100 prominent authors from more than 50 different nations have elected The Library of World Literature: "The 100 Best Books in the History of Literature".

The winner of the vote - with 50% more votes than any other book - is the widely read Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, published in Spain in two parts, 1605 and 1615.

The editors of The Norwegian Book Clubs asked the 100 authors to nominate ten books that, in their opinion, are the ten best and most central works in world literature: These are books that have had a decisive impact on the cultural history of the world and also left an individual mark on the authors own thinking and imagination.

John Irving, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Nadine Gordimer, Milan Kundera, Christa Wolf, Carlos Fuentes, V.S. Naipaul, Paul Auster, A.S. Byatt, Ben Okri, Orhan Pamuk, Fay Weldon, Wole Soyinka, Bei Dao, Nawal El Saadawi, Yvonne Vera, Astrid Lindgren, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Norman Mailer... - and 80 other prominent authors attended the election.

The 100 titles that gathered most votes take their place in the Library of World Literature. Except for Don Quixote, the titles are not ranked.

This is the Library of World Literature. The authors are listed in alphabetical order.

Chinua Achebe
(b. 1930)
Things Fall Apart
Nigeria

Hans Christian Andersen
(1805-1875)
Fairy Tales and Stories
Eventyr og historier
Denmark

Jane Austen
(1775-1817)
Pride and Prejudice
England

Honoré de Balzac
(1799-1850)
Old Goriot
Le Père Goriot
France

Samuel Beckett
(1906-1989)
Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable
Molloy, Malone meurt, L'innommable
Ireland

Giovanni Boccaccio
(1313-1375)
Decameron
Italy

Jorge Luis Borges
(1899-1986)
Collected Fictions
Ficciones
Argentina

Emily Brontë
(1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights
England

Albert Camus
(1913-1960)
The Stranger
L'Etranger
France

Paul Celan
(1920-1970)
Poems
Gedichte
Romania/France

Louis-Ferdinand Céline
(1894-1961)
Journey to the End of the Night
Voyage au bout de la nuit
France

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
(1547-1616)
Don Quixote
El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha
Spain

Geoffrey Chaucer
(1340-1400)
Canterbury Tales
England

Joseph Conrad
(1857-1924)
Nostromo
England

Dante Alighieri
(1265-1321)
The Divine Comedy
Divina Commedia
Italy

Charles Dickens
(1812-1870)
Great Expectations
England

Denis Diderot
(1713-1784)
Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
Jacques le fataliste et son maître
France

Alfred Döblin
(1878-1957)
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Germany

Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky
(1821-1881)
Crime and Punishment
Prestupleniye i nakazaniyne
The Idiot
Idiot
The Possesed
Besy
The Brothers Karamazov
Bratya Karamazovy
Russia

George Eliot
(1819-1880)
Middlemarch
England

Ralph Ellison
(1914-1994)
Invisible Man
USA

Euripides
(ca. 480-406 BC)
Medea
Medeia
Greece

William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
Absalom, Absalom!
The Sound and the Fury
USA

Gustave Flaubert
(1821-1880)
Madame Bovary
A sentimental Education
L 'éducation sentimentale
France

Federico García Lorca
(1898-1936)
Gypsy Ballads
Romancero gitano
Spain

Gabriel García Márquez
(b. 1928)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Cien anõs de soledad
Love in the Time of Cholera
El amor en los tiempos del cólera
Colombia

Gilgamesh
(ca. 1800 BC)
Mesopotamia

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Faust
Germany

Nikolaj Gogol
(1809-1852)
Dead Souls
Mertvye dushi
Russia

Günter Grass
(b. 1927)
The Tin Drum
Die Blechtrommel
Germany

João Guimarães Rosa
(1880-1967)
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Grande sertão: Veredas
Brasil

Knut Hamsun
(1859-1952)
Hunger
Sult
Norway

Ernest Hemingway
(1899-1961)
The Old Man and the Sea
USA

Homer
(ca. 700 BC)
The Iliad
Ilias
The Odyssey
Odysseia
Greece

Henrik Ibsen
(1828-1906)
A Doll's House
Et dukkehjem
Norway

The Book of Job
(600-400 BC)
Ijob
Israel

James Joyce
(1882-1941)
Ulysses
Ireland

Franz Kafka
(1883-1924)
The Complete Stories
Die Verwandlung und andere Erzählungen
The Trial
Der Prozess
The Castle
Das Schloss
Bohemia

