If you liked
Books like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Loved Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll? 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
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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2
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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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
War and Peace
Russian aristocrats live, love and survive the Napoleonic wars in a vast, surprisingly readable panorama of a society in upheaval.
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5
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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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
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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8
Anna Karenina
A passionate affair against the grain of high society, threaded with one of fiction's most honest portraits of an ordinary good life.
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9
Bleak House
The case of Jarndyce v Jarndyce — a Chancery lawsuit that has consumed generations and may never be resolved — provides the frame for one of Dickens's richest novels, weaving together characters from every level of Victorian society. Bleak House uses a double narrative (third person and first person by the heroine Esther Summerson) and the mystery of Esther's parentage to create the closest thing to the great Victorian novel.
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10
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.