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How many of the BBC's top 100 books have you read?

Stacks of books on the shelf
How many of the BBC's 100 most influential novels have you read? [Photo: Getty]

A list of the top 100 most influential novels has been released by BBC Arts.

Devised by a panel, which included authors Juno Dawson and Kit de Waal together with Radio 4 Front Row presenter Stig Abell, the list includes a wide range of English language novels written in the past 300 years.

It was compiled to mark the 300th anniversary of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe being published.

The list is broken up into 10 categories, dictated by subject area rather than genre.

These sections range from Crime & Conflict and Coming of Age to Rule Breakers and Adventure.

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Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary features on the Love, Sex & Romance list, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things are included in the Identity list.

Well-known, widely-studied classics such as Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Orwell’s 1984 are there, alongside children’s books The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis and Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman.

You can view the full, comprehensive top 100 list on the BBC website. The broadcaster has invited people to share the novels that have shaped them on its Facebook page, or use the hashtag #mybooklife on Twitter.

The list has been released to kick start a year-long celebrations of literature by the BBC. As part of an initiative led by Libraries Connected and supported by Arts Council England, the organisation will be partnering with libraries around the UK.

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Panellists will discuss the top 10 list tomorrow, Friday 8 November, during a panel event at the British Library chaired by presenter Jo Whiley. The event live-streamed to BBC iPlayer.

Last month, the winner of the prestigious Booker Prize was announced. Authors Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo were jointly awarded the prize. Atwood for The Testaments – her long-anticipated follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale – and Evaristo for her novel Girl, Woman, Other.

The move broke official Booker prize rules – which have, since a previous tie in 1992, specified the prize could not be shared. The only other tie was in 1974.

However, after five hours of deliberation, judges concluded they “couldn’t separate” the two works.

BBC’s Top 100 Novels That Shaped The World

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Days Without End – Sebastian Barry

Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

Half of a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi

Small Island – Andrea Levy

The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

White Teeth – Zadie Smith

Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

Forever – Judy Blume

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Riders – Jilly Cooper

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

The Far Pavilions – M. M. Kaye

The Forty Rules of Love – Elif Shafak

The Passion – Jeanette Winterson

The Slaves of Solitude – Patrick Hamilton

City of Bohane – Kevin Barry

Eye of the Needle – Ken Follett

For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway

His Dark Materials Trilogy – Philip Pullman

Ivanhoe – Walter Scott

Mr Standfast – John Buchan

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

The Hunger Games – Suzanne Collins

The Jack Aubrey Novels – Patrick O’Brian

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy – J.R.R. Tolkien

A Game of Thrones – George R. R. Martin

Astonishing the Gods – Ben Okri

Dune – Frank Herbert

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson

The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis

The Discworld Series – Terry Pratchett

The Earthsea Trilogy – Ursula K. Le Guin

The Sandman Series – Neil Gaiman

The Road – Cormac McCarthy

A Thousand Splendid Suns – Khaled Hosseini

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Home Fire – Kamila Shamsie

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

Noughts & Crosses – Malorie Blackman

Strumpet City – James Plunkett

The Color Purple – Alice Walker

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

V for Vendetta – Alan Moore

Unless – Carol Shields

A House for Mr Biswas – V. S. Naipaul

Cannery Row – John Steinbeck

Disgrace – J.M. Coetzee

Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens

Poor Cow – Nell Dunn

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – Alan Sillitoe

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne – Brian Moore

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Emily of New Moon – L. M. Montgomery

Golden Child - Claire Adam

Oryx and Crake – Margaret Atwood

So Long, See You Tomorrow – William Maxwell

Swami and Friends – R. K. Narayan

The Country Girls - Edna O’Brien

The Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling

The Outsiders – S. E. Hinton

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ - Sue Townsend

The Twilight Saga – Stephenie Meyer

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

Ballet Shoes – Noel Streatfeild

Cloudstreet – Tim Winton

Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

I Capture the Castle – Dodie Smith

Middlemarch – George Eliot

Tales of the City – Armistead Maupin

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – Anne Brontë

The Witches – Roald Dahl

American Tabloid – James Ellroy

American War – Omar El Akkad

Ice Candy Man – Bapsi Sidhwa

Rebecca -Daphne du Maurier

Regeneration – Pat Barker

The Children of Men – P.D. James

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle

The Reluctant Fundamentalist – Mohsin Hamid

The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith

The Quiet American – Graham Greene

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Bartleby, the Scrivener – Herman Melville

Habibi – Craig Thompson

How to be Both – Ali Smith

Orlando – Virginia Woolf

Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

Psmith, Journalist – P. G. Wodehouse

The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie

Zami: A New Spelling of My Name – Audre Lorde