We all love browsing through the best book lists and seeing which books were chosen and which weren’t. But not every book list is equal. When a big and respectable organization like the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) makes a list of the 100 most inspiring novels of all time, it holds a lot more weight.
In 2019, the BBC did just that and released its list. And just like any list, it angered many people for not including certain books. No list is going to be perfect and people tend to be too focused on books that didn’t make the list instead of celebrating the books that did. So what if Moby Dick wasn’t selected. Are you going to enjoy it less because of that reason?

These lists are a great way to find new books to read. and broaden your horizons. It is just another list at the end of the day. More will be released in the future and it will stir up more debate. You can check out the full list by the BBC below!
BBC’s List of the 100 Most Inspiring Books of All Time
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
- Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
- Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
- Small Island by Andrea Levy
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- White Teeth by Zadie Smith
- Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
- Forever… by Judy Blume
- Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Riders by Jilly Cooper
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- The Far Pavilions by M. M. Kaye
- The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafa
- The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
- The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
- City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
- Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
- Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
- Mr Standfast by John Buchan
- The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
- The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- The Jack Aubrey Novels by Patrick O’Brian
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin, 1996
- Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
- Dune by Frank Herbert
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley by
- Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
- The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
- The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
- The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Le Guin
- The Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman
- Strumpet City by James Plunkett
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
- Unless by Carol Shields
- A House for Mr Biswas by V. S. Naipaul
- Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
- Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee, 1999
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- Poor Cow by Nell Dunn
- Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
- The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
- The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
- The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- Emily of New Moon by L. M. Montgomery
- Golden Child by Claire Adam
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
- So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
- Swami and Friends by R. K. Narayan
- The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
- Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling
- The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend
- The Twilight Saga by Stephenie Meyer
- A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
- Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
- Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
- I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
- The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë
- The Witches Roald Dahl
- American Tabloid by James Ellroy
- American War by Omar El Akkad
- Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- Regeneration by Pat Barker
- The Children of Men by P.D. James
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
- The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
- The Quiet American by Graham Greene
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
- Habib by Craig Thompson
- How to Be Both by Ali Smith
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Psmith, Journalist by P. G. Wodehouse
- The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
- Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde
A Great Mix of Popular Titles and Lesser-Known Books
Starting off any list with Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a good sign. What I love about this list the most is that it chooses books that are critically acclaimed that aren’t read by millions of people. I am not the only one that has never come across some of these books.
As someone who tries to read books that get a lot of positive reviews, I am glad to see a lot of books that I have read on the list. Books like Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
Recently, I have been choosing books from lists that I have been curating and I haven’t come across a book that I haven’t enjoyed. That goes to show you that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of authors out there that we would be a fan of.
Conclusion
What did you think of the BBC’s list of the 100 most inspiring novels of all time? What books that didn’t make the list should have made it? Were you happy with the overall list? Let us know in the comments below. Until next time, happy reading!
Julian Barnes, sebastian faulks, thomas pynchon, saul bellow, dom de lillo, douglas adams, gerald and lawrence durrell, john fowles, lindsay clarke, bruce chatwin … mark twain
Naguib Mahfouz, Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, Barbara Kingsolver, Shirley Hazzard, Patrick White, Christina Stead, Kathrine Susannah Pritchard, Amin Maalouf, Gabriel Garcia Marques, Demetrio Aguilar Malta, Jorge Borges