Waterstones is a bookstore chain with more than 200 stores in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland and Europe. In January 1997, Waterstones announced the results of its Books of the Century poll to find out what the public considered to be the hundred greatest books of the twentieth century. Over 25, 000 people took part in the poll and the Book of the Century was revealed as J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.​

1. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Animal Farm by George Orwell
4. Ulysses by James Joyce
5. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
6. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
7. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
8. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
9. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
10. Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
11. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang
12. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
14. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
15. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
16. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
17. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
20. The Stranger by Albert Camus
21. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
22. The Trial by Franz Kafka
23. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
24. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
25. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
26. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
27. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
28. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
29. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
30. Survival In Auschwitz by Primo Levi
31. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
32. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks
33. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
34. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
35. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
36. Beloved by Toni Morrison
37. Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt
38. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
39. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
40. Watership Down by Richard Adams
41. Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder
42. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
43. Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
45. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
46. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
47. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
48. Howards End by E. M. Forster
49. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
50. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
51. Dune by Frank Herbert
52. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
53. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind
54. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
55. The Gormenghast Trilogy by Mervyn Peake
56. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
57. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
58. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
59. Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain
60. The Magus by John Fowles
61. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
62. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
63. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
64. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
65. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
66. Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernières
67. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
68. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig
69. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
70. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
71. It by Stephen King
72. The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
73. The Stand: The Complete and Uncut Edition by Stephen King
74. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
75. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha by Roddy Doyle
76. Matilda by Roald Dahl
77. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
78. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
79. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes by Stephen Hawking
80. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
81. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
82. The Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
83. Delia's Complete Cookery Course by Delia Smith
84. An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan
85. The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence
86. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
87. 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke
88. The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
89. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
90. Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela
91. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins
92. Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
93. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell
94. Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton
95. High Fidelity by Nick Horn
96. The Van by Roddy Doyle
97. The BFG by Roald Dahl
98. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
99. I, Claudius by Robert Graves
100. The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans