Don Quixote, the tale of a Spanish knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances, was yesterday voted the best book of all time in a survey of around 100 of the world's best authors.
"If there is one novel you should read before you die, it is Don Quixote," the Nigerian author Ben Okri said at the Norwegian Nobel Institute as he announced the results of history's most expansive authors' poll. "Don Quixote has the most wonderful and elaborated story, yet it is simple."
Around 100 well-known authors from 54 countries voted for the "most meaningful book of all time" in a poll organised by editors at the Norwegian Book Clubs in Oslo.
Voters included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, Seamus Heaney, Carlos Fuentes and Norman Mailer. Isabel Allende boycotted the exercise on the grounds that she objected to "book surveys".
The Swedish children's author Astrid Lindgren managed to vote just before her death in January, and her book Pippi Longstocking made the list.
Lessing said the authors aimed to spark a thirst for reading in a young generation that preferred TV and Playstations. "They should be called educated barbarians," she said.
Miguel de Cervantes' tale of misguided heroism gained 50% more votes than any other book, eclipsing works by Shakespeare, Homer and Tolstoy.
Ten authors got more than one book on to the list, which was not ranked. After Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoevsky emerged as the most worthwhile read with four books listed: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov.
The only Shakespeare plays the authors agreed on were Hamlet, King Lear and Othello.
The Bard was matched by Franz Kafka, who was virtually unknown during his lifetime. His three angst-ridden tales of grotesque alienation on the list were The Trial, The Castle and the Complete Stories.
Three works by Leo Tolstoy made it: War and Peace, Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
The American William Faulkner and the Briton Virginia Woolf both scored twice, along with the Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who declined to vote.
Living writers were few and far between . Notable examples were Doris Lessing - whose Golden Notebook featured - and Salman Rushdie, Chinua Achebe and Toni Morrison.
Alf van der Hagen, an editor with the Norwegian Book Clubs, said: "The unique element to this list is that we didn't just ask authors from Europe or the US, we took a worldwide survey for the first time."
He said more than two-thirds of the 100 titles were written by Europeans, almost half were written last century and 11 were by women.