Books like The Sun Also Rises

For the real Paris behind The Sun Also Rises

If what you loved about The Sun Also Rises was the feeling of being young, broke, drinking too much, and moving through cafés with other writers in 1920s Paris, A Moveable Feast is the obvious next read. It is memoir rather than fiction, but it brings you into the real world behind the novel—the bars, friendships, rivalries, meals, and people Hemingway knew when that whole literary scene was still happening.

For Hemingway’s other great story of love after war

This is closest if what you liked was Hemingway’s stripped-down style and the way he writes about love without becoming sentimental. A Farewell to Arms replaces the cafés and bullfights with war and a much more serious romance, but it has the same emotional restraint, damaged characters, drinking, and sense that happiness can disappear very quickly.

For expatriate Paris after the money ran out

If you liked the wandering, drinking, sex, and expatriate Paris of The Sun Also Rises, Tropic of Cancer takes that world and makes it much dirtier and more chaotic. Miller’s Paris is poorer, stranger, more sexual, and less polished than Hemingway’s, but both books are fascinated by outsiders living freely in Europe and trying to make a life out of very little.

For the same postwar disgust at full volume

This is a much darker and more bitter book, but it shares The Sun Also Rises’ fascination with disillusioned people trying to keep moving after the First World War. Céline’s narrator travels through war, Africa, America, and Paris with almost no faith left in society, and if you liked the wounded, cynical mood underneath Hemingway’s parties and drinking, this pushes that feeling much further.

For the stories that led directly to The Sun Also Rises

This is one of the best choices if what you liked was the actual writing style of The Sun Also Rises. The stories are short, spare, and often about war, drinking, violence, relationships, and people who cannot quite say what they are feeling. You can see Hemingway developing the same voice and emotional understatement that he would use in The Sun Also Rises a year later.

For Hemingway’s same restraint in a very different story

This is less similar in setting and plot, but very similar in Hemingway’s way of writing about endurance, pride, failure, and dignity without overexplaining any of it. If what stayed with you from The Sun Also Rises was the quiet sadness underneath the simple sentences, The Old Man and the Sea gives you that same emotional restraint in a much smaller, more concentrated story.

For the Lost Generation’s epitaph

This is the most unusual recommendation on the list, but it makes sense if you were drawn to The Sun Also Rises as a book about the generation damaged by the First World War. Pound’s poem is fragmented, bitter, modernist, and deeply suspicious of the culture that sent young men to war, so it gives you another version of the same postwar disillusionment Hemingway turned into fiction.

For Paris as a fever dream

If what you liked was the restless, autobiographical feeling of people moving through cities, memories, sex, poverty, and artistic life, Black Spring is a good next step. It is much more experimental and dreamlike than The Sun Also Rises, but it has the same attraction to bohemian life and the feeling of a writer turning his own experiences, friendships, and surroundings into literature.