Everybody loves a list but this is a list of major ambition: namely, to select the best 100 novels in the English language, published from the late 17th century to the present day. This list has been built up week by week in the Observer since September 2013. .
The novelist, critic and literary editor of the Observer, Robert McCrum is uniquely well-placed to make this selection and more importantly to write a short critique on each book. The result, as Observer readers over the past two years will know, is a complete delight. This collection takes the full text of each individual piece (the published versions in the Observer had been cut by about half) and also adds a graphic of the original jacket or title page. McCrum has written a brilliant and hugely readable introduction to the book, which contextualises and examines the evolution of the novels that he has selected.