Top 99 Modern Novels
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Part I
The Secret
In an article for The New York Times Book Review, Burgess listed his choices for the 99 best modern novels from the years 1934-1983.
1934 1940 1941 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949
1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1957 1958 1959
"If you disagree violently with some of my choices, I shall be pleased. We arrive at values only through dialectic." ~ Anthony Burgess
Party Going, by Henry Green
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, by Aldous Huxley
Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce
At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O'Brien
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
Strangers and Brothers (to 1970), by C. P. Snow
The Aerodrome, by Rex Warner
The Horse's Mouth, by Joyce Cary
The Razor's Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
The Victim, by Saul Bellow
Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry
The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
No Highway, by Nevil Shute
The Heat of the Day, by Elizabeth Bowen
Ape and Essence, by Aldous Huxley
1984, by George Orwell
The Body, by William Sansom
Scenes from Provincial Life, by William Cooper
The Disenchanted, by Budd Schulberg
A Dance to the Music of Time (to 1975), by Anthony Powell
The Catcher in the Rye, by J. D. Salinger
A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (to 1969), by Henry Williamson
The Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway
Wise Blood, by, by Flannery O'Connor
Sword of Honor (to 1961) Evelyn Waugh
The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
The Groves of Academe, by Mary McCarthy
Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis
Room at the Top, by John Braine
The Alexandria Quartet (to 1960), by Lawrence Durrell
The London Novels (to 1960), by Colin MacInnes
The Assistant, by Bernard Malamud
The Bell, by Iris Murdoch
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, by Alan Sillitoe
The Once and Future King, by T. H. White
The Mansion, by William Faulkner
Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming