Classics · Similar reads
Books like The Master and Margarita
The best books like The Master and Margarita are The Gulag Archipelago, Doctor Zhivago, and Homage to Catalonia. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov is about totalitarianism and creative freedom, cowardice and its consequences, devil as satirist. 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 Gulag Archipelago
01
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn · History
The Gulag Archipelago is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental account of the Soviet forced-labor camp system.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Doctor Zhivago
02
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 → - Homage to Catalonia
03
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.
Read the summary → - Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
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 classics read.
Read the summary → - Stardust
05
Neil Gaiman · Fantasy
Stardust begins with a simple bargain: young Tristran Thorn promises a girl he fancies that he will bring her a fallen star, and to find it he must cross the wall at the edge of his English village into Faerie.
Both dig into love and sacrifice.
Read the summary → - The Night Circus
06
Erin Morgenstern · Fantasy
Le Cirque des Rêves appears overnight, with no announcement — black and white striped tents that smell of caramel and bonfire smoke, open only after dark, filled with impossible things.
Both dig into love and sacrifice.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
07
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
08
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
09
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 → - 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 The Master and Margarita: quick answers
What are the best books like The Master and Margarita?
The best books like The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov are The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with The Master and Margarita, such as totalitarianism and creative freedom, cowardice and its consequences, devil as satirist.
What should I read after The Master and Margarita?
A natural next read after The Master and Margarita is The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi.
What books are similar to The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov?
The Master and Margarita centers on totalitarianism and creative freedom, cowardice and its consequences, devil as satirist. Books with a similar feel include The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
