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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Tale of Two Cities
Charles Dickens · 384 pages
A Tale of Two Cities is a historical novel published in 1859 by Charles Dickens, set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution. The novel tells the story of the French Doctor Manette, his 18-year-long imprisonment in the Bastille in Paris, and his release to live in London with his daughter Lucie whom he had never met. The story is set against the conditions that led up to the Fr
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck · 553 pages
Steinbeck’s classic novel of the Great Depression is as vivid now as ever. The story focuses on a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers, farmers who work another man’s land for a share of the crops. Driven from their home by drought and poverty they take to the road in a battered old truck and make their way to California to look for work. When they arrive they find hundreds of others like them being f
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoyevsky · 498 pages
A masterpiece of guilt and redemption that transforms the sordid story of an old woman’s murder into the nineteenth century’s profoundest and most compelling philosophical novel. Raskolnikov, an impoverished student living in the St. Petersburg of the tsars, is determined to overreach his humanity and assert his untrammeled individual will. When he commits an act of murder and theft, he sets in
The Jungle
Upton Sinclair · 342 pages
Upton Sinclair's dramatic and deeply moving story exposed the brutal conditions in the Chicago stockyards at the turn of the nineteenth century and brought into sharp moral focus the appalling odds against which immigrants and other working people struggled for their share of the American dream. Denounced by the conservative press as an un-American libel on the meatpacking industry, the book was c
Germinal
Emile Zola · 496 pages
The thirteenth novel in Emile Zola's great Rougon-Macquart sequence, Germinal expresses outrage at the exploitation of the many by the few, but also shows humanity's capacity for compassion and hope.Etienne Lantier, an unemployed railway worker, is a clever but uneducated young man with a dangerous temper. Forced to take a back-breaking job at Le Voreux mine when he cannot get other work, he disco
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez · 422 pages
Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
Middlemarch
George Eliot · 795 pages
Eliot’s epic of 19th century provincial social life, set in a fictitious Midlands town in the years 1830-32, has several interlocking storylines blended effortlessly together to form a fully coherent narrative. Its main themes are the status of women, social expectations and hypocrisy, religion, political reform and education. It has often been called the greatest novel in the English language.
The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne · 272 pages
War and Peace
Leo Tolstoy · 716 pages
War and Peace delineates in graphic detail events surrounding the French invasion of Russia, and the impact of the Napoleonic era on Tsarist society, as seen through the eyes of five Russian aristocratic families. The novel begins in the year 1805 during the reign of Tsar Alexander I and leads up to the 1812 French invasion of Russia by Napoleon. The era of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), when t
Howards End
E.M. Forster · 320 pages
Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. Howards End is considered by some to be Forster's masterpiece
The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck · 316 pages
This tells the poignant tale of a Chinese farmer and his family in old agrarian China. The humble Wang Lung glories in the soil he works, nurturing the land as it nurtures him and his family. Nearby, the nobles of the House of Hwang consider themselves above the land and its workers; but they will soon meet their own downfall. Hard times come upon Wang Lung and his family when flood and drought
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser · 831 pages
The classic depiction of the harsh realities of American life, the dark side of the American Dream, and one man's doomed pursuit of love and success..."Mr. Dreiser is not imitative and belongs to no school. He is at heart a mysticist and a fatalist, though using the realistic method. He is, on the evidence of this novel alone, a power." --The New York Times Book Review
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 334 pages
Set in 1930s Georgia, the novel centers around a deaf and mute man, John Singer. Singer has been devastated by the loss of his dear friend, Antonapoulos, who was committed to an asylum for bad behavior
Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak · 542 pages
***This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.*** One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. ***The book quickly became an international be
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton · 320 pages
Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written immediately after the end of the First World War, is a brilliantly realized anatomy of New York society in the 1870s, the world in which she grew up, and from which she spent her life escaping. Newland Archer, Wharton's protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this society; he accepts its standards and abides by its rules but
Moby-Dick or, The Whale
Herman Melville · 420 pages
A classic of the sea, telling of the pursuit of Moby Dick, the white whale who defied capture.
The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe · 690 pages
All the King's Men
Robert Penn Warren · 490 pages
The story is about Willie Stark, a slick politician of humble birth, who was based on real-life Huey Long, a Louisiana governor, but the real main character is Jack Burden, a reporter who serves to narrate the story and Stark's rise to power.
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy · 301 pages
*All the Pretty Horses* is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. Its romanticism (in contrast to the bleakness of McCarthy's earlier work) brought the writer much public attention. It was a bestseller, and it won both the U.S. National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Along with *The Crossing* (1994), and C*ities of the Plain* (19
Fall of Giants
Ken Follett · 892 pages
It is 1911. The Coronation Day of King George V. The Williams, a Welsh coal-mining family, is linked by romance and enmity to the Fitzherberts, aristocratic coal-mine owners. Lady Maud Fitzherbert falls in love with Walter von Ulrich, a spy at the German Embassy in London. Their destiny is entangled with that of an ambitious young aide to U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and to two orphaned Russian b
North and South
Elizabeth Gaskell · 450 pages
When her father leaves the Church in a crisis of conscience, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the north of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of the local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice. Thi
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert · 332 pages
Charles Bovary, médecin de campagne, veuf d'une mégère, fait lors d'une tournée la rencontre du père Rouault et de sa fille, Emma. Après leur mariage, Emma reste insatisfaite et rêve d'une nouvelle vie. Son premier amant lui donne le goût du luxe et fait miroiter un avenir à deux avant de l'abandonner. Une fois remise, Emma continue à faire de folles dépenses, qui peu à peu la mènent à la ruine et
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy · 440 pages
Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv