If you liked
Books like Of Human Bondage
Loved Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham? 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 Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa wakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. His family's response — practical, embarrassed, increasingly resentful — is the subject of Kafka's most celebrated novella, a parable of alienation, family obligation and the irreversibility of certain transformations.
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2
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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3
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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4
My Ántonia
Jim Burden narrates the story of Ántonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants who came to the Nebraska prairies in the 1880s. Cather's novel is a celebration of pioneer life and of a woman of extraordinary vitality and resilience — and also an elegy for a world that has passed.
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5
My Antonia
Jim Burden narrates his memory of Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian immigrant girl who arrived in Nebraska when Jim did as a child, and who becomes a symbol for everything Jim associates with the pioneer past. Cather's novel is an elegy for the immigrant experience and the prairie landscape, told from a deliberately partial, nostalgic perspective.
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6
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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7
The Great Gatsby
Wealth, longing and a green light across the bay in the Jazz Age — short, perfect and quietly devastating.
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8
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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9
The Sun Also Rises
Jake Barnes, an American journalist in Paris rendered impotent by a war wound, and the beautiful Lady Brett Ashley move with their expatriate circle from Montmartre to the fiesta in Pamplona. Hemingway's debut novel defined the Lost Generation and introduced the iceberg theory of fiction — more powerful for what it doesn't say.
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10
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.