After Robert McCrum finished his two-year-long project compiling the best novels written in English, you had a lot to add. Here are the 15 books that received most votes to join the list

Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English. Take a look at his list

In his Booker-winning masterpiece, Coetzee’s intensely human vision infuses a fictional world that both invites and confounds political interpretation

A writer of ‘frightening perception’, Don DeLillo guides the reader in an epic journey through America’s history and popular culture

This modern Irish masterpiece is both a study of the faultlines of Irish patriarchy and an elegy for a lost world

Anne Tyler’s portrayal of a middle-aged, mid-American marriage displays her narrative clarity, comic timing and ear for American speech to perfection

Fitzgerald’s story, set in Russia just before the Bolshevik revolution, is her masterpiece: a brilliant miniature whose peculiar magic almost defies analysis

Martin Amis’s era-defining ode to excess unleashed one of literature’s greatest modern monsters in self-destructive antihero John Self

Marilynne Robinson’s tale of orphaned sisters and their oddball aunt in a remote Idaho town is admired by everyone from Barack Obama to Bret Easton Ellis

The personal and the historical merge in Salman Rushdie’s dazzling, game-changing novel about a young man born at the very moment of Indian independence

VS Naipaul’s hellish vision of an African nation’s path to independence saw him accused of racism, but remains his masterpiece

The novel with which the Nobel prize-winning author established her name is a kaleidoscopic evocation of the African-American experience in the 20th century