100 Novels That Changed the World: An inspiring journey through history’s most important literature, the perfect gift for book lovers and academics

by Colin Salter

A look at 100 inspiring novels that have left a significant mark on the world of literature and popular culture.

Before the novel, the world of books was dominated by scientific tomes, religious tracts and histories of the victorious in war. There had been stories and epic poems from ancient times – Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey recounted ancient Greece, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a chivalric romance in Middle English, but it was not until the seventeenth century, when the European middle classes had money and leisure, that anything so frivolous as a novel could be sold for entertainment.

Colin Salter traces the evolution of the novel from the earliest examples through to the postmodernist best-sellers of the 21st century. Rather than dwelling too long on the technical nuances of innovative writing style he has amassed 100 of the greatest novel writers and chosen their most significant work.

For writers such as Herman Melville, James Joyce or Harper Lee the decision is not a difficult one. For Charles Dickens, Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood, the choice is perhaps more difficult.

Following the style set with previous books in the 100 series, most notably 100 Children’s Books and 100 Science Discoveries, each author is given a concise biography and their major novel analysed and then set in context with their other published work.

Readers can become ridiculously well-read in 224 pages.

Authors Alexandre Dumas, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Mary Shelly, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Hilary Mantel, Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott, Lewis Carroll, JRR Tolkien, Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Harper Lee, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Jules Verne, HG Wells, Virginia Woolf, Leo Tolstoy, Louisa M. Alcott, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bram Stoker, John Steinbeck, CS Lewis, Chinua Achebe, Jack Kerouac, John Le Carre, Arundhati Roy, Mila Kundera, Joseph Heller, JD Salinger, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Miguel Cervantes, Graham Greene, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Graves, Daphne du Maurier, Agatha Christie, PG Wodehouse, Raymond Chandler, Hunter S. Thompson, Khaled Hosseini.

Genres: Nonfiction, Books About Books

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 26, 2023

About the author

Edinburgh-based writer Colin Salter is the author of 100 Letters That Changed The World, 100 Speeches That Changed The World and the co-author with Scott Christianson of 100 Books That Changed The World.

Reviews

[Jennica Dotson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A highly intriguing look at 100 novels over time which have made a historical impact. Some of these novels changed the very way novels were written. Others tackled intense and important topics such as racism, sexism, war, and myriad others. I learned about a handful of interesting books I’d never before known about, and learned lots of fun new details about many that I already had.

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun book about books - what a friend would call a "bathroom" book - you know how people used to read the newspaper on the throne - he likes silly, fun books like this.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colin Salter’s *100 Novels That Changed the World* sets itself up for an impossible task from the title alone. The hubris of the claim is almost heroic, or perhaps comic, depending on one’s morning mood. To assert that one hundred novels—precisely one hundred—have *changed the world* is to wade into the swampy terrain of cultural relativism armed only with a glossy hardback and a marketing department’s optimism.

The problem is not that novels don’t change the world—they certainly can, and have—but that the world in question changes in so many directions, registers, and readerships that any attempt to codify its transformation into a list risks parody. Yet here we are, holding a beautifully produced book that promises an “inspiring journey through history’s most important literature,” and realizing halfway through that it might be more coffee-table than critical companion, more showpiece than soul probe.

Salter is an amiable guide, clearly someone who loves literature and wants to make it accessible. His introduction gestures toward a noble mission: tracing the evolution of the novel from its earliest forms to the postmodern bestsellers of the 21st century.

He begins with the predictable but necessary starting points—*Don Quixote*, *Robinson Crusoe*, *Pamela*—and ends somewhere around *The Kite Runner* and *The God of Small Things*. The gesture is inclusive, but the execution wobbles. There’s little in the way of theoretical scaffolding or even a transparent rationale for inclusion. Did *The Code of the Woosters* really change the world? Did *Girl with a Pearl Earring*? What seismic social transformation did *Naked Lunch* usher in apart from a few raised eyebrows and a lot of confused undergraduates? The issue, as you’ve noted, is that the title makes a promise the book can’t possibly fulfill.

That said, the book’s failure to deliver on its titular grandeur is not entirely Salter’s fault. This is, after all, a project from Harper Collins’ UK branch—a publishing behemoth that specializes in handsome, giftable compendiums designed for quick browsing and Christmas wrapping. It’s not a scholarly anthology; it’s a sampler platter.

