Classics · Similar reads
Books like Père Goriot
The best books like Père Goriot are The Red and the Black, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and Germinal. Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac is about money and class, parental devotion, corruption and ambition. 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 Red and the Black
01
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 → - Les Liaisons Dangereuses
02
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Classics
Les Liaisons Dangereuses is an epistolary novel set in pre-Revolutionary French aristocratic society, built entirely from letters between its characters.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Germinal
03
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 → - Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
04
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.
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.
Both dig into disillusionment.
Read the summary → - Homage to Catalonia
06
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.
Both dig into disillusionment.
Read the summary → - The Magicians
07
Lev Grossman · Fantasy
The Magicians follows Quentin Coldwater, a brilliant and deeply unhappy teenager from Brooklyn, who discovers that Brakebills College — a secret school of magic — is real, and that the fantasy world he's been obsessed with since childhood, Fillory (a Narnia analogue), is also real.
Both dig into disillusionment.
Read the summary → - The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
08
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
John le Carré · Thriller
Alec Leamas is a burnt-out British intelligence officer who has just watched his last agent shot dead at the Berlin Wall.
Both dig into disillusionment.
Read the summary → - The Sun Also Rises
09
Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction
The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway's first novel, published in 1926, and it remains the sharpest portrait of the "Lost Generation" — the young Americans and British expatriates who drifted through Paris and Spain in the years after World War I, drinking heavily and searching for something they couldn't name.
Both dig into disillusionment.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
10
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
11
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
12
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 →
Books like Père Goriot: quick answers
What are the best books like Père Goriot?
The best books like Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac are The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Germinal by Émile Zola, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with Père Goriot, such as money and class, parental devotion, corruption and ambition.
What should I read after Père Goriot?
A natural next read after Père Goriot is The Red and the Black by Stendhal. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Germinal by Émile Zola, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.
What books are similar to Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac?
Père Goriot centers on money and class, parental devotion, corruption and ambition. Books with a similar feel include The Red and the Black by Stendhal, Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Germinal by Émile Zola, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
