If you liked
Books like Invisible Cities
Loved Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino? 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
Maurice
Maurice Hall, a Cambridge student, falls in love with Clive Durham, a conservative aristocrat who eventually marries and rejects his homosexuality. Maurice then meets the gamekeeper Alec Scudder. Written in 1913-14, Forster's novel was published posthumously in 1971 because he could not publish it in his lifetime. The ending offers something genuine novels about homosexuality rarely offered before the Wolfenden Report.
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2
The Bookshop
Florence Green decides to open a bookshop in a small Suffolk town in 1959. The town resists. Fitzgerald's very short novel is a study in quiet, devastating cruelty — how institutions, minor power and social habit conspire against someone who simply wants to do something good. One of the bleakest comedies in English fiction.
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3
The Master and Margarita
The Devil visits Soviet Moscow with his entourage — a huge black cat, an assassin and others — and wreaks havoc through acts of magic and murder. Interwoven with the Devil's visit is a reimagining of Pontius Pilate's encounter with Yeshua Ha-Notsri. Bulgakov's satirical masterpiece, written under Stalin and published twenty years after his death, is one of the greatest novels of the 20th century.
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4
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
Two minor characters from Hamlet — Rosencrantz and Guildenstern — find themselves caught in events they don't understand and cannot control, waiting for the summons that will seal their fate. Stoppard's play is both a comic meditation on identity and free will and a theatrical examination of what it means to be a supporting character in someone else's drama.
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5
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
George and Martha, a middle-aged academic couple, invite a younger couple — Nick and Honey — back after a party and spend the night performing a savage ritual of mutual destruction. Albee's play is one of the great American domestic dramas: a study in love as warfare, illusion as survival, and what couples do to each other in the name of intimacy.
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6
War Horse
Joey, a horse, is sold to the British cavalry as war approaches and narrates his experiences through World War One — from the English countryside through the trenches of France, passing between English, German and French hands. Morpurgo's novel for young readers became a West End and Broadway phenomenon, raising questions about narrating animal experience and about the war's cost to all those caught in it.
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7
To Kill a Mockingbird
A child's-eye view of race, courage and conscience in the American South, anchored by one of fiction's great fathers.
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8
A Raisin in the Sun
The Younger family — three generations of Black Americans living in a cramped Chicago apartment — await a life-insurance payout that each member hopes to use differently: a house in a white neighbourhood, a business, a medical education. Hansberry's landmark play takes its title from Langston Hughes and asks what happens to a dream deferred.
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9
Fences
Troy Maxson, a former baseball player in 1950s Pittsburgh, has built a fence around his yard and his family as he navigates the limits placed on a Black man by the era he lives in. Wilson's play — one of ten in his Century Cycle covering Black American life across the 20th century — asks what a man is owed, what he takes from his children, and what he cannot admit about himself.
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10
Long Day's Journey Into Night
The Tyrone family spends a single August day in 1912 at their Connecticut home — the fog-bound patriarch, his morphine-addicted wife, the resentful elder son and the younger son (based on O'Neill himself) who has just been diagnosed with tuberculosis. O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece, written with instructions not to be published for 25 years after his death, is one of the great American tragedies.