If you liked
Books like The Chimes
Loved The Chimes 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
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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2
Pride and Prejudice
Wit, manners and misjudged first impressions in Regency England — the template for the modern romantic comedy and still the most quoted of Austen's novels.
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3
Persuasion
Anne Elliot, persuaded against her better judgment to break off her engagement to the naval officer Frederick Wentworth, encounters him again years later — now successful and still unmarried. Austen's last completed novel is her most melancholy and most quietly feminist, written as she was dying and published posthumously.
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4
Frankenstein
A scientist creates life and abandons it, with consequences for both — the founding myth of science fiction, written when the author was barely twenty.
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5
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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6
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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7
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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8
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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9
Fanny Hill
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure — known as Fanny Hill — follows an orphaned country girl who arrives in London, falls into a brothel, and narrates her subsequent sexual and social education with remarkable candour. The first English-language prose pornography, it is also a novel about class, economics and female survival; it was prosecuted for obscenity on publication and its author briefly imprisoned.
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10
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.