Recommendations
Books Like Anna Karenina
What to read after Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1878) is one of the greatest novels in any language — two parallel stories, Anna and Vronsky's affair and Levin's search for meaning, each the most fully realized version of its kind in European literature. If you were drawn to its psychological depth, its moral seriousness, and the way it contains entire worlds, these novels will find you in the same place.
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War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's other great novel — four families across the Napoleonic Wars; longer and more epic than Anna Karenina and differently structured, but the same quality of social observation and the same capacity to make you feel that you are living alongside the characters rather than reading about them
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Doctor Zhivago
by Boris Pasternak
The great Russian novel of the twentieth century — Zhivago's love for Lara against the backdrop of the Revolution and Civil War; Pasternak is consciously writing in the tradition Tolstoy established, and Doctor Zhivago can be read as the twentieth-century Anna Karenina: a love story made impossible by forces larger than the lovers
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Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The greatest English novel of the same era as Anna Karenina — Dorothea Brooke in a provincial English town, and the way a community decides who is worth taking seriously; Eliot and Tolstoy are the two supreme nineteenth-century novelists of psychological and moral complexity, and readers who love one consistently find the other compelling
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Madame Bovary
by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary in a provincial French town — the foundational European novel of a woman destroyed by the gap between her expectations and her reality; Anna Karenina is partly in dialogue with Madame Bovary, which was published twenty years earlier; the two novels together define the nineteenth-century novel of the adulterous wife
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The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel — three brothers and the murder of their father; Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were contemporaries and rivals, the two poles of the nineteenth-century Russian novel; Anna Karenina readers who want more of the tradition often move between them
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Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A student in St. Petersburg who murders a pawnbroker and lives with the psychological consequences — Dostoevsky's most widely read novel and the best starting point for readers new to him; the companion to Anna Karenina in the tradition of the Russian novel of conscience
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A Gentleman in Moscow
by Amor Towles
Count Rostov under house arrest in the Metropol Hotel — the contemporary novel most fully in the tradition Tolstoy established: historical, character-driven, long, unhurried, and deeply interested in what it means to live well under constraint; Towles has cited Tolstoy as a formative influence
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The Portrait of a Lady
by Henry James
Isabel Archer, an American in Europe who makes a catastrophic marriage — Henry James is the American contemporary who was most directly in dialogue with Tolstoy and George Eliot; The Portrait of a Lady is James at his most Tolstoyan, before his late style became impenetrable
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