“What are Samuel Beckett’s Best Books?” We looked at all of Beckett’s authored bibliography and ranked them against one another to answer that very question!

We took all of the books written by Samuel Beckett and looked at their Goodreads, Amazon, and LibraryThing scores, ranking them against one another to see which books came out on top. The books are ranked in our list below based on which titles have the highest overall score between all 3 review sites in comparison with all of the other books by the same author. The process isn’t super scientific and in reality, most books aren’t “better” than other books as much as they are just different. That being said, we do enjoy seeing where our favorites landed, and if you aren’t familiar with the author at all, the rankings can help you see what books might be best to start with.

The full ranking chart is also included below the countdown on the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

The Top Book’s Of Samuel Beckett

57 ) Eh Joe and Other Writings

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 55
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 44

55 ) The Expelled

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 49
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 49

55 ) L’Image

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 54
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 44

54 ) Come and Go

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 47
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

53 ) Lessness

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 51
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 44

52 ) Breath and Other Short Plays

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 46
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 44

51 ) Echo’s Bones

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 45
• Amazon: 34
• LibraryThing: 44

In 1933, Chatto & Windus agreed to publish Samuel Beckett’s More Pricks Than Kicks, a collection of ten interrelated stories—it was to be his first published work of fiction. At his editor’s request, Beckett penned an additional story to serve as the final piece. It was called “Echo’s Bones,” but it caused many problems for Beckett, as he had killed off the protagonist of the stories. But in the end, his editor politely turned it down and it was not included. As a result, the story “Echo’s Bones,” not to be confused with the poem and collection of poems of the same title, remained unpublished. Now, almost eight decades later, it will finally find its way into print.

50 ) Relatos

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 50
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 30

49 ) All Strange Away

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 37
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 38

46 ) Krapp’s Last Tape

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

46 ) Footfalls

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 41
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 40

46 ) The Lost Ones

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 55
• Amazon: 23
• LibraryThing: 27

45 ) El Innombrable

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

44 ) No’s Knife

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 13
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

42 ) From an Abandoned Work

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 11
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

42 ) Dream Of Fair To Middling Women

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 53
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 42

41 ) Our Exagmination Round His Factification For Incamination Of Work In Progress

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 10
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

40 ) Mercier and Camier

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 38
• Amazon: 32
• LibraryThing: 21

One of the most accessible examples of Samuel Beckett’s dark humor, Mercier and Camier is the hilarious chronicle of its two heroes’ epic journey. While their travels are fraught with complications and intrigue, Mercier and Camier at least “did not remove from home, they had that good fortune.”

38 ) Malone Muere

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 30
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 25

38 ) Premier Amour

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 35
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 31

37 ) Six Residua

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 42
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 12

36 ) Expelled, The, and Other Novellas

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 35
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 18

34 ) Dramatic Works and Dialogues

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

34 ) Texts For Nothing

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 32

32 ) Beckett Shorts

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 1
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 50

32 ) Murphy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 32
• Amazon: 30
• LibraryThing: 24

Murphy’, Samuel Beckett’s first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France in 1947. The novel recounts the hilarious but tragic life of Murphy in London as he attempts to establish a home and to amass sufficient fortune for his intended bride to join him.

30 ) Happy Days

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 27
• Amazon: 30
• LibraryThing: 28

In ‘Happy Days, ‘ Beckett pursues his relentless search for the meaning of existence, probing the tenuous relationships that bind one person to another, and each to the universe, to time past and time present.

30 ) Eleutheria

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 43
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 41

A young man at odds with his middle-class family, refusing to take part in “normal” life while accepting hand-outs from his mother, is the subject of this play. Unperformed during Beckett’s lifetime, it draws on the traditions of French boulevard comedy and melodrama.

28 ) Ends and Odds

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 30
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 18

Ends and Odds brings together nine short dramatic works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting for Godot.

28 ) All That Fall

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 43
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 39

27 ) For To End Yet Again and Other Fizzles

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 40
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 37

Susan Kinsolving’s first collection, Dailies & Rushes, was hailed as a remarkable debut by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal, and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In her new work, The White Eyelash, she turns the extremes of her recent experiences into poems of harsh factuality. This dark narrative sequence is highly contrasted by the humor presented in a section called “Light Fare and Oddballs.” Once again, Kinsolving exhibits a daunting range with signature style and substance.

26 ) Waiting For Godot

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 34
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 17

A seminal work of twentieth-century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett’s first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone—or something—named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness.

