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BBC 100 Stories That Shaped the World

BBC 100 Stories That Shaped the World is a ranked list published in 2018 — one of the 14 sources behind the book canon, weighted as major international poll. 55 of its 100 entries appear in the aggregated canon.

  1. 1The Odyssey — HomerCanon #93
  2. 2Uncle Tom’s Cabin — Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852)Canon #52
  3. 3Frankenstein — Mary Shelley (1818)Canon #14
  4. 4Nineteen Eighty-Four — George Orwell (1949)Canon #13
  5. 5Things Fall Apart — Chinua Achebe (1958)Canon #16
  6. 6One Thousand and One Nights — various authors
  7. 7Don Quixote — Miguel de CervantesCanon #2
  8. 8Hamlet — William ShakespeareCanon #69
  9. 9One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez (1967)Canon #4
  10. 10The Iliad — HomerCanon #101
  11. 11Beloved — Toni Morrison (1987)Canon #29
  12. 12The Divine Comedy — Dante AlighieriCanon #104
  13. 13Romeo and Juliet — William Shakespeare
  14. 14The Epic of Gilgamesh — author unknown
  15. 15Harry Potter Series — JK Rowling (1997)
  16. 16The Handmaid's Tale — Margaret Atwood (1985)Canon #191
  17. 17Ulysses — James Joyce (1922)Canon #1
  18. 18Animal Farm — George Orwell (1945)Canon #37
  19. 19Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë (1847)Canon #10
  20. 20Madame Bovary — Gustave Flaubert (1856)Canon #6
  21. 21Romance of the Three Kingdoms — Luo Guanzhong
  22. 22Journey to the West — Wu Cheng'en
  23. 23Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevksy (1866)Canon #3
  24. 24Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen (1813)Canon #5
  25. 25Water Margin — attributed to Shi Nai'an
  26. 26War and Peace — Leo Tolstoy (1865)Canon #12
  27. 27To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee (1960)Canon #27
  28. 28Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys (1966)Canon #80
  29. 29Aesop's Fables — Aesop
  30. 30Candide — VoltaireCanon #36
  31. 31Medea — EuripidesCanon #137
  32. 32The Mahabharata — attributed to Vyasa
  33. 33King Lear — William Shakespeare
  34. 34The Tale of Genji — Murasaki ShikibuCanon #22
  35. 35The Sorrows of Young Werther — Johann Wolfgang von GoetheCanon #30
  36. 36The Trial — Franz Kafka (1925)Canon #9
  37. 37Remembrance of Things Past — Marcel Proust (1913)Canon #102
  38. 38Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë (1847)Canon #7
  39. 39Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison (1952)Canon #20
  40. 40Moby-Dick — Herman Melville (1851)Canon #8
  41. 41Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston (1937)Canon #63
  42. 42To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf (1927)Canon #23
  43. 43The True Story of Ah Q — Lu Xun (1921)
  44. 44Alice's Adventures in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll (1865)Canon #48
  45. 45Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy (1873)
  46. 46Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad (1899)Canon #59
  47. 47Monkey Grip — Helen Garner (1977)
  48. 48Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf (1925)Canon #18
  49. 49Oedipus the King — SophoclesCanon #178
  50. 50The Metamorphosis — Franz Kafka (1915)
  51. 51The Oresteia — Aeschylus
  52. 52Cinderella — unknown author and date
  53. 53Howl — Allen Ginsberg (1956)
  54. 54Les Misérables — Victor Hugo (1862)Canon #34
  55. 55Middlemarch — George Eliot (1871)Canon #11
  56. 56Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo (1955)
  57. 57The Butterfly Lovers — folk story
  58. 58The Canterbury Tales — Geoffrey ChaucerCanon #205
  59. 59The Panchatantra — attributed to Vishnu Sharma
  60. 60The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas — Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1881)
  61. 61The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie — Muriel Spark (1961)Canon #96
  62. 62The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists — Robert Tressell (1914)Canon #113
  63. 63Song of Lawino — Okot p'Bitek (1966)
  64. 64The Golden Notebook — Doris Lessing (1962)Canon #41
  65. 65Midnight's Children — Salman Rushdie (1981)Canon #206
  66. 66Nervous Conditions — Tsitsi Dangarembga (1988)
  67. 67The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)Canon #35
  68. 68The Master and Margarita — Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)Canon #121
  69. 69The Ramayana — attributed to Valmiki
  70. 70Antigone — Sophocles
  71. 71Dracula — Bram Stoker (1897)Canon #60
  72. 72The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K Le Guin (1969)
  73. 73A Christmas Carol — Charles Dickens (1843)Canon #105
  74. 74América — Raúl Otero Reiche (1980)
  75. 75Before the Law — Franz Kafka (1915)
  76. 76Children of Gebelawi — Naguib Mahfouz (1967)
  77. 77Il Canzoniere — Petrarch
  78. 78Kebra Nagast — various authors
  79. 79Little Women — Louisa May Alcott (1868)Canon #33
  80. 80Metamorphoses — OvidCanon #169
  81. 81Omeros — Derek Walcott (1990)
  82. 82One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1962)Canon #218
  83. 83Orlando — Virginia Woolf (1928)Canon #164
  84. 84Rainbow Serpent — Aboriginal Australian story cycle
  85. 85Revolutionary Road — Richard Yates (1961)
  86. 86Robinson Crusoe — Daniel DefoeCanon #55
  87. 87Song of Myself — Walt Whitman (1855)
  88. 88The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — Mark Twain (1884)
  89. 89The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain (1876)Canon #126
  90. 90The Aleph — Jorge Luis Borges (1945)
  91. 91The Eloquent Peasant — ancient Egyptian folk story (2000)
  92. 92The Emperor's New Clothes — Hans Christian Andersen (1837)
  93. 93The Jungle — Upton Sinclair (1906)Canon #172
  94. 94The Khamriyyat — Abu Nuwas
  95. 95The Radetzky March — Joseph Roth (1932)Canon #211
  96. 96The Raven — Edgar Allan Poe (1845)
  97. 97The Satanic Verses — Salman Rushdie (1988)
  98. 98The Secret History — Donna Tartt (1992)
  99. 99The Snowy Day — Ezra Jack Keats (1962)
  100. 100Toba Tek Singh — Saadat Hasan Manto (1955)

List compiled and published by its original authors; positions shown as published. Canon ranks link to each entry's full evidence page.