Books like Doctor Zhivago

01

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov · Classics

The Master and Margarita is structured as a double narrative: one set in Moscow in the 1930s, where a figure named Woland (who is Satan) arrives with a retinue of demons and wreaks havoc on the Soviet literary and cultural establishment; and one set in Jerusalem around the time of the Crucifixion, where Pontius Pilate interrogates a wandering philosopher named Yeshua.

A kindred classics read.

02

The Gulag Archipelago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · History

The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental account of the Soviet forced-labor camp system.

A kindred classics read.

03

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi · Memoir

Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable.

A kindred classics read.

04

Homage to Catalonia

George Orwell · Memoir

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's firsthand account of fighting in the Spanish Civil War, which he joined in late 1936 as a volunteer with the POUM militia — a Trotskyist revolutionary organization that was later suppressed by the Soviet-backed Stalinist wing of the Republican forces.

A kindred classics read.

05

Station Eleven

Emily St. John Mandel · Literary fiction

Station Eleven begins with an actor dying of a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear in Toronto.

Both dig into art and survival.

06

Bleak House

Charles Dickens · Classics

Bleak House is organized around the interminable Chancery case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce — a legal dispute over a will that has been grinding through the Court of Chancery for decades, consuming the fortunes and lives of everyone attached to it.

A kindred classics read.

07

Candide

Voltaire · Classics

Candide is a young man raised in a Westphalian castle on the philosophy of his tutor Pangloss: that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

A kindred classics read.

08

David Copperfield

Charles Dickens · Classics

David Copperfield is the novel Dickens called his "favourite child" — a first-person bildungsroman that tracks David from a motherless childhood in Suffolk through blacking-factory misery (barely disguised autobiography), education, early work in London, two marriages, and eventual literary success.

A kindred classics read.

09

Emma

Jane Austen · Classics

Emma Woodhouse is handsome, clever, and rich, and she has been comfortable and a little bit wrong about things her entire life.

A kindred classics read.

10

Far from the Madding Crowd

Thomas Hardy · Classics

Far from the Madding Crowd is Thomas Hardy's breakthrough novel and remains his most accessible — the one with the strongest balance of romantic plot and pastoral beauty, where the landscape of Dorset feels like abundance rather than trap.

A kindred classics read.

11

Germinal

Émile Zola · Classics

Germinal is the thirteenth novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, and the one most readers consider his masterpiece.

A kindred classics read.

12

Great Expectations

Charles Dickens · Classics

Great Expectations follows Pip, an orphan boy on the Kent marshes who is yanked from modest obscurity into the orbit of wealth and social aspiration when an anonymous benefactor funds his move to London.

A kindred classics read.