Classics · Similar reads
Books like Madame Bovary
The best books like Madame Bovary are The Great Gatsby, The Bell Jar, and Steppenwolf. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert is about romantic illusion vs. reality, bourgeois mediocrity, female desire and constraint. 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 Great Gatsby
01
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Classics
The Great Gatsby is narrated by Nick Carraway, a young Midwesterner who moves to Long Island in the summer of 1922 and finds himself adjacent to the fabulous, mysterious parties of his neighbor Jay Gatsby.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - The Bell Jar
02
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 → - Steppenwolf
03
Hermann Hesse · Philosophy
Steppenwolf is Hermann Hesse's most psychologically intense and formally inventive novel, published in 1927 at a time of personal crisis.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - The Stranger
04
Albert Camus · Literary fiction
Meursault is a French Algerian clerk who, over a few days following his mother's funeral, takes a girlfriend, shoots an Arab man on a beach for no clearly articulable reason, and is tried and sentenced to death.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - All Quiet on the Western Front
05
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.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
06
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
07
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
08
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
09
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
10
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
11
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
12
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 →
Books like Madame Bovary: quick answers
What are the best books like Madame Bovary?
The best books like Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert are The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Stranger by Albert Camus, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with Madame Bovary, such as romantic illusion vs. reality, bourgeois mediocrity, female desire and constraint.
What should I read after Madame Bovary?
A natural next read after Madame Bovary is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Stranger by Albert Camus.
What books are similar to Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert?
Madame Bovary centers on romantic illusion vs. reality, bourgeois mediocrity, female desire and constraint. Books with a similar feel include The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, The Stranger by Albert Camus, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Bleak House by Charles Dickens — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
