# Bokklubben World Library

Bokklubben World Library (Norwegian: Verdensbiblioteket) is a series of classical books, mostly novels, published by the Norwegian Book Clubs [no] since 2002. It is based on a list of the hundred best books, as proposed by one hundred writers from fifty-four countries, compiled and organized in 2002 by the Book Club. This list endeavors to reflect world literature, with books from all countries, cultures, and time periods.
Each writer had to select his or her own list of ten books. The books selected by this process and listed here are not ranked or categorized in any way; the organizers have stated that "they are all on an equal footing," with the exception of Don Quixote which was given the distinction "best literary work ever written."
Fyodor Dostoevsky is the author with the most books on the list, with four. William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka, and Leo Tolstoy each have three.

## Breakdown of voters and list

The writers surveyed included 69 men and 31 women. 85 of the books included on the list are written by men, 11 are written by women, and four have unknown authors. 26 of the 100 voting writers had English as their first language, which may be a factor in the list having so many (29) books written in English.

## List of books

| Title | Author | Year | Country | Language |
| Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 | Nigeria | English |
| Fairy Tales | Hans Christian Andersen | 1835–37 | Denmark | Danish |
| Divine Comedy | Dante Alighieri | 1308–21 | Italy | Italian |
| Epic of Gilgamesh | Unknown | 18th – 17th century BCE | Sumer / Akkadian Empire | Akkadian |
| Book of Job | Unknown | 7th – 4th century BCE | Achaemenid Empire | Biblical Hebrew |
| One Thousand and One Nights | Various | 700–1500 | Iraq/Iran/India/Syria/Egypt/Tajikistan | Arabic |
| Njál's Saga | Unknown, possibly Sæmundr fróði | 13th century | Iceland | Old Norse |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | 1813 | United Kingdom | English |
| Le Père Goriot | Honoré de Balzac | 1835 | France | French |
| The Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable | Samuel Beckett | 1951–53 | Republic of Ireland | French, English |
| The Decameron | Giovanni Boccaccio | 1349–53 | Italy | Italian |
| Ficciones | Jorge Luis Borges | 1944–86 | Argentina | Spanish |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Brontë | 1847 | United Kingdom | English |
| The Stranger | Albert Camus | 1942 | Algeria, French Empire | French |
| Poems | Paul Celan | 1952 | Romania, USSR, France | German |
| Journey to the End of the Night | Louis-Ferdinand Céline | 1932 | France | French |
| Don Quixote | Miguel de Cervantes | 1605 (part 1), 1615 (part 2) | Spain | Spanish |
| The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | 1380s–1400 | England | English |
| Stories | Anton Chekhov | 1886 | Russia | Russian |
| Nostromo | Joseph Conrad | 1904 | United Kingdom | English |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | 1861 | United Kingdom | English |
| Jacques the Fatalist | Denis Diderot | 1796 | France | French |
| Berlin Alexanderplatz | Alfred Döblin | 1929 | Germany | German |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1866 | Russia | Russian |
| The Idiot | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1869 | Russia | Russian |
| Demons | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1872 | Russia | Russian |
| The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoevsky | 1880 | Russia | Russian |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot | 1871 | United Kingdom | English |
| Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 | United States | English |
| Medea | Euripides | 431 BCE | Greece | Ancient Greek |
| Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | 1936 | United States | English |
| The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 | United States | English |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1857 | France | French |
| Sentimental Education | Gustave Flaubert | 1869 | France | French |
| Gypsy Ballads | Federico García Lorca | 1928 | Spain | Spanish |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | 1967 | Colombia | Spanish |
| Love in the Time of Cholera | Gabriel García Márquez | 1985 | Colombia | Spanish |
| Faust | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | 1832 | Saxe-Weimar | German |
