What to read after “The Last of the Wine” by Mary Renault: a list matched by tropes, mood and atmosphere. Under each book you will see what it has in common.
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.
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.
The emperor Claudius, dismissed by his family as a stammering fool, writes the hidden history of the Julio-Claudian house. From Augustus to the reign of Caligula he records the poisonings, exiles and betrayals that shaped Rome, and how he survived them by being thought harmless.
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.
Marcus Aquila, a young Roman officer, arrives in Britain after his father's legion vanished in the north. When the legion's eagle standard is rumoured to survive, Marcus and his British companion Esca travel beyond Hadrian's Wall to recover it and clear his family's name.
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.
Briseis, queen of Lyrnessus, is taken captive when the Greeks sack her city and given to Achilles as a prize. In the Greek camp she watches the war from among the enslaved women, finding moments of friendship and endurance while the men around her fight over honour and revenge.
Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara sees her world torn apart by the American Civil War. Determined to rebuild her family's plantation and her fortune, she schemes and marries her way through the ruins of the Old South, chasing a man she cannot have.
The Trojan War told through its women: queens, captives, mothers and goddesses who wait, grieve and endure while the men fight and die. From the Greek camp to the burning city, their voices answer the old story that left them out.
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.
Theseus grows up in Troizen believing the sea god is his father, then learns his true parentage and travels to Athens to claim his place. On the way he becomes the year-king of Eleusis, bound by an old sacrifice, and later goes to Crete, where he enters the labyrinth and faces the Minotaur.
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.
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.
Lavinia grows up in Latium, a king's daughter who has no voice in her own story. A prophecy names a stranger from Troy as her husband, and when Aeneas arrives their union sets off a war. Years later she tells her own version of the life the epic left unspoken.
A conscripted soldier fights an interstellar war against the Taurans, an alien enemy he barely understands. Relativity means each tour sends him centuries into the future, where the society he left behind has changed beyond recognition and the war has no clear end.
In a bombed Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, a nurse tends a badly burned patient who can no longer remember his name. As the others in the house circle him, fragments of his past as a desert explorer and his affair with a married woman resurface.
In Leningrad in 1941, as the German army tightens its siege, Tatiana meets Alexander, a young officer with a secret. Their love is forbidden by her family and by the war, but through hunger, loss and the frozen winter they hold on to each other and to the hope of survival.
Marcus Cicero, a provincial lawyer with no noble lineage, takes on the corruption of a Roman governor and turns a dangerous trial into the foundation of his political career. Told by his secretary Tiro, the novel follows Cicero's rise through the Republic's elections, alliances, and rivalries.
Sold into slavery after her father's death, Amara works in a brothel in Pompeii, owned by a man she hates. She hides her education and waits, building ties with the other women and looking for a way out, in a city where even a slave can sometimes buy back her freedom.
Robert Jordan, an American volunteer, joins a band of Republican guerrillas in the Spanish mountains to blow up a bridge. Over a few days he falls for Maria, a young woman scarred by war, and weighs duty, love and the near certainty that the mission will cost him his life.
In fourteenth-century England, Katherine Swynford becomes a lady-in-waiting and falls in love with John of Gaunt, a royal duke bound by marriage and politics. Their long, often forbidden attachment survives plague, war and the disapproval of a court that cannot forgive a scandal.
Linda Radlett grows up in an eccentric upper-class family and spends her youth chasing the grand romance she has read about. Her cousin Fanny watches Linda move through marriages, affairs and wartime Paris, learning what love actually costs.
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.
On one summer day in 1935, a girl misreads what she sees and tells a lie that destroys two lives. Years later, as war looms, she tries to understand and atone for what she did. A novel about memory, guilt and the stories we tell to survive.
Start with “Doctor Zhivago”, “The Egyptian”, “I, Claudius”: they are the closest to “The Last of the Wine” 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 “The Last of the Wine” these are Ancient World, Coming of Age, Star-Crossed Lovers), 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 Silence of the Girls”, “A Thousand Ships”, “Lavinia”. Switch the “Modern” filter to keep only books from 2000 onward.
