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Books like

Start with a book you loved. Find out what to read next.

Choose a familiar book, then decide what you want more of: the setting, the voice, the mood, the characters, or the ideas. Every recommendation comes with a plain explanation of why it belongs.

12 complete read-alike guides

All Books Like guides

Cover of A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

16 recommendations

Books like A Farewell to Arms

by Ernest Hemingway

A Farewell to Arms takes a war, a love affair, and an enormous amount of grief and writes about all three without making a show of any of them. Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley fall in love among hospitals, drinking, military retreats, rain, and death, trying to build a private life while the First World War keeps intruding on it. If you want more books with spare writing, restrained emotion, damaged people, doomed or difficult love, and war stripped of most of its heroics, start here.

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Cover of A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

8 recommendations

Books like A Moveable Feast

by Ernest Hemingway

A Moveable Feast makes 1920s Paris feel close enough to walk into: cold apartments, cheap wine, long afternoons in cafés, books borrowed because there was no money to buy them, and writers who had not yet become famous. If that is the world you want more of, these books return to it from different sides — through the people who were actually there, the fiction it produced, and the writers who came to Paris after Hemingway.

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Cover of Animal Farm by George Orwell

15 recommendations

Books like Animal Farm

by George Orwell

Animal Farm begins with a revolution that sounds almost impossible to argue with: the animals will throw out their human owner and build a fairer society for themselves. Then the pigs discover how useful power can be. Orwell turns propaganda, political betrayal, fear, and the rewriting of history into a story so simple that you can understand exactly what is happening even before the animals do. If you want more books about revolutions going wrong, authoritarian power, manipulated truth, and ordinary people discovering that equality can disappear one small compromise at a time, start here.

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Cover of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan

10 recommendations

Books like Bonjour Tristesse

by Françoise Sagan

Bonjour Tristesse puts a seventeen-year-old girl in a villa on the French Riviera with too much freedom, too much sun, and adults who are almost as irresponsible as she is. Cécile wants the summer to stay easy: swimming, flirting, drinking, and watching her charming father move from one woman to another. Then jealousy and boredom turn into something much more serious. If you want more of that mixture of youth, sex, beautiful places, emotional cruelty, and people behaving badly because they can, start here.

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Cover of Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

15 recommendations

Books like Giovanni's Room

by James Baldwin

Giovanni’s Room is a love story about wanting something badly and being terrified of what wanting it might mean. David is an American in Paris, caught between his relationship with Hella and his desire for Giovanni, while shame, masculinity, fear, and self-deception slowly make it impossible for him to simply choose the life he wants. If you want more books about queer desire, impossible love, identity, loneliness, and people hurting themselves by trying to become who they think they are supposed to be, start here.

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Cover of Journey to the End of the Night by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

8 recommendations

Books like Journey to the End of the Night

by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Nobody closes Journey wanting something similar — there is nothing similar. But there are books that carry pieces of it: the voice, the war, the night city, the laughter in the wound. Eight directions from the end of the night.

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Cover of Sexus by Henry Miller

20 recommendations

Books like Sexus

by Henry Miller

Sexus catches Henry Miller at the exact moment his respectable life begins to self-destruct. He is thirty-three, suffocating in a dead-end New York job, consumed by the conviction that he is meant to be a writer, and dangerously obsessed with Mona—a dance-hall hostess he drags into a toxic, consuming affair while his first marriage rots around him. Miller refuses to sanitize the wreckage for the reader. He lays bare the sex, the jealousy, the boredom, the vanity, and his own monstrous behavior with a manic, feral confidence. The prose swings violently from the gutter to the sublime, filthy one minute and breathtakingly lyrical the next. If you are looking for books where authors weaponize their own worst impulses, sexual obsessions, and desperate artistic hunger into high literature, start here.

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Cover of The Diary of a Drug Fiend by Aleister Crowley

16 recommendations

Books like The Diary of a Drug Fiend

by Aleister Crowley

The Diary of a Drug Fiend begins with champagne, cocaine, heroin, hotels, and two lovers convinced they have discovered a more intense way to live. Peter and Lou turn intoxication into part of their romance, and for a while the whole thing feels glamorous, private, and almost magical. Then pleasure starts becoming dependence. If you want more of that mixture of glamorous young people, European hotels and cafés, drugs that begin as ecstatic and liberating, sexual obsession, and the slide into dependence, madness, or spiritual crisis, start here.

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Cover of The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

17 recommendations

Books like The Sheltering Sky

by Paul Bowles

The Sheltering Sky follows three Americans traveling through North Africa as though getting farther from home might somehow change who they are. Port and Kit’s marriage is already fraying, and the deeper they move into the desert, the less protection they seem to have from loneliness, illness, desire, and chance. Bowles writes all of this in cool, beautiful prose that rarely tells you how to feel, which makes the sense of dread even stronger. If you want more books about alienated travelers, failing relationships, unfamiliar landscapes, existential unease, and people discovering that escape can become its own kind of trap, start here.

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Cover of The Stranger by Albert Camus

20 recommendations

Books like The Stranger

by Albert Camus

The Stranger follows a man through death, sex, work, heat, violence, and finally judgment without letting him respond in the ways everyone expects him to. Camus writes in clean, exact sentences and leaves enormous things unexplained, so the book feels emotionally cool even when something terrible is happening. If you want more books with exceptional prose, alienated characters, moral uncertainty, existential unease, and writing that trusts you to decide for yourself what any of it means, start here.

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Cover of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

8 recommendations

Books like The Sun Also Rises

by Ernest Hemingway

Readers often finish The Sun Also Rises wanting more of its world: expatriate Paris, drinking, damaged friendships, postwar disillusionment, and Hemingway’s spare way of writing about people who rarely say what they mean. These eight books each carry some part of that feeling forward.

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Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

10 recommendations

Books like Tropic of Cancer

by Henry Miller

Tropic of Cancer is about being broke, horny, hungry, angry, and determined to become a writer in Paris. Miller turns cheap rooms, borrowed meals, friendships, sex, humiliation, and long stretches of doing almost nothing into a book that feels completely alive. If you want more of that combination of autobiographical writing, bohemian life, poverty, transgression, and a narrator who refuses to behave himself, these are the books I’d read next.

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