Recommendations
Books Like Dream of the Red Chamber
Best books to read after Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
If the grand world of Dream of the Red Chamber absorbed you, these picks span the other great classical Chinese novels, the modern Chinese fiction that builds on the tradition, and the novels that share its scope and encyclopedic ambition.
- 1Buy
Journey to the West
by Wu Cheng'en
One of the four great classical novels — the Monkey King's pilgrimage, comic and metaphysical and inexhaustible.
- 2Buy
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
by Luo Guanzhong
The military and political epic of the Three Kingdoms period — the most historically grounded of the four classical novels.
- 3Buy
Water Margin
by Shi Nai'an
The outlaw epic — 108 heroes at Mount Liang, the Chinese Robin Hood narrative of brotherhood and rebellion.
- 4Buy
Border Town
by Shen Congwen
The most lyrical short novel of modern Chinese literature — a pastoral elegy for a disappearing river culture.
- 5Buy
To Live
by Yu Hua
The great modern Chinese novel of loss — forty years of history through one man's unadorned testimony.
- 6Buy
Soul Mountain
by Gao Xingjian
The Nobel laureate's unique journey through the Chinese interior — folk myth, inner monologue, and landscape.
- 7Buy
Red Sorghum
by Mo Yan
Mo Yan's Nobel-winning mythic saga of Shandong province — the modern Chinese novel of violence, memory, and landscape.
- 8Buy
The Story of the Stone (5 vols)
by Cao Xueqin / Gao E
The complete Hawkes/Minford translation — for readers who want the full unabridged text of the great novel.
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