If you liked
Books like The Call of the Wild
Loved The Call of the Wild by Jack London? 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 Cherry Orchard
The Ranevskaya family returns to their ancestral estate with its cherry orchard, facing financial ruin and unable to take the practical steps that would save them. Chekhov's final play is simultaneously funny and heartbreaking — a study in the incapacity of people to respond to change, and in the passing of one world and the arrival of another.
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2
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart is beautiful, witty and socially brilliant — and she is slowly sliding toward ruin. Wharton's first major novel traces Lily's downfall with the precision of a social scientist and the sympathy of someone who understood exactly how the gilded cage of New York society worked.
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3
Heart of Darkness
Marlow, a riverboat captain, travels deep into the Belgian Congo to find the ivory trader Kurtz, whose methods have become legendary for their horror. One of the most debated texts in English literature — a study of colonialism and the human capacity for evil that has itself been accused of reproducing the racism it critiques.
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4
The Awakening
Edna Pontellier, a married woman summering on the Louisiana Gulf Coast, awakens to her own desires and autonomy, refusing the roles of wife and mother that her society demands. Condemned on publication in 1899 and largely forgotten, the novel is now central to feminist literary history and to discussions of women's freedom and selfhood.
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5
Howards End
Three families — the intellectual Schlegels, the business-minded Wilcoxes and the lower-middle-class Basts — become entangled through property, love and tragedy. Forster's novel, anchored by its epigraph 'Only connect', asks what England is and who belongs to it — and whether connection across class and sensibility is even possible.
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6
Jude the Obscure
Jude Fawley is a stonemason in rural Dorset who dreams of entering the university at Christminster — a city that will never accept him. His relationships with his cousin Sue Bridehead and his marriage to Arabella Donn are both wrong for different reasons, and the novel follows their combined tragedy with an unsparing honesty that scandalized its first readers. Hardy's last novel.
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7
Swann's Way
The first volume of In Search of Lost Time begins with the narrator's inability to sleep, the memories unlocked by a madeleine dipped in tea, a childhood in Combray, and the story of Charles Swann's obsessive love for Odette de Crécy. Proust's great opening volume introduces the novel's central argument: that involuntary memory is the only reliable medium for recovering the past.
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8
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.
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9
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman recovering from a 'nervous condition' in a summer rental house is prescribed rest and forbidden from writing — and begins to fixate on the yellow wallpaper of her room, eventually believing a woman is trapped behind it. Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story is the foundational text of feminist literary criticism and one of the most-assigned texts in women's literature courses.
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10
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Tess Durbeyfield, a peasant girl whose father discovers a dubious claim to noble descent, is sent to seek kinship with the d'Urbervilles and meets with catastrophe. Hardy's most devastating novel follows Tess through betrayal, hardship, murder and execution, asking whether any person can be truly 'pure' in a world that will not let her simply be herself.