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.
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.
Laid up in hospital with a broken leg, Inspector Alan Grant is bored until he is given a portrait of Richard III. Wondering whether the king really murdered the princes in the Tower, he reopens a five-hundred-year-old case from his bed, working only from books.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the 1850s, a teenage runaway known only as the kid drifts into a borderland of scalphunters and broken towns. He joins the Glanton gang, whose campaign against Apache raiders becomes indiscriminate slaughter, shadowed by a pale, learned judge who preaches war as the highest law.
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.
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.
A group of schoolboys survives a plane crash on a deserted island and tries to govern themselves. Order slips first into fear and then into savagery as the boys turn on one another. An allegory about civilisation, violence and what people become without rules.
Giant alien ships appear above Earth's cities and impose a peaceful rule under the Overlords. Decades of calm and progress pass, but humanity's golden age hides a purpose no one can guess until the Overlords finally reveal themselves.
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.
A wandering sailor joins the whaling ship Pequod, whose captain is obsessed with hunting the white whale that took his leg. As the voyage stretches across the oceans, the crew is dragged toward a reckoning. A vast, digressive novel of obsession, the sea and human nature.
Years after the war against the Formics, Andrew Wiggin travels as a Speaker for the Dead, revealing the truth of the departed. On the colony world Lusitania he is drawn into the fate of a human family and the alien Pequeninos, whose customs hide a terrible secret.
In a future run by the collective, the word I has no meaning and all work is done for the good of all. Equality 7-2521 breaks the rules by doing forbidden research and falling in love, then flees a society that cannot allow an individual to exist.
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.
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.
The first hundred colonists arrive on Mars in 2026 to build a new world, a mission split between those who want to preserve the planet and those who want to change it. Over decades their disagreements grow into open conflict with Earth.
An orphan raised in a workhouse runs away to London, where the thief Fagin takes him into a band of child pickpockets. Kind strangers try to rescue him while the criminals want him back for their own plans. The novel follows his search for a home and the mystery of his birth.
Start with “Crime and Punishment”, “War and Peace”, “The Daughter of Time”: they are the closest to “Les Misérables” 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 “Les Misérables” these are Redemption Arc, Found Family, Rebellion), 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 “Shantaram”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
