Recommendations
Books Like The Way We Live Now
Best books to read after The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
The Way We Live Now is Trollope at his most Dickensian and his most modern — a satire of financial fraud, social corruption, and the willingness of every class of English society to overlook dishonesty when money is involved. If the novel's sweep and its portrait of a society that gets the fraudsters it deserves moved you, these books share its vision of money as the universal solvent of morality.
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Barchester Towers
by Anthony Trollope
The most beloved of Trollope's Barsetshire novels — the conflict between the new Bishop Proudie and the old guard over the appointment of a new Warden of Hiram's Hospital; the best entry point to Trollope's work and the novel that shows the comedic warmth of his ordinary mode, against which The Way We Live Now's satire reads all the darker
- 2Buy
Vanity Fair
by William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray's satirical panorama of English society through the careers of the scheming Becky Sharp and the virtuous Amelia Sedley — the predecessor that most directly anticipates The Way We Live Now in its portrait of how English society rewards the socially ambitious and overlooks dishonesty when it is performed with sufficient confidence
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Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's most ambitious social satire — the most direct Victorian parallel to The Way We Live Now in its scope, its panoramic range across social classes, and its portrait of an institution (the Court of Chancery) that consumes the fortunes and lives of those caught in it; where Trollope's satire is cool and ironic, Dickens's is passionate and theatrical
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The Financier
by Theodore Dreiser
Dreiser's portrait of the Philadelphia financier Frank Cowperwood — rising through business manipulation, insider trading, and political corruption — is the American novel that most directly parallels The Way We Live Now in its anatomy of financial fraud and its portrait of a society that celebrates the powerful enough to look away from how their power was acquired
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American Pastoral
by Philip Roth
Roth's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Swede, a successful Newark glove manufacturer, whose perfect American life is destroyed by historical forces he cannot comprehend — a late-twentieth-century version of the Trollopian question: what does the world you have built actually rest on, and what happens when it is taken away?
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
by Muriel Spark
Spark's satirical precision — a character observed at close quarters whose self-deceptions are exposed with complete clarity while the reader is simultaneously charmed by her — recalls Trollope's mode in The Way We Live Now; both novels depend on the reader's ability to see the truth that the character refuses to see
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The Eustace Diamonds
by Anthony Trollope
Trollope's most exciting and immediately accessible novel — the story of Lizzie Eustace, who claims the diamonds left by her dead husband are her personal property rather than part of his estate, and whose beautiful, intelligent, amoral career through English society is the most direct character-level parallel to Melmotte in The Way We Live Now: a person of uncertain virtue who charms everyone while they choose not to look too closely
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Other People's Money
by Justin Cartwright
Cartwright's contemporary novel about the collapse of a Cornish bank due to fraud — a direct heir to The Way We Live Now in its portrait of how a community's willingness to believe what it wants to believe enables financial fraud, and how the exposure of the fraud destroys the community's self-image along with its savings
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