TIME 100 best novels
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Order these acclaimed novels by the year each was published. Drag or tap it onto the line
TIME 100
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TIME 100
TIME 100 best novels
Order these acclaimed novels by the year each was published. You place all 36 cards on one timeline, one at a time. Three wrong guesses ends the run.
36
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How the TIME 100 novels timeline game works
Every card is a novel from TIME's list of the best English-language novels, with the author under the title, and you put them in order of publication year. One novel starts on the timeline with its year in view. New cards arrive one at a time, and you pick their gap. Correct picks earn the year; a wrong one still sends the book to its true place and takes one of three lives.
Everything here comes from the modern era: modernist experiments, Southern Gothic, hard-boiled crime, postwar satire, the Beats, postmodern epics and recent literary fiction. Several authors appear more than once, so their order matters. The years between the wars are crowded with classics published close together, and a book's setting can pull you toward the wrong era.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
What's in the deck
Here are 28 of the 36 cards you might be dealt, with 8 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf
- The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway
- To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
- Light in August William Faulkner
- Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller
- Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
- The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
- The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
- Native Son Richard Wright
- The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
- All the King's Men Robert Penn Warren
- Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
- The Heart of the Matter Graham Greene
- The Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
- Invisible Man Ralph Ellison
- Lord of the Flies William Golding
- The Lord of the Rings J.R.R. Tolkien
- On the Road Jack Kerouac
- Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
- Naked Lunch William S. Burroughs
- Catch-22 Joseph Heller
- A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold John le Carre
- Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
- Beloved Toni Morrison
- Infinite Jest David Foster Wallace
- Atonement Ian McEwan
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