If you liked
Books like Hard Times
Loved Hard Times by Charles Dickens? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from classics, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.
10 books · ranked
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1
North and South
When Margaret Hale moves from the rural south of England to the industrial northern mill town of Milton, she is confronted with a world of poverty, labour disputes and a mill owner she initially despises. Gaskell's social novel is both a love story and an examination of the human cost of industrialisation — and of the prejudices that class and geography create between people who need to understand each other.
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2
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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3
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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4
The Count of Monte Cristo
Edmond Dantès, a young sailor falsely imprisoned for years in the Château d'If, escapes to find a vast hidden treasure and uses it to engineer a meticulous revenge on the three men who destroyed his life. Dumas's adventure novel is one of the most popular works of fiction ever written — a study in patience, justice, revenge and whether vengeance can ever truly satisfy.
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5
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student talks himself into murder, then has to live inside his own conscience — the original psychological thriller.
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6
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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7
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.
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8
Anna Karenina
A passionate affair against the grain of high society, threaded with one of fiction's most honest portraits of an ordinary good life.
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9
The Red and the Black
Julien Sorel, a carpenter's son of brilliant intelligence and fierce ambition, rises through Napoleonic society using his abilities and his lovers — first a provincial mayor's wife, then an aristocratic Parisian — to advance beyond his station. Stendhal's novel is a study in the psychology of ambition, hypocrisy and the impossibility of authentic selfhood under social constraint.
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10
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer has secretly borrowed money to save her husband's life and has been repaying it for years without his knowledge. When the truth threatens to emerge, the marriage — and Nora's entire constructed identity — begins to crack. Ibsen's play is one of the founding texts of modern drama and a landmark of feminist literature.