| Dead Souls | Nikolai Gogol | 1842 | Russia | Russian |
| The Tin Drum | Günter Grass | 1959 | Germany | German |
| The Devil to Pay in the Backlands | João Guimarães Rosa | 1956 | Brazil | Portuguese |
| Hunger | Knut Hamsun | 1890 | Norway | Norwegian |
| The Old Man and the Sea | Ernest Hemingway | 1952 | United States | English |
| Iliad | Homer | 760–710 BCE | Greece | Ancient Greek |
| Odyssey | Homer | 8th century BCE | Greece | Ancient Greek |
| A Doll's House | Henrik Ibsen | 1879 | Norway | Norwegian |
| Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 | Irish Free State | English |
| Stories | Franz Kafka | 1924 | Czechoslovakia | German |
| The Trial | Franz Kafka | 1925 | Czechoslovakia | German |
| The Castle | Franz Kafka | 1926 | Czechoslovakia | German |
| Shakuntala | Kālidāsa | 1st century BCE – 4th century CE | India | Sanskrit |
| The Sound of the Mountain | Yasunari Kawabata | 1954 | Japan | Japanese |
| Zorba the Greek | Nikos Kazantzakis | 1946 | Greece | Greek |
| Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | 1913 | United Kingdom | English |
| Independent People | Halldór Laxness | 1934–35 | Iceland | Icelandic |
| Complete Poems | Giacomo Leopardi | 1818–1835 | Italy | Italian |
| The Golden Notebook | Doris Lessing | 1962 | United Kingdom | English |
| Pippi Longstocking | Astrid Lindgren | 1945 | Sweden | Swedish |
| Diary of a Madman and Other Stories | Lu Xun | 1918 | China | Chinese |
| Children of Gebelawi | Naguib Mahfouz | 1959 | Egypt | Arabic |
| Buddenbrooks | Thomas Mann | 1901 | Germany | German |
| The Magic Mountain | Thomas Mann | 1924 | Germany | German |
| Moby-Dick | Herman Melville | 1851 | United States | English |
| Essays | Michel de Montaigne | 1595 | France | French |
| History | Elsa Morante | 1974 | Italy | Italian |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 | United States | English |
| The Tale of Genji | Murasaki Shikibu | 1000–12 | Japan | Japanese |
| The Man Without Qualities | Robert Musil | 1930–32 | Austria | German |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 | Russia/United States | English |
| Nineteen Eighty-Four | George Orwell | 1949 | United Kingdom | English |
| Metamorphoses | Ovid | 1st century CE | Roman Empire | Classical Latin |
| The Book of Disquiet | Fernando Pessoa | 1928 | Portugal | Portuguese |
| Tales | Edgar Allan Poe | 1832–49 | United States | English |
| In Search of Lost Time | Marcel Proust | 1913–27 | France | French |
| Gargantua and Pantagruel | François Rabelais | 1532–34 | France | French |
| Pedro Páramo | Juan Rulfo | 1955 | Mexico | Spanish |
| Masnavi | Rumi | 1258–73 | Sultanate of Rum (Persia) | Persian |
| Midnight's Children | Salman Rushdie | 1981 | United Kingdom, India | English |
| Bostan | Saadi | 1257 | Persia | Persian |
| Season of Migration to the North | Tayeb Salih | 1966 | Sudan | Arabic |
| Blindness | José Saramago | 1995 | Portugal | Portuguese |
| Hamlet | William Shakespeare | 1603 | England | English |
| King Lear | William Shakespeare | 1608 | England | English |
| Othello | William Shakespeare | 1609 | England | English |
| Oedipus the King | Sophocles | 430 BCE | Greece | Ancient Greek |
| The Red and the Black | Stendhal | 1830 | France | French |
| Tristram Shandy | Laurence Sterne | 1760 | Ireland | English |
| Confessions of Zeno | Italo Svevo | 1923 | Italy | Italian |
| Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift | 1726 | Ireland | English |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | 1865–69 | Russia | Russian |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | 1877 | Russia | Russian |
| The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories | Leo Tolstoy | 1886 | Russia | Russian |
| Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 | United States | English |
| Ramayana | Valmiki | 5th – 4th century BCE | India | Sanskrit |
| Aeneid | Virgil | 29–19 BCE | Roman Empire | Classical Latin |
| Mahabharata | Vyasa | 9th – 5th century BCE | India | Sanskrit |
| Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | 1855 | United States | English |
| Mrs Dalloway | Virginia Woolf | 1925 | United Kingdom | English |
| To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | 1927 | United Kingdom | English |
| Memoirs of Hadrian | Marguerite Yourcenar | 1951 | France/Belgium | French |

