Full list of the 100 best works of fiction alphabetically by author as determined from a vote by 100 noted writers from 54 countries as released by the Norwegian Book Clubs. Don Quixote was named as the top book in history but otherwise no ranking was provided.
This was reported in a story in The Guardian (UK) on Wednesday May 8 2002 accessible here.
Chinua Achebe, Nigeria (b. 1930) Things fall apart
Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark (1805-1875) Fairy tales and stories
Jane Austen, England (1775-1817) Pride and prejudice
Honore de Balzac, France (1799-1850) Old Goriot
Samuel Beckett, Ireland (1906-1989) Molloy; Malone dies; The unnamable
Giovanni Boccaccio, Italy (1313-1375) Decameron
Jorge Luis Borges, Argentina (1899-1986) Collected fictions
Emily Brontë, England (1818-1848) Wuthering Heights
Albert Camus, France (1913-1960) The stranger
Paul Celan, Romania/France (1920-1970) Poems
Louis-Ferdinand Celine, France (1894-1961) Journey to the end of the night
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Spain (1547-1616) Don Quixote
Geoffrey Chaucer, England (1340-1400) Canterbury tales
Joseph Conrad, England (1857-1924) Nostromo
Dante Alighieri, Italy (1265-1321) The divine comedy
Charles Dickens, England (1812-1870) Great expectations
Denis Diderot, France (1713-1784) Jacques the fatalist and his master
Alfred Doblin, Germany (1878-1957) Berlin Alexanderplatz : the story of Franz Biberkopf
Fyodor M. Dostoyevsky, Russia (1821-1881) Crime and punishment; The idiot; The possessed; The brothers Karamazov
George Eliot, England (1819-1880) Middlemarch
Ralph Ellison, United States (1914-1994) Invisible man
Euripides, Greece (c 480-406 BCE) Medea
William Faulkner, United States (1897-1962) Absalom, Absalom!; The sound and the fury
Gustave Flaubert, France (1821-1880) Madame Bovary; A sentimental education
Federico Garcia Lorca, Spain (1898-1936) The gypsy ballads
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Colombia (1928-2014) One hundred years of solitude; Love in the time of cholera
Anonymous, Mesopotamia (c 1800 BCE) Gilgamesh
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany (1749-1832) Faust
Nikolai Gogol, Russia (1809-1852) Dead souls
Gunter Grass, Germany (1927-2015) The tin drum
João Guimarães Rosa, Brazil (1880-1967) The devil to pay in the backlands
Knut Hamsun, Norway (1859-1952) Hunger
Ernest Hemingway, United States (1899-1961) The old man and the sea
Homer, Greece (c 700 BCE) Iliad; Odyssey
Henrik Ibsen, Norway (1828-1906) A doll's house
The Book of Job, Canaan (600-400 BCE) (And here)
James Joyce, Ireland (1882-1941) Ulysses
Franz Kafka, Bohemia (1883-1924) The complete stories; The trial; The castle
Kālidāsa, India (c. 400) The recognition of Sakuntala
Yasunari Kawabata, Japan (1899-1972) The sound of the mountain
Nikos Kazantzakis, Greece (1883-1957) Zorba the Greek
D. H. Lawrence, England (1885-1930) Sons and lovers
Halldór K. Laxness, Iceland (1902-1998) Independent people; an epic
Giacomo Leopardi, Italy (1798-1837) Complete Poems
Doris Lessing, England (1919-2013) The golden notebook
Astrid Lindgren, Sweden (1907-2002) Pippi Longstocking
Lu Xun, China (1881-1936) Diary of a madman and other stories
Anonymous, India (c 500 BC) Mahabharata
Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt (1911-2006) Children of Gebelawi (as Children of the alley : a novel)
Thomas Mann, Germany (1875-1955) Buddenbrooks; The magic mountain
Herman Melville, United States (1819-1891) Moby-Dick
Michel de Montaigne, France (1533-1592) Essays
Elsa Morante, Italy (1918-1985) History : a novel
Toni Morrison, United States (b. 1931) Beloved
Lady Murasaki, Japan (b 978?) The tale of Genji
Robert Musil, Austria (1880-1942) The man without qualities
Vladimir Nabokov, Russia/United States (1899-1977) Lolita
Njála, Iceland (c 930-c 1011) Njála saga
George Orwell, England (1903-1950) 1984
Ovid, Italy (c 43 BC- 17 or 18 AD) The metamorphoses
Fernando Pessoa, Portugal (1888-1935) The book of disquiet
Edgar Allan Poe, United States (1809-1849) The complete tales
Marcel Proust, France (1871-1922) Remembrance of things past
Francois Rabelais, France (1495-1553) Gargantua and Pantagruel
Juan Rulfo, Mexico (1918-1986) Pedro Páramo
Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī, Iran (1207-1273) Mathnawi
Salman Rushdie, India/Britain (b. 1947) Midnight's children
Sheikh Musharrif ud-din Sadi, Iran (c 1200-1292) The Orchard
Tayeb Salih, Sudan (b. 1929) Season of migration to the North
Jose Saramago, Portugal (1922-2010) Blindness
William Shakespeare, England (1564-1616) Hamlet; King Lear; Othello
Sophocles, Greece (496-406 BC) Oedipus the King
Stendhal, France (1783-1842) Red and black
Laurence Sterne, Ireland (1713-1768) The life and opinions of Tristram Shandy, gentleman
Italo Svevo, Italy (1861-1928) Confessions of Zeno
Jonathan Swift, Ireland (1667-1745) Gulliver's travels
Leo Tolstoy, Russia (1828-1910) War and peace; Anna Karenina; The death of Ivan Ilyich and other stories
Anton P. Chekhov, Russia (1860-1904) Selected stories
India/Iran/Iraq/Egypt (700-1500), Arabian nights
Mark Twain, United States (1835-1910) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Vālmīki, India (c 300 BC) Ramayana
Virgil, Italy (70-19 BC) The Aeneid
Walt Whitman, United States (1819-1892) Leaves of grass
Virginia Woolf, England (1882-1941) Mrs. Dalloway; To the lighthouse
Marguerite Yourcenar, France (1903-1987) Memoirs of Hadrian