If you liked
Books like A Passage to India
Loved A Passage to India by E.M. Forster? 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
The Great Gatsby
Wealth, longing and a green light across the bay in the Jazz Age — short, perfect and quietly devastating.
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2
The Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound, and the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley move with their expatriate circle from Montmartre to the fiesta in Pamplona. Hemingway's debut novel defined the Lost Generation and introduced the iceberg theory of fiction — more powerful for what it doesn't say.
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3
Passing
Two light-skinned Black women meet by chance in Chicago in the 1920s: Irene is secure in her Black identity, while Clare is 'passing' as white in a marriage to a man who doesn't know. Larsen's compressed, devastating novella explores race, class, desire and the specific psychological violence of a world that forces people to choose.
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4
A Farewell to Arms
American ambulance driver Frederic Henry falls in love with British nurse Catherine Barkley during the First World War in Italy. Their love story plays out against the background of military defeat and retreat. Hemingway's semi-autobiographical novel is his most romantically devastating — a war novel in which the war is not the worst thing that happens.
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5
My Ántonia
Jim Burden narrates the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who came to the Nebraska prairies in the 1880s. Cather's novel is a celebration of pioneer life and of a woman of extraordinary vitality and resilience — and also an elegy for a world that has passed.
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6
My Antonia
Jim Burden narrates his memory of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl who arrived in Nebraska when Jim did as a child, and who becomes a symbol for everything Jim associates with the pioneer past. Cather's novel is an elegy for the immigrant experience and the prairie landscape, told from a deliberately partial, nostalgic perspective.
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7
As I Lay Dying
As Addie Bundren lies dying, fifteen members of her family and community narrate the subsequent chapter — their voices telling the story of carrying her body across Mississippi to bury her in Jefferson. Faulkner's formally radical novel uses stream-of-consciousness and multiple perspectives to create one of the most demanding and most studied works in the American canon.
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8
Of Human Bondage
Philip Carey, orphaned and self-conscious about his club foot, grows up seeking freedom — from his religious guardian, from his art studies in Paris, from his obsessive and self-destructive love for a waitress named Mildred. Maugham's semi-autobiographical novel is one of the last great Victorian Bildungsromane and one of the most precise accounts of how the wrong person can own you.
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9
The Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. His family's response — practical, embarrassed, increasingly resentful — is the subject of Kafka's most celebrated novella, a parable of alienation, family obligation and the irreversibility of certain transformations.
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10
Kokoro
A young man forms an intense bond with a solitary older man he calls Sensei, sensing some hidden wound. In a long letter after his death, Sensei confesses the act of betrayal that has defined his life. Soseki's novel is about guilt, friendship and the specifically Meiji-era Japanese confrontation between the old world and the new.