BVBook Verdict

If you liked

Books like Suite française

Loved Suite française by Irène Némirovsky? Here are 10 books with a similar appeal — drawn mostly from history, ranked by how confidently we'd recommend them next.

10 books · ranked

  1. 1

    The Warmth of Other Suns

    Isabel Wilkerson · 2010 · History

    The Great Migration of Black Americans told through three unforgettable lives; monumental narrative history.

  2. 2

    Sapiens

    Yuval Noah Harari · 2011 · History

    A sweeping history of humanity from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the present, arguing that what made humans uniquely powerful was the ability to create and believe in shared fictions — nations, religions, money — that allowed large-scale social cooperation impossible for other species. One of the bestselling non-fiction books of the 21st century.

  3. 3

    Guns, Germs, and Steel

    Jared Diamond · 1997 · History

    Why some societies came to dominate others, argued from geography rather than race; sweeping and influential.

  4. 4

    Martin Guerre

    Alexandre Dumas · 2004 · History

    A man capitalizes on his remarkable resemblance to another man to steal the other's life and identity. [Celebrated Crimes is an 8-volume collection of 18 essays by Alexandre Dumas. Each essay is based

  5. 5

    The Devil in the White City

    Erik Larson · 2003 · History

    A world's fair and a serial killer in 1890s Chicago, braided together; history that reads like a thriller.

  6. 6

    Team of Rivals

    Doris Kearns Goodwin · 2005 · History

    How Lincoln governed by appointing his opponents; a masterful study of political leadership.

  7. 7

    1776

    David McCullough · 2005 · History

    The year America's revolution nearly failed; intimate, propulsive popular history.

  8. 8

    Urbain Grandier

    Alexandre Dumas · 2002 · History

    On June 2, 1630, Father Urbain Grandier, the parish priest of St.-Pierre-du-Marche of Loudun, France, was accused of witchcraft by a group of Ursuline nuns. Grandier, a politically-influential priest

  9. 9

    Ali Pacha

    Alexandre Dumas · 2001 · History

    The beginning of the nineteenth century was a time of audacious enterprises and strange vicissitudes of fortune. Whilst Western Europe in turn submitted and struggled against a sub-lieutenant who made

  10. 10

    Stalingrad

    Antony Beevor · 1998 · History

    The brutal turning-point battle of the Second World War; definitive, vivid military history.

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