I very much enjoyed com­ing up with my top ten of the best nov­els pub­lished in Eng­lish for today’s Guardian. Here they are, with the final top-100 rank­ing in brack­ets:

1
The Man With­out Qual­i­ties (#67)
by Robert Musil
“It per­fect­ly cap­tures the peri­od before the first world war in cen­tral Europe and antic­i­pates the intel­lec­tu­al uncer­tain­ty of the mod­ern era.”
2
Berlin Alexan­der­platz
by Alfred Döblin
“It is a clas­sic of mod­ernism that cap­tures the essence of one of Europe’s great­est cities before it was engulfed by Nazism.”
3
The Tri­al (#27)
by Franz Kaf­ka
“Kafka’s voice is essen­tial to under­stand­ing lit­er­a­ture in the 20th cen­tu­ry: a per­va­sive sense of guilt and self-doubt set in an urban con­text.”
4
Bleak House (#12)
by Charles Dick­ens
“An unfor­get­table por­trait of 19th-cen­tu­ry Lon­don, and the won­der­ful Inspec­tor Buck­et is the first pro­fes­sion­al police detec­tive to appear in fic­tion.”
5
The Mal­tese Fal­con
by Dashiell Ham­mett
“Sam Spade is the clas­sic hard­boiled sleuth and this nov­el trans­formed the detec­tive genre.”
6
The Big Sleep
by Ray­mond Chan­dler
“Philip Mar­lowe – the Los Ange­les knight – has shaped the detec­tive genre and influ­enced count­less oth­er writ­ers and film-mak­ers.”
7
Amer­i­can Tabloid
by James Ell­roy
“Ell­roy’s voice and his detec­tive fic­tion has cap­tured the vio­lence and misog­y­ny of post­war Amer­i­can cul­ture like no oth­er author. This is his most pow­er­ful work.”
8
Titus Groan
by Mervyn Peake
“This is the first book in his tril­o­gy. As a work of imag­i­na­tion and fan­ta­sy it is unequalled.”
9
Smi­ley’s Peo­ple
by John le Car­ré
“Le Car­ré’s spy nov­els, and espe­cial­ly his char­ac­ter of George Smi­ley, cap­tures some­thing pro­found about the state of Britain in the Cold War – a coun­try strug­gling to come to terms with its own decreas­ing impor­tance on the world stage.”
10
The Val­ley of Fear
by Arthur Conan Doyle
“Although one of Doyle’s less well-known detec­tive nov­els, I think it is fas­ci­nat­ing for the way it shows Holmes con­fronting the real­i­ty of the mod­ern world, with its themes of law­less Amer­i­can indus­tri­al towns and under­cov­er detec­tives. T. S. Eliot could recite whole sec­tions of it!”