Recommendations
Books Like Les Misérables
Best books to read after Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is one of the greatest and most beloved novels in world literature — a vast social panorama of post-Napoleonic France organized around the redemption of Jean Valjean and the impossibility of Inspector Javert's moral rigidity. These recommendations extend the experience through Hugo's other major works and through ambitious social fiction about justice, redemption, and the poor.
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's 1831 novel about Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and the priest Frollo — the companion to Les Misérables in Hugo's fiction, equally passionate about social justice and equally organized around a figure of pure goodness (Esmeralda) destroyed by a corrupt world.
- 2Buy
A Tale of Two Cities
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's novel set during the French Revolution — the most direct British counterpart to Hugo's social passion. Sydney Carton's sacrifice at the guillotine is the closest thing in English fiction to Jean Valjean's moral transformation.
- 3Buy
The Count of Monte Cristo
by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's 1844 novel about Edmond Dantès, wrongly imprisoned and escaping to exact revenge — set in the same post-Napoleonic France as Les Misérables, equally epic in scale, and a natural companion for readers who want another enormous French novel.
- 4Buy
Crime and Punishment
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dostoevsky's novel about Raskolnikov's murder and its aftermath is the Russian counterpart to Hugo's French moral passion — both novels are organized around the question of what society does to individuals, and what individuals owe to redemption.
- 5Buy
Germinal
by Émile Zola
Zola's novel about a miners' strike is the naturalist successor to Hugo's social passion — less romantic and more documentary than Les Misérables, but sharing Hugo's commitment to the dignity of the working class and the injustice of the industrial system.
- 6Buy
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Eliot's vast Victorian novel about provincial English life shares Les Misérables's ambition (both novels are among the longest and most comprehensive in their respective literary traditions) and its interest in what people owe each other and what society costs its members.
- 7Buy
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy's great novel, with its comprehensive portrait of Russian society and its interest in sin, suffering, and social judgment, is the Russian companion to Les Misérables — both are mid-nineteenth century novels organized around a social outcast and the community's response to them.
- 8Buy
The Stranger
by Albert Camus
Camus's Meursault is tried for a crime he committed but condemned for emotional crimes that have nothing to do with the murder — a twentieth-century meditation on the gap between the judicial system and actual justice that is Les Misérables's compressed, existentialist counterpart.
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