On 5 November 2019, the BBC published a list of novels selected by a panel of six writers and critics, who had been asked to choose 100 English language novels "that have had an impact on their lives". The resulting list of "100 novels that shaped our world", called the "100 'most inspiring' novels" by BBC News, was published by the BBC to kick off a year of celebrating literature.

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
• Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
• Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
• Small Island by Andrea Levy
• The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
• Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
• White Teeth by Zadie Smith
• Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
• Forever by Judy Blume
• Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Riders by Jilly Cooper
• Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Far Pavilions by M M Kaye
• The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
• The Passion by Jeanette Winterson
• The Slaves of Solitude by Patrick Hamilton
• City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
• Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett
• For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
• His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• Ivanhoe by Walter Scott
• Mr Standfast by John Buchan
• The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
• The Jack Aubrey Novels by Patrick O’Brian
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J R R Tolkein
• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis
• The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
• The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K Le Guin
• The Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
• Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman
• Strumpet City by James Plunkett
• The Color Purple by Alice Walker
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• V for Vendetta by Alan Moore
• Unless by Carol Shields
• A House for Mr Biswas by V S Naipaul
• Cannery Row by John Steinbeck
• Disgrace by J M Coetzee
• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
• Poor Cow by Nell Dunn
• Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
• Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
• Emily of New Moon by L M Montgomery
• Golden Child by Claire Adam
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell
• Swami and Friends by R K Narayan
• The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien
• The Harry Potter series by J K Rowling
• The Outsiders by S E Hinton
• The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾ by Sue Townsend
• The Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer
• A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
• Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
• Cloudstreet by Tim Winton
• Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
• The Shipping News by E Annie Proulx
• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte
• The Witches by Roald Dahl
• American Tabloid by James Ellroy
• American War by Omar El Akkad
• Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Regeneration by Pat Barker
• The Children of Men by P D James
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
• The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
• The Quiet American by Graham Greene
• A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
• Bartleby, the Scrivener by Herman Melville
• Habibi by Craig Thompson
• How to be Both by Ali Smith
• Orlando by Virginia Woolf
• Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Psmith, Journalist by P G Wodehouse
• The Moor’s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
• Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde