Have you ever wondered what books your favourite author would choose as their favourites? Well, here is your chance to find out.

Leading writers from Britain, America and Australia have been asked to list their top ten works of literature, and the results will be published in a book next month.

The top-rated work was Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. His other great epic, War and Peace, came third. Two other Russians also made the top ten. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel Lolita came fourth and the stories of Anton Chekov ninth.

Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary came second. Shakespeare was the highest rated British author, coming sixth with Hamlet. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was voted the greatest American novel. The only woman to make the top ten was George Eliot with Middlemarch.

The 125 authors selected 544 titles. Contemporary authors were conspicuous by their absence. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, now being made into a film starring Keira Knightley, had only one nomination, as did Martin Amis’s London Fields. Even Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, which won the “Booker of Bookers”, gained only one nomination.

Peter Carey, the Australian author who won the Booker Prize twice — for Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang — picked Madame Bovary as his favourite novel. Margaret Drabble, author of 17 novels, was the only author to name Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Thomas Keneally, who won the Booker for Schindler’s Ark, his historical novel about the Holocaust, picked Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

The horror writer Stephen King chose as his favourite book The Golden Argosy, an anthology of 55 short stories from authors including Hemingway and Fitzgerald, first published in 1947 and reissued in 1955, which he bought in a sale for $2.25. He tells the editors of The Top Ten: “At that time I only had $4 and spending over half of it on one book was a hard decision. I’ve never regretted it. [It] taught me more about good writing than all the classes I’ve ever taken.”

Independent People, a chronicle of endurance and survival by the Icelandic Nobel laureate Haldór Laxness, appeared on 19 lists.

J. Peder Zane, editor of The Top Ten, said: “We live in a Golden Age. Never before have so many books been within such easy reach. But when anything is possible, choice becomes torture. What to pick? Where to start?” The premise of the book was simple, he said: “Who knows more about great books than great writers?”

Sven Birkerts, a lecturer at Harvard University and one of the book’s contributors, said: “One thing that stands out so clearly in the list of top choices is the outsized vividness of the characters. . . They are our representatives in the world of life imagined — Prince Andrei and Natasha, Pierre, Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, Tom and Huck, Emma, Gatsby and Daisy, Hamlet, Ophelia, Humbert Humbert and Lolita, Dorothea Brooke and Casaubon. Even to name them is to recall their compact human resonance. To read their lives is to be forced to reconsider our own.”

He said that he was surprised that classics such as Joyce’s Ulyssesdid not make the overall top ten. “There is no disputing tastes,” he said. “But there is also no disputing that collective preferences exist. The collective preference reflected in the list of greats is clearly for memorable character-driven dramas of love and death delineated in sensuous nuanced prose.” The Top Ten is published by W W Norton on March 1, price £9.99.

Norman Mailer

1 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

2 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

3 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky

4 The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky

5 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen

6 U.S.A. (trilogy) John Dos Passos

7 Moby-Dick Herman Melville

8 The Red and the Black Stendhal

9 Buddenbrooks Thomas Mann

10 Labyrinths Jorge Luis Borges

Peter Carey

1 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

2 Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne

3 Great Expectations Charles Dickens

4 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes

5 Middlemarch George Eliot

6 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

7 Austerlitz W. G. Sebald

8 Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez

9 The Portrait of a Lady Henry James

10 Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë

Stephen King

1 The Golden Argosy edited by Van H. Cartmell and Charles Grayson

2 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

3 The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie

4 McTeague Frank Norris

5 Lord of the Flies William Golding

6 Bleak House Charles Dickens

7 1984 George Orwell

8 The Raj Quartet Paul Scott

9 Light in August William Faulkner

10 Blood Meridian Cormac McCarthy

Margaret Drabble

1 Antony and Cleopatra William Shakespeare

2 Emma Jane Austen

3 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

4 The Three Sisters Anton Chekhov

5 The Aeneid Virgil

6 The Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri

7 Germinal Émile Zola

8 The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing

9 To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf

10 The Old Wives’ Tale Arnold Bennett

Tom Wolfe

1 L’Assommoir and Nana (tie) Émile Zola

2 Cousin Bette Honoré de Balzac

3 Bel-Ami Guy de Maupassant

4 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

5 The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck

6 Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 (tie) John O’Hara

7 Sister Carrie Theodore Dreiser

8 Studs Lonigan James T. Farrell

9 Our Town Thornton Wilder

10 Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh

Thomas Keneally

1 Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë

2 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson

3 The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne

4 Great Expectations Charles Dickens

5 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

6 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce

7 Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf

8 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

9 Voss Patrick White

10 The Tin Drum Gönter Grass

The Top Twenty

1 Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy

2 Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert

3 War and Peace Leo Tolstoy

4 Lolita Vladimir Nabokov

5 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

6 Hamlet William Shakespeare

7 The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

8 In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust

9 Stories of Anton Chekhov Anton Pavlovich Chekhov

10 Middlemarch George Eliot

11 Don Quixote Miguel de Cervantes

12 Moby-Dick Herman Melville

13 Great Expectations Charles Dickens

14 Ulysses James Joyce

15 The Odyssey Homer

16 Dubliners James Joyce

17 Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoevsky

18 King Lear William Shakespeare

19 Emma Jane Austen

20 One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel GarcÍa Márquez

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