Recommendations
Books Like Notre-Dame de Paris
Best books to read after Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo
Readers entranced by Hugo's medieval Paris, the triangle of Quasimodo, Esmeralda, and Frollo, and his architectural passion will find Hugo's other great novels and the tradition of French Romantic historical fiction he helped define.
- 1Buy
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's supreme novel — Jean Valjean's decades-long flight from Inspector Javert through post-Napoleonic France expands Notre-Dame's ambition to an urban epic; all of Hugo's characteristic powers — the architectural set-pieces, the digressions on history and society, the melodramatic plot, the sublime individual against the social machine — reach their fullest development here.
- 2Buy
The Man Who Laughs
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's most Gothic novel and the one closest in spirit to Notre-Dame — Gwynplaine, a disfigured street performer in seventeenth-century England, is Hugo's other great figure of the social outcast whose physical monstrosity conceals an exceptional moral beauty; the grotesque-sublime contrast that defines Quasimodo is the novel's central principle.
- 3Buy
Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
The companion medieval historical novel that Hugo directly competed with — Scott's 1819 novel about twelfth-century England under Richard I established the conventions of the historical romance that Hugo adapted for Notre-Dame; Ivanhoe's Rebecca, an outsider of exceptional beauty and nobility destroyed by social prejudice, is the direct precursor to Esmeralda.
- 4Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
The companion medieval Gothic novel in the tradition of architectural mystery — Eco's 1980 novel about a murder in a fourteenth-century Italian monastery is the most important modern descendant of Notre-Dame's medievalism; both novels use a specific medieval building as a symbolic world and a plot machine, and both are deeply concerned with the power of written knowledge.
- 5Buy
Salammbô
by Gustave Flaubert
The companion French Romantic historical novel set in an exotic past — Flaubert's 1862 novel about Carthage during the Mercenary War is the great anti-Hugo historical novel, written with the same archaeological passion for historical detail but stripped of Hugo's humanitarian sentiment; comparing the two books defines the fault line between Romantic and Realist aesthetics.
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The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
by Victor Hugo
The English translation title that made Quasimodo globally famous — the 1831 novel published in France as Notre-Dame de Paris but translated into English under a title that shifted the focus from Hugo's cathedral-as-protagonist to his most memorable character; reading both the French original title's architectural ambition and the English marketing choice reveals how the novel was received and transformed.
- 7Buy
Notre-Dame de Paris
by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Huysmans's 1908 non-fiction study of the cathedral as a medieval spiritual monument — written after his conversion to Catholicism, it responds to Hugo's materialist reading of the cathedral's architecture with a mystical one; together the two books, a novel and a theological essay, give the cathedral its fullest literary treatment.
- 8Buy
The Pillars of the Earth
by Ken Follett
The modern companion novel about a medieval cathedral's construction — Follett's 1989 novel follows the building of a cathedral in twelfth-century England through the lives of its architect, prior, and surrounding community; Notre-Dame is the great Romantic meditation on a completed cathedral, Pillars of the Earth the great popular novel about building one.
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