## List of authors surveyed

| Name | Country |
| Chinghiz Aitmatov | Kyrgyzstan |
| Ahmet Altan | Turkey |
| Aharon Appelfeld | Israel |
| Paul Auster | United States |
| Félix de Azúa | Spain |
| Julian Barnes | United Kingdom |
| Simin Behbahani | Iran |
| Robert Bly | United States |
| André Brink | South Africa |
| Suzanne Brøgger | Denmark |
| A. S. Byatt | United Kingdom |
| Peter Carey | Australia |
| Martha Cerda | Mexico |
| Jung Chang | China/United Kingdom |
| Maryse Condé | France |
| Mia Couto | Mozambique |
| Jim Crace | United Kingdom |
| Edwidge Danticat | Haiti |
| Bei Dao | China |
| Assia Djebar | Algeria |
| Mahmoud Dowlatabadi | Iran |
| Jean Echenoz | France |
| Kerstin Ekman | Sweden |
| Nathan Englander | United States |
| Hans Magnus Enzensberger | Germany |
| Emilio Estévez | Cuba |
| Nuruddin Farah | Somalia |
| Kjartan Fløgstad | Norway |
| Jon Fosse | Norway |
| Janet Frame | New Zealand |
| Marilyn French | United States |
| Carlos Fuentes | Mexico |
| Izzat Ghazzawi | Palestine |
| Amitav Ghosh | India |
| Pere Gimferrer | Spain |
| Nadine Gordimer | South Africa |
| David Grossman | Israel |
| Einar Már Guðmundsson | Iceland |
| Seamus Heaney | Ireland |
| Christoph Hein | Germany |
| Aleksandar Hemon | Bosnia-Herzegovina |
| Alice Hoffman | United States |
| Chenjerai Hove | Zimbabwe |
| Sonallah Ibrahim | Egypt |
| John Irving | United States |
| P. C. Jersild | Sweden |
| Yasar Kemal | Turkey |
| Jan Kjærstad | Norway |
| Milan Kundera | Czech Republic/France |
| Leena Lander | Finland |
| John le Carré | United Kingdom |
| Siegfried Lenz | Germany |
| Doris Lessing | United Kingdom |
| Astrid Lindgren | Sweden |
| Viivi Luik | Estonia |
| Amin Maalouf | Lebanon/France |
| Claudio Magris | Italy |
| Norman Mailer | United States |
| Tomás Eloy Martínez | Argentina |
| Frank McCourt | Ireland/United States |
| Gita Mehta | India |
| Ana Miranda | Brazil |
| Rohinton Mistry | India/Canada |
| Abdel Rahman Munif | Saudi Arabia |
| Herta Müller | Romania |
| V. S. Naipaul | Trinidad/United Kingdom |
| Cees Nooteboom | Netherlands |
| Ben Okri | Nigeria/United Kingdom |
| Orhan Pamuk | Turkey |
| Sara Paretsky | United States |
| Jayne Anne Phillips | United States |
| Valentin Rasputin | Russia |
| João Ubaldo Ribeiro | Brazil |
| Alain Robbe-Grillet | France |
| Salman Rushdie | India/United Kingdom |
| Nawal El Saadawi | Egypt |
| Hanan al-Shaykh | Lebanon |
| Nihad Sirees | Syria |
| Göran Sonnevi | Sweden |
| Susan Sontag | United States |
| Wole Soyinka | Nigeria |
| Gerold Späth | Switzerland |
| Graham Swift | United Kingdom |
| Antonio Tabucchi | Italy |
| Fouad al-Tikerly | Iraq |
| D. M. Thomas | United Kingdom |
| Adam Thorpe | United Kingdom |
| Kirsten Thorup | Denmark |
| Aleksandr Tkachenko | Russia |
| Pramoedya Ananta Toer | Indonesia |
| Olga Tokarczuk | Poland |
| Michel Tournier | France |
| Jean-Philippe Toussaint | Belgium |
| Mehmed Uzun | Turkey |
| Nils-Aslak Valkeapää | Sápmi |
| Vassilis Vassilikos | Greece |
| Yvonne Vera | Zimbabwe |
| Fay Weldon | United Kingdom |
| Christa Wolf | Germany |
| A. B. Yehoshua | Israel |
| Spôjmaï Zariâb | Afghanistan |