Le Monde's 100 books of the century, the top 20

1999 poll, French readers voting for what stuck with them. less anglo and more existentialist than every other list like this

The Stranger - Albert Camus (1942)

won by a wide margin, still the book people bring up first

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust (1913-1927)

everyone owns it, ask around who's really finished it

The Trial - Franz Kafka (1925)

The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

technically a children's book, ranked here anyway

Man's Fate - André Malraux (1933)

Journey to the End of the Night - Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1932)

the author's politics are indefensible, the book still made the list. worth sitting with both facts

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (1939)

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway (1940)

Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier (1913)

his only novel, he died in WWI the following year

Froth on the Daydream - Boris Vian (1947)

also translated as Mood Indigo depending which edition you find

The Second Sex - Simone de Beauvoir (1949)

Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett (1952)

Being and Nothingness - Jean-Paul Sartre (1943)

not exactly light reading, it's on here for a reason though

The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco (1980)

newest book in the top 20 by a couple decades

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1973)

Paroles - Jacques Prévert (1946)

Alcools - Guillaume Apollinaire (1913)

The Blue Lotus - Hergé (1936)

a Tintin book, in the top 20 of a literary poll. French readers don't separate comics the way we do

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank (1947)

Tristes Tropiques - Claude Lévi-Strauss (1955)

anthropology, not fiction - still made it in ahead of half the novels here

Or start a list of your own. Free, it takes a minute.

Related lists