Classics · Similar reads
Books like Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The best books like Les Liaisons Dangereuses are The Sorrows of Young Werther, The Red and the Black, and Siddhartha. Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos is about seduction as power, social performance, revenge and cruelty. If that's what drew you in, here are 12 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.
- The Sorrows of Young Werther
01
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Classics
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel — told almost entirely in letters from the protagonist to his friend Wilhelm — about a young man of artistic sensibility who falls devastatingly in love with a woman already promised to another.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - The Red and the Black
02
Stendhal · Classics
The Red and the Black follows Julien Sorel, the son of a provincial carpenter and the most self-consciously ambitious character in the French novel, as he attempts to rise through the social hierarchy of post-Napoleonic France by any means available to him.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Siddhartha
03
Hermann Hesse · Religion & Spirituality
Siddhartha is Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel of spiritual seeking, written at a time when Hesse was deeply studying Buddhist and Hindu texts.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - The Bell Jar
04
Sylvia Plath · Memoir
The Bell Jar is Sylvia Plath's only novel, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, one month before Plath's death.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
05
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.
Read the summary → - Candide
06
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.
Read the summary → - David Copperfield
07
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.
Read the summary → - Doctor Zhivago
08
Boris Pasternak · Classics
Doctor Zhivago is the novel Boris Pasternak spent much of his adult life writing and which the Soviet state refused to publish, leading to its smuggled publication in Italian in 1957.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Emma
09
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.
Read the summary → - Far from the Madding Crowd
10
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.
Read the summary → - Germinal
11
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.
Read the summary → - Great Expectations
12
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.
Read the summary →
Books like Les Liaisons Dangereuses: quick answers
What are the best books like Les Liaisons Dangereuses?
The best books like Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos are The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with Les Liaisons Dangereuses, such as seduction as power, social performance, revenge and cruelty.
What should I read after Les Liaisons Dangereuses?
A natural next read after Les Liaisons Dangereuses is The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
What books are similar to Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos?
Les Liaisons Dangereuses centers on seduction as power, social performance, revenge and cruelty. Books with a similar feel include The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Candide by Voltaire — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
