If you liked
Books like Twelfth Night
Loved Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare? 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
Don Quixote
An elderly Spanish gentleman, his mind disordered by too many chivalric romances, sets out as a knight errant with his pragmatic squire Sancho Panza to do good and restore justice to the world. Cervantes's novel — often called the first modern novel — plays the idealist and the pragmatist against each other in ways that have sustained 400 years of interpretation.
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2
Paradise Lost
Satan falls, corrupts Eden, and humanity loses paradise — told in twelve books of blank verse that Milton intended as a justification of God's ways to man. One of the great monuments of English literature and one of the most ambivalent: Satan is so compelling that Blake claimed Milton was secretly of the Devil's party, and readers have disagreed ever since.
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3
Pride and Prejudice
Wit, manners and misjudged first impressions in Regency England — the template for the modern romantic comedy and still the most quoted of Austen's novels.
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4
Sense and Sensibility
Elinor and Marianne Dashwood embody two opposing temperaments — sense and sensibility — as they navigate love, heartbreak and financial precarity after their father's death leaves them dependent on others' goodwill. Austen's first published novel is a sophisticated study of what it costs women to feel and what it costs them not to.
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5
Jane Eyre
An orphaned governess insists on her own dignity against everything stacked against her — fierce, gothic and unexpectedly modern.
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6
Wuthering Heights
A storm of obsession and revenge on the Yorkshire moors; for readers who want their love stories dark and uncompromising.
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7
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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8
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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9
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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10
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.