Recommendations
Books Like Les Misérables
Best books to read after Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Les Misérables is Hugo's argument that poverty, injustice, and the law as it is — not as it should be — create the misery they claim to address. These books extend the conversation into the wider Hugo canon, the tradition of French social fiction, and the literature of social justice and human dignity in extremity.
- 1Buy
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
The mirror novel — where Valjean is imprisoned and returns to build virtue, Dantès is imprisoned and returns to take revenge. The two great French prison novels of the 19th century, which read together illuminate the full moral range of their moment.
- 2Buy
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's earlier masterpiece — set in 15th-century Paris around the cathedral, telling the story of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and the archdeacon Frollo. The Gothic complement to Les Misérables.
- 3Buy
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's novel of guilt, law, and redemption — the Russian counterpart to Les Misérables: a young man who commits a murder and is brought to confession and redemption through the same combination of psychological torment and human grace.
- 4Buy
The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the Dust Bowl migration — the American equivalent of Les Misérables in its portrait of a class of people stripped of everything and in its indictment of the systems that stripped them.
- 5Buy
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's French Revolution novel — 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.' Written in the same decade as Les Misérables and dealing with the same French historical catastrophe, but from the English perspective.
- 6Buy
Germinal
by Émile Zola
Zola's novel of a coal mining strike in northern France — the naturalist successor to Hugo's social fiction: the same France, the same poverty, the same systemic indictment, but without Hugo's romanticism.
- 7Buy
North and South
by Elizabeth Gaskell
Gaskell's Victorian novel of a southern woman who moves to a northern industrial town and discovers the conditions of working-class life — the British social novel that most directly parallels Hugo's indictment of poverty's causes.
- 8Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
George Eliot's panoramic novel of provincial English life — the greatest 19th-century novel in the tradition of moral seriousness and social critique that Hugo represents in France.
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