24 ) Endgame

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 33
• Amazon: 19
• LibraryThing: 22

Samuel Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature n 1969; his literary output of plays, novels, stories and poetry has earned him an uncontested place as one of the greatest writers of our time. “Endgame, ” originally written in French and translated into English by Beckett himself, is considered by many critics to be his greatest single work.

24 ) Imagination Dead Imagine

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 51
• Amazon: 21
• LibraryThing: 2

23 ) Collected Poems Of Samuel Beckett

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 29
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 43

21 ) Rockabye and Other Short Pieces

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 25
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 32

We find in Beckett’s masterful, exquisite prose, the familiar themes from his earlier works here expressed in the anguished murmurings of the solitary human consciousness.

21 ) That Time

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 39
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 32

19 ) No Author Better Served

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 4
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 32

Samuel Beckett’s view of existence seems so remorselessly, brilliantly bleak that one doesn’t expect much in the way of human warmth from his correspondence. Yet the letters he and director Alan Schneider exchanged over the course of three decades are full of wit and fellow feeling. The focus, to be sure, is on Beckett’s plays, five of which Schneider premiered in the United States between 1956 and 1983.

19 ) Cascando and Other Short Dramatic Pieces

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 48
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 22

18 ) L’Innommable

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 28
• LibraryThing: 25

This collection of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s dramatic pieces includes a short stage play, two radio plays, and two pantomimes. The stage play, Krapp’s Last Tape, evolves a shattering drama out of a monologue of a man who, at age sixty-nine, plays back the autobiographical tape he recorded on his thirty-ninth birthday.

17 ) Stirrings Still

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 24
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 29

16 ) How It Is

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 33
• LibraryThing: 15

“It is one thing to be informed by Shakespeare that life “is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing”; it is something else to encounter the idea literally presented in a novel by Samuel Beckett. But I am reasonably certain that a sensitive reader who journeys through How It Is will leave the book convinced that Beckett says more that is relevant to experience in our time than Shakespeare does in Macbeth.

15 ) I Can’t Go On, I’Ll Go On

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 55
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 5

14 ) Watt

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 26
• Amazon: 18
• LibraryThing: 13

In prose possessed of the radically stripped-down beauty and ferocious wit that characterize his work, this early novel by Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett recounts the grotesque and improbable adventures of a fantastically logical Irish servant and his master. Watt is a beautifully executed black comedy that, at its core, is rooted in the powerful and terrifying vision that made Beckett one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century.

13 ) As the Story Was Told

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 1

12 ) Trilogy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 35
• LibraryThing: 9

Samuel Beckett’s brilliance as a dramatist–as the creator of Waiting for Godot, Krapp’s Last Tape, and that despairing pas de deux Endgame–has tended to overshadow his gifts as a novelist. Yet he’s unmistakably one of the great fiction writers of our century.

11 ) Poemes

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 15
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 32

10 ) Molloy

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 14
• Amazon: 19
• LibraryThing: 11

9 ) Company

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 28
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 14

7 ) The Complete Short Prose Of Samuel Beckett, 1929-1989

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 5
• Amazon: 28
• LibraryThing: 3

7 ) The Letters Of Samuel Beckett

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 24
• LibraryThing: 5

The letters written by Samuel Beckett between 1929 and 1940 provide a vivid and personal view of Western Europe in the 1930s, and mark the gradual emergence of Beckett’s unique voice and sensibility.

6 ) Nohow On

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 9
• Amazon: 21
• LibraryThing: 4

Beckett has few imitators these days, when story is all to most novelists, but he remains a writer of unquestionable stature. Nohow On: Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho: Three Novels and its companion volume Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 assemble virtually all of Beckett’s prose work outside his sequence of major novels: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.

5 ) The Unnamable

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 16
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 16

3 ) Proust

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 12
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 18

3 ) Stories Texts For Nothing

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 20
• Amazon: 1
• LibraryThing: 10

This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett relentlessly strips away all but the essential to arrive at a core of truth. His prose reveals the same mastery that marks his work from Waiting for Godot and Endgame to Molloy and Malone Dies. In each of the three stories, old men displaced or expelled from the modest corners where they have been living bestir themselves in search of new corners.

2 ) Collected Shorter Plays Of Samuel Beckett

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 7
• Amazon: 15
• LibraryThing: 8

1 ) The Complete Dramatic Works

Review Website Ranks:

• Goodreads: 2
• Amazon: 14
• LibraryThing: 7

Samuel Beckett’s Best Books

Samuel Beckett Review Website Bibliography Rankings