Recommendations
Books Like The Count of Monte Cristo
Best books to read after The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo is the archetypal revenge narrative in Western literature — Edmond Dantès's fourteen-year imprisonment, escape, and methodical destruction of his betrayers is one of the most satisfying plots ever constructed. These recommendations extend the experience through Dumas's other works and through adventure and revenge fiction that shares its pleasures.
- 1Buy
The Three Musketeers
by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's 1844 adventure novel about d'Artagnan and the three musketeers — the companion to The Count of Monte Cristo in its swashbuckling energy, its pleasure in plot, and its effortless entertainment. Where Monte Cristo is about a man who is destroyed and rebuilds himself as an avenger, the musketeers are about comradeship, loyalty, and a young man's discovery of his own courage.
- 2Buy
The Man in the Iron Mask
by Alexandre Dumas
The concluding volume of the Vicomte de Bragelonne trilogy and the conclusion of the story of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan — set thirty years after The Three Musketeers and ending with the deaths of all four original musketeers. Essential reading for fans of Dumas.
- 3Buy
Les Misérables
by Victor Hugo
Hugo's great social novel shares the post-Napoleonic French setting of Monte Cristo and a comparable moral architecture — both Jean Valjean and Edmond Dantès are men who are unjustly imprisoned and who must decide what to do with their freedom. Hugo asks what redemption requires; Dumas asks what revenge requires.
- 4Buy
The Scarlet Pimpernel
by Baroness Orczy
Orczy's 1905 novel about the mysterious English nobleman who rescues French aristocrats from the guillotine — a direct descendant of the Monte Cristo tradition of the disguised hero who outwits his enemies and operates through mystery and surprise.
- 5Buy
Dumas on Food
by Alexandre Dumas
Dumas's Grand Dictionnaire de cuisine, published posthumously, reflects the same exuberant, comprehensive personality that animates his fiction — he knew as much about food as about adventure, and reading about Dumas the man enriches the experience of reading his novels.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's gothic thriller about a second wife haunted by her predecessor at Manderley shares Monte Cristo's obsessive, atmospheric quality and its interest in secrets, identity, and the past's power over the present. Gothic suspense as a descendant of Dumas's adventure tradition.
- 7Buy
The Name of the Rose
by Umberto Eco
Eco's 1980 medieval detective novel shares Monte Cristo's pleasure in elaborate plotting, secret knowledge, and the gradual revelation of a complex scheme. Both novels reward readers who enjoy the architecture of plot as much as the forward momentum of narrative.
- 8Buy
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
by Susanna Clarke
Clarke's 2004 fantasy novel about two English magicians in the Napoleonic era shares Monte Cristo's historical setting and its pleasure in an enormously long, elaborately plotted narrative with a satisfying architecture. Both books reward commitment with completeness.
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