And yet, one cannot help but wish for more intellectual consistency. Sometimes Salter gives us a critical or cultural reception; other times he slides into plot summary as though we’ve wandered into a Wikipedia vortex. His brief essays are uneven—*Pride and Prejudice* gets its deserved sparkle, but *Invisible Man* and *Beloved* are treated with a kind of perfunctory reverence that reads more like an entry requirement than an interpretive insight.

The greatest misstep is structural: each author gets one novel, one slot, one shot. This rigid rule—perhaps imposed by editorial policy rather than Salter’s own instincts—results in an odd flattening of literary history. Imagine limiting Thomas Hardy to *Tess of the d’Urbervilles* (lovely as she is, but still just one facet of his tragic cosmology), Henry James to *The Ambassadors* (a choice that will puzzle even the staunchest Jamesians), and Edith Wharton to *The Age of Innocence*. *A Passage to India* represents Forster, while Dickens gets one spin at the wheel. The tyranny of the one-novel rule is both unfair and unnecessary; some writers, by their very nature, demand multiplicity. Dickens without *Bleak House* or *Great Expectations* feels amputated. Wharton without *House of Mirth* feels politely defanged.

And yet, paradoxically, some authors are allowed in seemingly for their marketable presence rather than transformative power. There’s a curious blend of the canonical and the trendy—*The Handmaid’s Tale* rubs shoulders with *Valley of the Dolls*, and *Lolita* keeps company with *Portnoy’s Complaint*. It’s as though Salter wanted to honor the literary shockwave effect—novels that “made noise” even if they didn’t quite change the tectonics of human thought. Maybe that’s what he means by “world changing”: the world of publishing, of media conversation, of public controversy. If so, the title should indeed have been “100 Novels That Shook the Bookshelves.”

The introduction gives away a lot. Salter admits that many post-1985 selections were chosen less for their revolutionary world impact than for their representation of underrepresented voices and experiences. In other words, the late entries function as an act of corrective inclusivity—important, certainly, but not always aligned with the book’s stated thesis.

You can feel the tension between genuine literary admiration and checklist representation. Including Arundhati Roy’s *The God of Small Things*, Alice Walker’s *The Color Purple*, or Toni Morrison’s *Beloved* is not wrong (they are monumental), but when each receives the same two-page spread as *Peter Pan* or *Treasure Island*, the effect is unsettlingly democratic. Not all revolutions are equal; not all novels operate on the same scale of cultural shift.

But perhaps we’re being too hard on Salter. Lists, by their nature, provoke dissent. Every “100 best” anthology exists to be argued with. The book implicitly invites us to make our own counter-list, to mutter “What about Kafka?” or “Where’s Rushdie’s *Midnight’s Children*?” (Oh wait—it’s there, squeezed between *Lolita* and *One Hundred Years of Solitude*, like a brilliant but slightly bewildered guest at a strange dinner party.) That muttering, that mental reshuffling, is half the fun. It’s what makes such books secretly addictive. You disagree, you roll your eyes, you scribble notes in the margins, and before you know it, you’ve read the whole thing.

Still, one cannot ignore the Eurocentric gravitational pull of the list. Out of the hundred, a vast majority are drawn from the Anglophone or Western European canon. Asia, Africa, and Latin America make appearances, yes, but mostly through tokenized representatives—Achebe’s *Things Fall Apart*, Márquez’s *One Hundred Years of Solitude*, Rushdie’s *Midnight’s Children*, Hosseini’s *The Kite Runner*. Japan gets Murakami by implication; China and the Middle East barely register. It’s not that Salter’s list is maliciously narrow—it’s just unreflectively so. The global novel, in all its messy multilingual wonder, still feels filtered through a British-American lens.

Part of this is historical. The novel as a form did grow from the European bourgeois milieu, as Salter notes. When he traces the emergence of prose fiction as an entertainment form in the seventeenth century—after centuries of religious tracts and epic poetry—he’s making a valid point about socio-economic shifts.

But the narrative stops there, as though the novel’s center of gravity never migrated beyond London, Paris, and New York. The Indian, African, or Latin American reinventions of the form—those breathtaking acts of narrative rebellion—are treated as colorful side notes, not tectonic events. To read Salter’s book is to be reminded how canon formation often mistakes *visibility* for *universality*.

