What to read after “Fathers and Sons” by Ivan Turgenev: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A poor student in St Petersburg, convinced that great men stand above the law, murders a pawnbroker and her sister. What follows is less a chase than a slow unravelling, as guilt, a detective's needling and a young woman's faith close in on him.
A bored young dandy inherits a country estate and turns down the earnest love of his bookish neighbour, Tatyana. Years later they meet again in St Petersburg society, and their positions are reversed.
Across the years of Napoleon's campaigns, the lives of several Russian families intertwine. Pierre searches for a purpose, Prince Andrei for glory and love, and Natasha grows up amid courtship and loss, while the war moves steadily toward the burning of Moscow.
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.
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.
On the Don steppe, a Cossack family is torn apart by war and revolution. Grigory's love for another man's wife and his shifting loyalties carry him through the First World War and the civil war that follows.
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.
Chichikov arrives in a provincial Russian town and charms its officials and landowners. He has come to buy serfs who have died but are still listed on the tax rolls, and his odd scheme draws him into the vanity and corruption of the society around him.
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 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.
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.
Expelled from prep school and drifting through New York before going home, teenager Holden Caulfield narrates a few days of restless encounters. He rails against adults he calls phonies while quietly grieving a brother and his own place in the world.
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 country doctor's wife dreams of romance and a grander life than her dull provincial marriage offers. She takes lovers and spends beyond her means, chasing a happiness that keeps slipping away. A sharply observed novel about desire, debt and disillusion.
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 young officer is posted to a remote fortress on the steppe, where he falls for the captain's daughter and is drawn into the Pugachev uprising. Loyalty, honour and love are tested as rebellion sweeps the province.
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.
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.
A brilliant scholar, dissatisfied with everything he can learn, makes a wager with the devil Mephistopheles for a taste of true experience. What follows leads him to love, ruin and the limits of human striving. A verse tragedy about knowledge, temptation and the soul.
An aging Cuban fisherman, Santiago, has gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. When a huge marlin finally takes his line far out to sea, he must hold on through a long, painful contest of endurance and will.
Start with “Oblomov”, “The Idiot”, “A Hero of Our Time”: they are the closest to “Fathers and Sons” 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 “Fathers and Sons” these are Russian Empire, Philosophical, Coming of Age), 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?
This list is mostly books from earlier years. To find newer ones, open the trope search and pick the tropes you want.
