What to read after “Compartment No. 6” by Rosa Liksom: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
A young German soldier boards a troop train bound for the Eastern Front. Convinced he will die within days, he watches the passengers and countryside pass by, and begins to wonder whether fate can be resisted.
Hazel Grace, a teenager with terminal cancer, meets Augustus Waters at a support group. Their cautious romance grows through shared wit and a planned trip to Amsterdam, while both confront what they can and cannot control.
In 1973 Paul Theroux set out from London to travel through Asia by train. He crosses Europe, the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and returns on the Trans-Siberian Railway, recording the trains, stations and people he meets.
Port and Kit Moresby travel from New York to North Africa with their friend Tunner, hoping the trip will mend their marriage. As they move deeper into the Sahara, the heat, illness and emptiness of the landscape strip away the habits that held them together, and each of them drifts toward a different kind of loss.
Stevens, a butler at an English country house, sets out on a motoring trip in 1956 and looks back over decades of service. Recalling his employer's political misjudgements and his own missed chances with the housekeeper, he begins to see what a life given to duty has cost him.
A device called a stepper lets people walk sideways into an endless chain of parallel Earths, each empty of humans. Joshua Valiente, one of the few who can step without help, joins an expedition aboard an airship to chart the Long Earth, while settlers and explorers discover that the further they travel, the stranger the worlds become.
A doctor and poet grows up in late imperial Moscow and lives through revolution and civil war. Between his wife and Lara, whose path keeps crossing his, he tries to hold on to ordinary life and to his writing.
A plague kills nearly everyone on Earth. An ecologist emerges from the mountains to find empty cities and a few survivors, and spends the rest of his life watching a new, smaller society take shape without the old world's machinery.
A young man joins the mobile infantry and is shaped into a soldier through brutal training and interstellar war. Told as his reflections on duty, citizenship and violence, the novel follows his rise from recruit to officer against an enemy unlike humanity.
Arkady Kirsanov returns from university to his father's country estate with his friend Bazarov, a self-declared nihilist. Bazarov's rejection of art, romance and authority clashes with the older generation, and a stay with the widowed Anna Odintsova and a duel force both friends to test the ideas they preach.
In 1950s New York, five young women take jobs at a publishing house and expect hard work to give them the lives they want. Caroline, April, Gregg, Barbara, and Mary Agnes navigate demanding bosses, office affairs, and the narrow choices open to women. Their friendships hold them together as romance and ambition pull them in different directions.
An escaped Australian convict flees to Bombay under a false name and disappears into the city's hidden world. He runs a clinic in a slum, is drawn into the orbit of a mafia boss and a guarded woman, and is remade by betrayal, imprisonment and war.
Ursula Todd is born in 1910 and dies, then is born again in the same English house. Over many lives she survives accidents, war and bad choices, and begins to sense that her repetitions might be leading somewhere.
A gentle landowner in St Petersburg cannot bring himself to leave his sofa or his dreams. His energetic friend and a young woman try to stir him into life, but old habits and the pull of his country estate prove hard to escape.
In 1855 a polished thief plans to steal a shipment of gold being carried by train from London toward the Crimea. He gathers a crew, copies the four keys to the safes and studies the timetable, while a police informant threatens to expose the scheme.
Four armed men seize a New York City subway train, taking seventeen passengers hostage and demanding a fortune within an hour. As the city negotiates, a transit police lieutenant races to understand the hijackers' escape plan before the deadline runs out.
Sinuhe, a physician of obscure birth, serves the pharaohs of Egypt and travels through the ancient world, from Thebes and Memphis to Syria, Babylon, and Crete. His life brings him close to power, love, and loss as he questions the gods and the price of ambition.
Jeff Winston dies in 1988 and wakes in 1963 in his eighteen-year-old body, with every memory of the years ahead intact. He lives that span over and over, each replay starting later, and slowly realises he is not the only one caught in the loop.
Five killers board the same bullet train from Tokyo to Morioka, each with a different mission and a different plan. A suitcase of ransom money ties their missions together, and the confined carriages turn every polite encounter into a threat.
Prince Myshkin returns to St Petersburg from a Swiss clinic, innocent of society's games. His compassion draws him into the tangled lives of the proud Nastasya Filippovna and the passionate Rogozhin, and the three are pulled toward ruin.
An inventor builds a machine that carries him far into the future. He finds a gentle people living above ground and a sinister race below, and slowly learns what became of humanity. A short, influential tale of time travel and a dark vision of the end.
Between 1941 and 1943 the German and French police arrested hundreds of women who had worked for the Resistance. Drawn from interviews and archives, this book follows 230 of them from prison in France onto the trains to Auschwitz, and the friendships that sustained them.
In the imperial capital of 1905, a student is drawn into a plot to kill a high official who is his own father. Over a few feverish days, the city's streets and the characters' minds come apart.
After Kristallnacht, a Jewish businessman escapes his Berlin apartment and begins moving from train to train across Germany. Unable to leave the country, he tries to hide his identity while the network of trains becomes both shelter and trap.
Start with “The Train Was on Time”, “The Fault in Our Stars”, “The Great Railway Bazaar”: they are the closest to “Compartment No. 6” in tropes and mood. Under each book in the list you will see what exactly it has in common.
How are similar books chosen?
We compare tropes (for “Compartment No. 6” these are Train Journey, Forced Proximity, Melancholic), genre, plot, era and tone. It is not “readers also bought”; it is similarity in the content itself.
Are there recent books in this list?
Yes. Among the newer ones are “The Fault in Our Stars”, “The Long Earth”, “Shantaram”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