Another quibble—one that betrays a critic’s irritation—is Salter’s occasional slip into blandness. His prose is serviceable but rarely electric. You sense a schoolteacher’s gentleness rather than a critic’s fire. When discussing *Moby-Dick*, for instance, he acknowledges its density and its allegorical breadth but stops short of confronting its philosophical madness—the wild ambition that makes it world-changing in the first place.

Similarly, his entry on *Ulysses* dutifully notes its experimental technique without diving into the intimate revolution of consciousness that Joyce achieved. You finish reading and think, “Yes, that’s correct,” but you don’t feel the shock of the new. The book informs but rarely transforms.

And yet, it is handsomely produced. The design is gorgeous—color reproductions of first-edition covers, author portraits, well-placed pull quotes. As an object, it’s a delight. It sits prettily on a shelf, catches the light, and says, “I’m cultured.” In that sense, it achieves its purpose perfectly. It’s a gateway drug for the mildly literary, a conversation starter for book clubs, a crash course for someone wanting to feel “well-read in 224 pages,” as the publisher cheekily promises. For the casual reader, it’s a treasure chest. For the academic, it’s an amuse-bouche—pleasant, but hardly sustaining.

Perhaps what rankles most is the tension between potential and execution. The premise—*novels that changed the world*—could have been a profound meditation on the social, political, and psychological power of narrative. What does it mean for a novel to change the world? Does it reshape moral sensibilities (*Uncle Tom’s Cabin*)? Does it provoke revolutions (*Les Misérables*)? Does it alter language itself (*Ulysses*)? Or does it simply infiltrate the collective imagination (*Frankenstein*, *1984*)? A critical study exploring these dynamics—measuring “change” in aesthetic, ethical, or cultural terms—would have been extraordinary. Salter’s book, unfortunately, remains descriptive rather than diagnostic. It tells us *what* changed, not *how* or *why*.

Take, for instance, *Frankenstein*. Mary Shelley’s novel quite literally redefined what fiction could be—melding Gothic horror with proto-science fiction, interrogating creation and responsibility. A book like that did change the world, in the sense that it generated an entire genre and a moral vocabulary still relevant today. But Salter treats it as one among equals, another brick in the cathedral of classics.

Similarly, *1984* is presented as a standard bearer of dystopia without the full recognition that Orwell’s language—*Big Brother*, *doublethink*, *thoughtcrime*—became part of our everyday lexicon. When a novel changes how we *speak*, it changes how we *think*. That’s the level of transformation the title promises but the text doesn’t pursue.

Then there’s the curious absence of self-awareness. Salter doesn’t interrogate the list-making impulse itself. The act of compiling “the hundred greatest” is not neutral—it’s ideological. It reveals assumptions about literary value, about whose stories count, and whose don’t. The canon has always been contested terrain, but in the 21st century, to publish such a list without reflecting on the politics of inclusion feels quaint at best, blinkered at worst. Even the token gestures toward diversity—Roy, Walker, Morrison—seem less like radical acknowledgments and more like obligatory inclusions, their revolutionary power muted by brevity.

Still, for all its shortcomings, there’s something undeniably charming about *100 Novels That Changed the World*. It wears its earnestness on its sleeve. You sense Salter’s enthusiasm, his genuine admiration for storytelling’s breadth. His choices, however debatable, reflect a wide curiosity. From Cervantes to Hosseini, he’s trying to map the arc of human imagination. And while the book doesn’t quite hold up as critical scholarship, it does succeed as a cultural artifact—evidence of how the early 21st century conceived of “great literature.”

In a hundred years, future readers might look back at Salter’s list and see it as a snapshot of our collective taste, our blind spots, and our biases. In that sense, the book may yet become more valuable as a historical document than as a reading guide.

There’s also a kind of unintentional poignancy here. By compressing centuries of literary brilliance into short entries, Salter reminds us of the sheer impossibility of canonizing art. The act of summarizing *Proust* in two pages or distilling *Tolstoy* into a neat paragraph feels absurd—and yet, it’s also a tribute to their endurance. These novels resist condensation. They overflow any frame we build around them. Salter’s summaries, even when inadequate, function as reminders of that resistance. No matter how we package or prettify literature, it refuses to stay still.

One might even argue that Salter’s book—despite itself—demonstrates why novels matter. The fact that we can argue so passionately over inclusion, exclusion, and representation shows that fiction remains central to our understanding of humanity. If *100 Novels That Changed the World* fails as a definitive canon, it succeeds as a provocation. It makes you want to reread, re-evaluate, rediscover. Maybe that’s the truest kind of world-changing power: not the authority to dictate taste, but the ability to rekindle curiosity.