Kalidasa
(ca. 400)
The Recognition of Sakuntala
Abhijñana Sakuntala
India

Yasunari Kawabata
(1899-1972)
The Sound of the Mountain
Yama no oto
Japan

Nikos Kazantzakis
(1883-1957)
Zorba the Greek
Víos kai politía tou Aléxi Zormpá
Greece

D.H. Lawrence
(1885-1930)
Sons and Lovers
England

Halldór K. Laxness
(1902-1998)
Independent People
Sjálfstætt fólk
Iceland

Giacomo Leopardi
(1798-1837)
Complete Poems
Canti
Italy

Doris Lessing
(b. 1919)
The Golden Notebook
England

Astrid Lindgren
(1907-2002)
Pippi Longstocking
Pippi Långstrump
Sweden

Lu Xun
(1881-1936)
Diary of a Madman and Other Stories
K'uangjen jih -chi
China

Mahabharata
(ca. 500 BC)
India

Naguib Mahfouz
(b. 1911)
Children of Gebelawi
Awlad Haritna
Egypt

Thomas Mann
(1875-1955)
Buddenbrooks
The Magic Mountain
Der Zauberberg
Germany

Herman Melville
(1819-1891)
Moby Dick
USA

Michel de Montaigne
(1533-1592)
Essays
Les Essais
France

Elsa Morante
(1918-1985)
History
La Storia
Italy

Toni Morrison
(b. 1931)
Beloved
USA

Shikibu Murasaki
The Tale of Genji
Genji monogatari
Japan

Robert Musil
(1880-1942)
The Man without Qualities
Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
Austria

Vladimir Nabokov
(1899-1977)
Lolita
Russia/USA

Njals saga
(ca. 1300)
Brennu-Njáls saga
Iceland

George Orwell
(1903-1950)
1984
England

Ovid
(43 BC-17 e.Kr.)
Metamorfoses
Italy

Fernando Pessoa
(1888-1935)
The Book of Disquiet
Livro do desassossego
Portugal

Edgar Allan Poe
(1809-1849)
The Complete Tales
USA

Marcel Proust
(1871-1922)
Remembrance of Things Past
À la recherche du temps perdu
France

François Rabelais
(1495-1553)
Gargantua and Pantagruel
La Vie de Gargantua et de Pantagruel
France

Juan Rulfo
(1918-1986)
Pedro Páramo
Mexico

Jalal ad-din Rumi
(1207-1273)
Mathnawi
Masnavi-ye Ma 'anavi
Iran

Salman Rushdie
(b. 1947)
Midnight's Children
India/England

Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi
(ca. 1200-1292)
The Orchard
Bustan
Iran

Tayeb Salih
(b. 1929)
Season of Migration to the North
Mawsim al-hijrah ilá al-Shamal
Sudan

José Saramago
(b. 1922)
Blindness
Ensaio sobre a Cegueira
Portugal

William Shakespeare
(1564-1616)
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
England

Sofokles
(496-406 BC)
Oedipus the King
Oidipous tyrannos
Greece

Stendhal
(1783-1842)
The Red and the Black
Le Rouge et le Noir
France

Laurence Sterne
(1713-1768)
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
Ireland

Italo Svevo
(1861-1928)
Confessions of Zeno
La coscienza di Zeno
Italy

Jonathan Swift
(1667-1745)
Gulliver's Travels
Ireland

Lev Tolstoj
(1828-1910)
War and Peace
Voina i mir
Anna Karenina
The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories
Smert Ivana Iljitsja
Russia

Anton P. Tsjekhov
(1860-1904)
Selected Stories
Izbrannye rasskazy
Russia

Thousand and One Nights
(700-1500)
Kitab Alf layla wa layla
India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt

Mark Twain
(1835-1910)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
USA

Valmiki
(ca. 300 BC)
Ramayana
India

Vergil
(70-19 BC)
The Aeneid
Aeneis
Italy

Walt Whitman
(1819-1892)
Leaves of Grass
USA

Virginia Woolf
(1882-1941)
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
England

Marguerite Yourcenar
(1903-1987)
Memoirs of Hadrian
Les memoires d 'Hadrien
France