If you liked
Books like War and Peace
Loved War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy? 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
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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2
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student talks himself into murder, then has to live inside his own conscience — the original psychological thriller.
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3
Great Expectations
A blacksmith's boy, a mysterious fortune and the question of what really makes a gentleman — Dickens at his most personal.
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4
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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5
A Doll's House
Nora Helmer has secretly borrowed money to save her husband's life and has been repaying it for years without his knowledge. When the truth threatens to emerge, the marriage — and Nora's entire constructed identity — begins to crack. Ibsen's play is one of the founding texts of modern drama and a landmark of feminist literature.
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6
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.
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7
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn escapes his abusive father and floats down the Mississippi River with Jim, an enslaved man seeking freedom. Through a series of adventures and moral tests, Huck must choose between following the conventions of a society built on slavery and following his own conscience. Both the great American adventure story and one of the most debated texts in the country's literary history.
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8
Hard Times
In the fictional northern industrial town of Coketown, the philosophy of fact and utilitarianism — embodied by the schoolmaster Gradgrind — produces its human cost: children unable to imagine, workers brutalised by their labour, and a circus family that represents everything the Gradgrind world suppresses. Dickens's most polemical novel, and one of the shortest.
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9
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Michael Henchard, a hay-trusser who in a drunken auction sells his wife and daughter to a sailor, rises to become the Mayor of Casterbridge — only to see his reputation, business and relationships destroyed by the return of the man he sold her to, now his business partner. Hardy's study of self-destruction and the remorselessness of consequence is among the most dramatically compelling of his novels.
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10
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The respectable Dr Henry Jekyll creates a potion that releases his darker nature as the violent Mr Hyde — smaller, freed from conscience, and capable of acts Jekyll himself cannot commit. As Hyde's crimes grow worse, Jekyll loses control of the transformation. Stevenson's Gothic novella is a founding text of the double-identity story and a study of Victorian repression and the darkness it conceals beneath respectability.