So yes, perhaps *The Code of the Woosters* didn’t change the world. Maybe *Naked Lunch* just changed a few minds on what constitutes narrative coherence. Maybe *Girl with a Pearl Earring* painted a prettier picture of art-meets-fiction than it did of actual social revolution. But in reading Salter’s compendium, we confront the beautiful absurdity of trying to measure cultural influence. Books don’t change the world in isolation; they change people, who then go out and do the messy business of altering reality. The list is flawed, the logic inconsistent, but the love of literature is real.

And that’s the paradox at the heart of *100 Novels That Changed the World*: it both underestimates and overstates the power of fiction. It sells the myth of transformation in a bite-sized, photogenic package, yet within its pages, you catch glimpses of genuine reverence—for Austen’s wit, Dickens’s empathy, Woolf’s interiority, Achebe’s reclamation, Márquez’s magic. Each entry, however uneven, is a small reminder that novels are our mirrors and our maps, our ways of seeing and surviving.

In the end, maybe the book’s most telling achievement is unintentional. It doesn’t prove that these hundred novels changed *the* world; it proves that the world of readers still longs to believe they can. That longing, naïve or noble, is what keeps literature alive.

Colin Salter’s compilation might frustrate the scholar, amuse the critic, and delight the casual reader—but above all, it reaffirms the eternal, impossible, and necessary desire to make sense of our world through story.

And that, perhaps, is change enough.

[Al · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colin Salter’s “100 Novels That Changed the World” sets itself up for an impossible task from the title alone. Did “The Code of the Woosters,” “Naked Lunch,” or “Girl with a Pearl Earring” change the world? Though all three entries have their admirers, the world remains unchanged with their existence. This book from the UK branch of Harper Collins seems to exist more for its gift book value than its serious examination of novels. Salter never explains if the choices were his or his publishing company, so it’s best not to dwell on the means of selection. His introduction indicates that some of the more recent choices (post 1985) were chosen more to show outstanding novels featuring underrepresented groups than ones that were “world changing.” Maybe a truer title would have been “100 Novels that Have Had an Impact on the Publishing World,” which would allow the odd inclusion of “Lolita,” “Portnoy’s Complaint,” and “Valley of the Dolls.”
There isn’t consistency in the treatment of the entries either. Some focus on a book’s critical or popular reception while some are just plot summaries. And authors with multiple candidates are limited to just one novel. Therefore, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and E.M. Forster are limited to representation with “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” “The Ambassadors,” “The Age of Innocence,” and “A Passage to India.” Mutter, mutter.
Ultimately, any lists of best books are open to debate, and that’s okay. The book itself is handsomely produced with color photos of the book covers, often first editions. For a book club or individual wishing to dive into past and modern-day classics, “100 Novels” provides a useful start.

[Tammy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in this mode that means my brain needs alot of information and this book delivered that. After all who doesn't love a good list!

The task of listing every important book for literature (and publishing/marketing ect) between 1008 to 2019 might seem like an impossible task but Salter found a way to do it that was interesting and detailed. There were antidotes about the author's life before, during, or after writing the book or just about the book itself and how the public received it.

Honestly there were a few books/authors I had never heard of which made this all the more interesting. On occasions there were authors I'd heard of whose lives (seeped in drama) Salter teased us about leading on to myself investigating.

This book is not one you have to stick with to understand, it's very easy to dip in and out, but it always holds interest when reading.

[Omar Khedr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Awesome book! That does an amazing job introducing and explaining the impact of some of history’s greatest novels

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well presented collection with many interesting choices, some of which I’ve added to the pile to read.

[Mitisha Pindoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Simple coffee table book. Would’ve been nice if they expanded on the impact each book had on the world instead of just a simple summary.

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perspective. I agreed with many of entries but not all. I did not finish it, ran out of time.

[Elizabeth Ricks · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting list.

[Milly]

Wasn’t bad, just couldn’t be bothered to finish at 51%

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cute, well presented book. I love a book about book. Doesn't articulate for all books exactly how they supposedly changed the world so the title is a little misleading. Fun regardless.

[Leeni · Rating 3 out of 5]

J. K. Rowlingin olisin jättänyt pois, mutta muuten ihan ok listaus klassikoita. Kesti yllättävän kauan lukea. Kuvatekstit olivat jotenkin tahattoman koomisia.