Historical fiction · Similar reads

Books like The Pillars of the Earth

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett is about power and corruption, faith and ambition, architecture and craft. If that's what drew you in, here are 6 books that share its DNA — each summarized on Superbook, and ready to chat with in the app.

  1. A Tale of Two Cities
    A Tale of Two Cities

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    A Tale of Two Cities

    Charles Dickens · Historical fiction

    A Tale of Two Cities is set against the French Revolution and follows three intertwined characters: Charles Darnay, a French aristocrat who has renounced his title and family legacy; Lucie Manette, the daughter of a man who spent eighteen years imprisoned in the Bastille; and Sydney Carton, a dissolute English lawyer who loves Lucie without hope and knows he will never be the man Darnay already is.

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  2. The Grapes of Wrath
    The Grapes of Wrath

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    The Grapes of Wrath

    John Steinbeck · Literary fiction

    The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's 1939 novel about the Joad family, Oklahoma sharecroppers forced off their land by the Dust Bowl and bank foreclosure, who load everything they own onto a truck and drive Route 66 to California in search of work and a decent life.

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  3. Bleak House
    Bleak House

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    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.

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  4. Great Expectations
    Great Expectations

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    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.

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  5. A Gentleman in Moscow
    A Gentleman in Moscow

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    A Gentleman in Moscow

    Amor Towles · Historical fiction

    In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced by a Bolshevik tribunal — not to death, but to permanent house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel.

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  6. A Thousand Splendid Suns
    A Thousand Splendid Suns

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    A Thousand Splendid Suns

    Khaled Hosseini · Historical fiction

    A Thousand Splendid Suns follows two Afghan women across nearly forty years of their country's turbulence: Mariam, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy merchant who is married off at fifteen to a much older man in Kabul, and Laila, a young woman from a different generation whose family is destroyed in a rocket strike during the civil war and who is subsequently forced into the same household.

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