Books like Les Misérables

01

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

Victor Hugo · Classics

Set in Paris in 1482, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame centers on Quasimodo — deaf, disfigured, and wholly devoted to the cathedral that is his home — and Esmeralda, a young Romani street dancer whose beauty ignites obsession in several men simultaneously: Claude Frollo, the archdeacon who raised Quasimodo and whose repressed religious fervor curdles into predatory lust; Phoebus, the vain soldier who uses Esmeralda without feeling anything for her; and Quasimodo himself, who loves her with a wordless ferocity she cannot fully see.

02

All Quiet on the Western Front

Erich Maria Remarque · History

All Quiet on the Western Front follows Paul Bäumer, a young German soldier who enlists with his classmates during the First World War after being swept up in patriotic speeches.

03

The Diary of a Young Girl

Anne Frank · Memoir

Anne Frank's diary, kept during the two years she spent hiding with her family in a concealed Amsterdam apartment, stands as one of the most widely read first-person accounts of the Holocaust.

04

Night

Elie Wiesel · Memoir

Night is Elie Wiesel's account of his deportation from the Transylvanian town of Sighet in 1944 and his survival of Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps.

05

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari · History

Sapiens traces the full arc of human history from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa roughly 70,000 years ago to the present.

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.