We have to keep in mind that sales figures for some of the older books tend to be estimates, making it difficult to say exactly which fiction work is the bestselling book of all times. However, it would appear that Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, tops the list with over 500 million copies. It is followed by Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, with 200 million copies sold since its release in 1859.
Published in 1954, The Lord of the Ring  byJ. R. R. Tolkien has sold more than 150 million copies worldwide — ten million more than The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. As you might have guessed, J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone complete the top 5, with just over 100 million books sold.
Agatha Cristie's crime classic And Then There Were None is next on the list, with 100 million copies sold. This is the same figure as The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Cao Xueqin, and J. R. .R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. The top 10 bestselling list finishes with two works by British authors — She: A History of Adventure by H. Rider Haggard, and C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
After Rowling's first Harry Potter book, the next modern bestseller is Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, a 2003 novel with 80 million book sold. Follow various volumes from the Harry Potter series, as well as Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, with 65 million books sold worldwide. Other literary classics also make it on the top 25, such as The Catcher in the Rye, One Hundred Years of Solitude or Nabokov's Lolita.