Books like The Age of Innocence

01

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James · Literary fiction

Isabel Archer is an intelligent, independent young American woman who arrives in Europe convinced that she wants nothing more than to be free — free from convention, from the pressure to marry, from the enclosures that other women seem to accept without complaint.

A kindred literary fiction read.

02

Ethan Frome

Edith Wharton · Literary fiction

Ethan Frome is a New England farmer locked into a joyless marriage with his sickly, complaining wife Zeena when her young cousin Mattie Silver comes to help with the household.

A kindred literary fiction read.

03

A Moveable Feast

Ernest Hemingway · Memoir

A Moveable Feast is Hemingway's posthumously published account of his years in Paris during the 1920s, when he and his first wife Hadley lived cheaply in Montparnasse while he apprenticed himself to the work of becoming a writer.

A kindred literary fiction read.

04

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Azar Nafisi · Memoir

Azar Nafisi spent years teaching literature at universities in Tehran before the restrictions on what she could teach — and who she could teach — became intolerable.

A kindred literary fiction read.

05

Farewell, My Lovely

Raymond Chandler · Thriller

Philip Marlowe witnesses a giant ex-convict named Moose Malloy walk into a Black jazz club that has changed since Malloy was last free, and inadvertently watches him commit murder in search of a woman named Velma who has vanished from his life.

Both dig into nostalgia and loss.

06

A Farewell to Arms

Ernest Hemingway · Literary fiction

A Farewell to Arms is set during the First World War in northern Italy and follows Frederic Henry, an American serving as a lieutenant in the Italian ambulance corps, who falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse.

A kindred literary fiction read.

07

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry · Literary fiction

A Fine Balance is set in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of 1975–1977, a period of suspended democracy, forced sterilization, and slum clearances that is barely taught in the West and barely taught in India.

A kindred literary fiction read.

08

A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara · Literary fiction

A Little Life follows four men from college into middle age and beyond — Willem, an actor; JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; and Jude, a lawyer with a past that is revealed in increasingly devastating detail as the novel progresses.

A kindred literary fiction read.

09

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

James Joyce · Literary fiction

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man traces the intellectual and spiritual development of Stephen Dedalus from early childhood to the edge of adulthood, when he leaves Ireland to pursue life as an artist.

A kindred literary fiction read.

10

A Thousand Acres

Jane Smiley · Literary fiction

A Thousand Acres retells King Lear on a thousand-acre Iowa farm in the 1970s.

A kindred literary fiction read.

11

A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan · Literary fiction

A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told in thirteen chapters, each from a different point of view and sometimes in a radically different form — including one chapter composed entirely as a PowerPoint presentation.

A kindred literary fiction read.

12

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain · Literary fiction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn begins where Tom Sawyer left off — Huck Finn, the outcast son of the town drunk, has been taken in and given a respectable life he doesn't want.

A kindred literary fiction read.