Books like “Crime and Punishment”

What to read after “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoevsky: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.

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1
The Trial
Franz Kafka · 1925
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Philosophical”
- Psychological Thriller
- Philosophical
A clerk is arrested one morning and told he is on trial, though no one will say for what. As he tries to navigate a faceless legal system, his ordinary life unravels. A bleak, darkly funny novel about bureaucracy, guilt and power.
2
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez · 1967
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
The Buendía family founds the town of Macondo and repeats its own history across seven generations, through civil wars, doomed loves and strange miracles. A manuscript of prophecies waits all the while to reveal how their story ends.
3
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse · 1927
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
A middle-aged loner who feels half man and half wolf drifts through a city he despises, until a chance encounter leads him to a strange magic theatre. There he confronts the many selves inside him. A novel about alienation, desire and finding one's way back to life.
4
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy · 1878
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
Anna Karenina, married to a senior official, meets the young officer Vronsky at a Moscow railway station, and the attraction between them overturns her settled life. In parallel, the landowner Levin wrestles with faith, work and his courtship of Kitty. The novel follows both households and the price society demands.
5
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov · 1840
Similar atmosphere: “Melancholic”
- Melancholic
- Morally Grey Character
Pechorin is a clever, restless officer serving in the Caucasus, bored by everything and unable to value what he wins. In five linked tales he manipulates the people drawn to him, a princess, a smuggler, an old comrade, and coolly explains his own cruelty. A portrait of a gifted man who has nothing left to want.
6
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells · 1895
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
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.
7
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad · 1899
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
- Philosophical
- Morally Grey Character
A sailor tells of his journey up an African river to reach a mysterious ivory trader who has become a god to the locals. The deeper he goes, the more he sees of greed and cruelty, and of what people become when no one restrains them. A short, unsettling classic.
8
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig · 2020
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
Stuck between life and death, Nora Seed finds a library whose shelves hold all the lives she might have lived if she had chosen differently. She tries them one by one, measuring her regrets against what she actually wants from being alive.
9
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe · 1958
Similar atmosphere: “Melancholic”
- Melancholic
Okonkwo, a respected wrestler and farmer in a Nigerian village, builds his standing on a fear of appearing weak. When he is exiled and, years later, British missionaries and officials arrive, the customs that shaped him begin to collapse around him and his people.
10
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Iain Reid · 2016
Similar atmosphere: “Psychological Thriller” and “Philosophical”
- Psychological Thriller
- Philosophical
A man and his girlfriend drive to his parents' remote farm so she can meet them. Through the long winter journey she keeps turning over a private thought about ending the relationship, while small details around them begin to feel wrong.
11
Earth Abides
George R. Stewart · 1949
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical” and “Melancholic”
- Philosophical
- Melancholic
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.
12
Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts · 2003
Similar atmosphere: “Philosophical”
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.