Classics · Similar reads
Books like The Red and the Black
The best books like The Red and the Black are Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Père Goriot, and The Sorrows of Young Werther. The Red and the Black by Stendhal is about ambition and class, hypocrisy and social performance, love and calculation. 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.
- Les Liaisons Dangereuses
01
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 → - Père Goriot
02
Honoré de Balzac · Classics
Père Goriot is the novel where Balzac's Human Comedy — his vast project of interlocking stories about French society — finds its moral and architectural center.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - The Sorrows of Young Werther
03
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Classics
The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel — told almost entirely in letters from the protagonist to his friend Wilhelm — about a young man of artistic sensibility who falls devastatingly in love with a woman already promised to another.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Siddhartha
04
Hermann Hesse · Religion & Spirituality
Siddhartha is Hermann Hesse's 1922 novel of spiritual seeking, written at a time when Hesse was deeply studying Buddhist and Hindu texts.
A kindred classics read.
Read the summary → - Bleak House
05
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
06
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
07
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 → - Doctor Zhivago
08
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 → - Emma
09
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
10
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
11
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 → - Great Expectations
12
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.
Read the summary →
Books like The Red and the Black: quick answers
What are the best books like The Red and the Black?
The best books like The Red and the Black by Stendhal are Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, plus 7 more below. Each was chosen for themes it shares with The Red and the Black, such as ambition and class, hypocrisy and social performance, love and calculation.
What should I read after The Red and the Black?
A natural next read after The Red and the Black is Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos. A kindred classics read. Other strong choices are Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse.
What books are similar to The Red and the Black by Stendhal?
The Red and the Black centers on ambition and class, hypocrisy and social performance, love and calculation. Books with a similar feel include Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Père Goriot by Honoré de Balzac, The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, Bleak House by Charles Dickens, Candide by Voltaire — all free to read and chat with on Superbook.
