u/guardian

This AMA has now ended.

A message from Charlotte and Liese:

"Thank you for all your questions! We hope you found the discussion interesting and got some more insight into how we put our 100 best novels list together.

You can read more on the story behind the list here and find all our latest books coverage here."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi r/TrueLit !

We are Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, the joint head of books at The Guardian. We recently published our list of the 100 best novels of all time, and we're here to pull back the curtain on how it all came together.

With screens dominating our time, reading for pleasure is facing a quiet crisis—half of UK adults say they never read, and reading levels among young people are at a 20-year low. We wanted this list to be an antidote to that; a gateway back to the best of literature.

To build it, we polled over 170 novelists, critics, and academics (including Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and Bernardine Evaristo). Our criteria included any book published in English, regardless of its original language. 

But we are aware that compiling a list like this is never easy. It sparks fierce debates, tough omissions, and endless conversations about what truly defines a "classic" in the modern era. 

Whether you want to know how the data was tallied, why a certain book made the top ten, why your favourite book was left off, or how the landscape of fiction is shifting, we are here to answer it all.

We’ll be here on Wednesday 1 July at 11am EDT/4pm BST to answer your questions live. Drop your questions below!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A little bit about the editors and their work…

Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer oversee The Guardian's book coverage, from cover stories for Saturday magazine such as our exclusive extract from Virginia Guiffre’s memoir Nobody’s Girl and interviews with Richard Osman, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Margaret Atwood to breaking news stories.

With the Books team they bring together the best critics to review the most exciting fiction and non fiction releases, interview leading novelists and commission leading writers such as Rebecca Solnit, David Hare, Zadie Smith and Robert Macfarlane to contribute to their pages. Charlotte has also written two novels: The House Guest and The People Before. 

You can see Charlotte’s top 10 picks for the list here and Liese’s here.

We are Charlotte Northedge and Liese Spencer, the joint head of books at The Guardian.