Books like Oliver Twist

01

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.

02

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.

03

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.

04

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.

05

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.

06

A Darker Shade of Magic

V.E. Schwab · Fantasy

A Darker Shade of Magic is set across four parallel versions of London — Red, Grey, White, and the long-destroyed Black — each existing in the same location but separated by the barriers between worlds.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

07

Exit West

Mohsin Hamid · Literary fiction

Exit West follows Saeed and Nadia, two young people who meet and fall in love in an unnamed city beginning to fracture under the pressure of civil conflict.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

08

Little Fires Everywhere

Celeste Ng · Contemporary fiction

In Shaker Heights, Ohio — a meticulously planned, deliberately integrated suburb — two families collide.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

09

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · Historical fiction

Pachinko follows four generations of a Korean family from a small fishing village in early twentieth-century Korea to Osaka and Yokohama in postwar Japan.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

10

Part of Your World

Abby Jimenez · Romance

Part of Your World opens with Dr.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

11

The Long Call

Ann Cleeves · Mystery

The Long Call opens a new series from Ann Cleeves, best known for the Vera and Shetland books, set on the remote north Devon coast.

Both dig into identity and belonging.

12

The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie · Literary fiction

The Moor's Last Sigh is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby — the Moor — a man who ages at twice the normal rate and has only months to live.

Both dig into identity and belonging.