Here are the novels that made the top 100 in both the US and UK as determined by their public broadcasters: the BBC’s Big Read of 2003 and PBS’s Great American Read of 2018. The BBC polled over 750,000 people in Britain, PBS polled 7,200 in the US.
In order of publication:
- 1800:
- 1800s
- 1810s
- 1813 Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice
- 1820s
- 1830s
- 1840s
- 1844: Alexandre Dumas – The Count of Monte Cristo
- 1847 Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
- 1847 Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
- 1850s
- 1860s
- 1861 Charles Dickens – Great Expectations
- 1865 Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
- 1866 Dostoyevsky – Crime and Punishment
- 1869 Louisa May Alcott – Little Women
- 1869 Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
- 1870s
- 1880s
- 1890s
- 1900:
- 1900s
- 1908 Lucy Maud Montgomery – Anne of Green Gables
- 1910s
- 1920s
- 1925 F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby
- 1930s
- 1936 Margaret Mitchell – Gone with the Wind
- 1938 Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca
- 1939 John Steinbeck – The Grapes of Wrath
- 1940s
- 1949 George Orwell – 1984
- 1950s
- 1950 C.S. Lewis – The Chronicles of Narnia (series)
- 1951 J.D. Salinger – The Catcher in the Rye
- 1952 E.B. White – Charlotte’s Web
- 1955 J.R.R. Tolkien – The Lord of the Rings (series)
- 1960s
- 1960 Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
- 1961 Joseph Heller – Catch-22
- 1965 Frank Herbert – Dune
- 1967 Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
- 1969 Mario Puzo – The Godfather
- 1970s
- 1978 Stephen King – The Stand
- 1979 Douglas Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- 1980s
- 1980 Jean M. Auel – The Clan of the Cave Bear
- 1988 Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
- 1989 Ken Follett – The Pillars of the Earth
- 1989 John Irving – A Prayer for Owen Meany
- 1990s
- 1997 Arthur Golden – Memoirs of a Geisha
- 1997 J.K. Rowling – Harry Potter (series)
- 1900s
- 2000:
- 2000s
Note: PBS counts a series as one book. I list those with at least one book in the UK top 100.
I have read half of these, all of them excellent – except for “Great Expectations”! But the list is still very White.
UK-only: Philip Pullman (Dark Materials), Winnie-the-Pooh, “The Wind in the Willows”, Thomas Hardy, Jacqueline Wilson, Terry Pratchett, Roald Dahl, “Treasure Island”, “Watership Down”, Evelyn Waugh, “The Secret Garden”, “Black Beauty”, “Artemis Fowl”, “Noughts and Crosses” (!!!), “Thorn Birds”, Enid Blyton (who wrote of golliwogs), “Lord of the Flies”, “Bridget Jones’s Diary”, “The Secret History”, James Joyce, “Brave New World”, Kerouac, Rushdie, etc. The UK top 100 had three Jane Austen books and five by Charles Dickens.
US-only:
- British: Agatha Christie, Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Swift, “Frankenstein”, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, Joseph Conrad, Zadie Smith, etc – made the US top 100 but not the UK’s, despite being British.
- Black American: Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Jason Reynolds, Sister Souljah, Colson Whitehead, etc.
- White American: Ayn Rand, Kurt Vonnegut, Game of Thrones, “Tom Sawyer”, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”, “A Separate Peace”, “Jurassic Park”, “Moby-Dick”, the Left Behind series, S.E. Hinton, Jack London, Tom Clancy, Dean Koontz, V.C. Andrews, Isaac Asimov, etc.
- Asian American: “The Joy Luck Club”, etc.
- Other: Chinua Achebe, “The Little Prince”, “Siddhartha”, Cervantes, Rómulo Gallegos, etc.
Too new to make the UK list: Hunger Games, Twilight series, “The Book Thief”. “The Help” (I saw the movie), “The Da Vinci Code”, “The Martian”, “Fifty Shades of Grey”, “Americanah”, John Green, Junot Diaz, etc.
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
- Other things transtatlantic: hit songs, accent, English, slave trade
- books
- The Top Ten Desert Island Books – the top 20 among this blog’s readers
- Reading old books
- How to find a good book: the 15 Year Rule
- Books I was made to read at school – which, in light of the above post, was decidedly UK-leaning.
- related books:
- Go Set a Watchman – by Harper Lee
- Michael Crichton: Sphere – same author as “Jurassic Park”
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Abagond 
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