiden's Tale by Margaret Atwood
35. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
36. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
37. The Harp in the South by Ruth Park
38. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
39. A Patch of Blue by Elizabeth Kata
40. The Little Prince by Antoine Saint-Exupery
41. Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis
42. The Hobbit by Tolkein
43. Fire and Hemlock by Diana Wynne Jones
44. The Tricksters by Margaret Mahy
45. Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
46. The Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett
47. The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M Boston
48. Little Women by Lousia May Alcott
49. The Chestry Oak by Kate Seredy
50. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken

Best find this year would have been Orhan Pamuk, who I found while I was in Turkey. I also discovered Dorothy L Sayers this year. Actually ten of the top 50 were new to me this year. Let's hope that I find ten new such wonderful novels in the year to come.