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Recommendations based on The Old Curiosity Shopby Charles Dickens
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Nicholas Nickleby
by Charles Dickens
Exploring themes of morality and justice through the story of a young man and his family.
Nicholas Nickleby's father dies unexpectedly after losing all of his money in a poor investment. Nicholas, his mother and his younger sister, Kate, are forced to give up their comfortable lifestyle ... (Wikipedia)
Bleak House
by Charles Dickens
A social commentary on the English legal system, exploring themes of inequality, injustice and corruption.
Bleak House opens in the twilight of foggy London, where fog grips the city most densely in the Court of Chancery. The obscure case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, in which an inheritance is gradually ... (Goodreads)
The Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Witty comedy of misadventures of a group of travelers in 19th century England.
Few first novels have created as much popular excitement as The Pickwick Papers –-a comic masterpiece that catapulted its 24-year-old author to immediate fame. Readers were captivated by the ... (Goodreads)
Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
A young woman's journey of self-discovery, navigating the complexities of high society.
Seventeen-year-old Catherine Morland is one of ten children of a country clergyman. Although a tomboy in her childhood, by the age of 17 she is "in training for a heroine" and is excessively fond of ... (Wikipedia)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
by Thomas Hardy
A young woman's struggles against societal expectations, and her journey of resilience and self-realization.
Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780141439594 . When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting ... (Goodreads)
The Moonstone
by Wilkie Collins
A mystery novel, unraveling the secrets of an ancient Indian diamond.
Colonel Herncastle, an unpleasant former soldier, brings the Moonstone back with him from India where he acquired it by theft and murder during the Siege of Seringapatam . Angry at his family, who ... (Wikipedia)
East of Eden
by John Steinbeck
Exploration of the timeless struggle between good and evil, set against a backdrop of a family saga.
In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas ... (Goodreads)
Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy
A tale of struggle and sorrow for a poor, uneducated man amid the rigid conventions of Victorian England.
The novel tells the story of Jude Fawley, who lives in a village in southern England (part of Hardy's fictional county of Wessex ), who yearns to be a scholar at "Christminster", a city modelled on ... (Wikipedia)
The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
A romantic drama set in the high society of 19th century New York, exploring the limits of love and longing.
Newland Archer, gentleman lawyer and heir to one of New York City's most illustrious families, happily anticipates his highly desirable marriage to the sheltered and beautiful May Welland. Yet he ... (Wikipedia)
My Name Is Asher Lev
by Chaim Potok
A young boy's struggles to reconcile his faith and identity as a budding artist.
Asher Lev is a boy with a prodigious artistic ability born into a Hasidic Jewish family. During his childhood in the 1950s, in the time of Joseph Stalin and the persecution of Jews and religious ... (Wikipedia)
Women in Love
by D.H. Lawrence
Two sisters explore their innermost desires as they search for true love and self-fulfillment.
Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen are sisters living in The Midlands in England in the 1910s. Ursula is a schoolteacher, Gudrun a painter. They meet two men who live nearby, school inspector Rupert Birkin ... (Wikipedia)
The Winter's Tale
by William Shakespeare
A family drama of reconciliation and redemption, unfolding across time and continents.
You can find an alternative cover for this ISBN, here,. The New Cambridge Shakespeare appeals to students worldwide for its up-to-date scholarship and emphasis on performance. The series features ... (Goodreads)
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins
A thrilling mystery of secrets and hidden identities, with a hero on a quest for the truth.
Walter Hartright, a young art teacher, encounters and gives directions to a mysterious and distressed woman dressed entirely in white, lost in London; he is later informed by policemen that she has ... (Wikipedia)
The Return of the Native
by Thomas Hardy
A story of a man's ill-fated love, set against the wild landscape of rural England.
The novel takes place entirely in the environs of Egdon Heath , and, with the exception of the epilogue, Aftercourses , covers exactly a year and a day. The narrative begins on the evening of Guy ... (Wikipedia)
The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien
Epic saga of the history of Middle-Earth, a world filled with mythical creatures.
The Silmarillion is an account of the Elder Days, of the First Age of Tolkien’s world. It is the ancient drama to which the characters in The Lord of the Rings look back, and in whose events some of ... (Goodreads)
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
Epic tale of war, peace, and love, focusing on the lives of five aristocratic families.
The novel begins in July 1805 in Saint Petersburg , at a soirée given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer—the maid of honour and confidante to the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna . Many of the main characters ... (Wikipedia)
Cold Comfort Farm
by Stella Gibbons
A young woman moves to the countryside to bring order to the chaotic lives of her relatives.
Following the death of her parents, the book's heroine, Flora Poste, finds she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She decides to take advantage of the fact ... (Wikipedia)
The Faerie Queene
by Edmund Spenser
A classic tale of heroism, courage, and love in a mythical kingdom.
The Faerie Queene was the first epic in English and one of the most influential poems in the language for later poets from Milton to Tennyson. Dedicating his work to Elizabeth I, Spenser brilliantly ... (Goodreads)
The Brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A philosophical exploration of morality, faith, and family dynamics among a group of brothers.
The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich ... (Goodreads)
Ivanhoe
by Walter Scott
An epic tale of chivalry, heroism and romance set in 12th century England.
For this novel, Scott moved far away from the setting of his own turbulent time. He went back to the late 12th century, and to England rather than the Scottish settings of all his previous novels. He ... (Goodreads)
Lady Chatterley's Lover
by D.H. Lawrence
A working-class man's affair with an aristocratic woman, and their coming to terms with the strictures of society.
Lawrence's frank portrayal of an extramarital affair and the explicit sexual explorations of its central characters caused this controversial book, now considered a masterpiece, to be banned as ... (Goodreads)
Howards End
by E.M. Forster
Exploration of the societal divides in early 20th century England, and the consequences of class prejudice.
Howards End is a novel by E. M. Forster about social conventions, codes of conduct and relationships in turn-of-the-century England. A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the ... (Goodreads)
Silas Marner
by George Eliot
A tale of redemption and a search for a lost love, set in a rural English village.
The novel is set in the early years of the 19th century. Silas Marner, a weaver, is a member of a small Calvinist congregation in Lantern Yard, a slum street in Northern England . He is falsely ... (Wikipedia)
Villette
by Charlotte Brontë
A young woman's journey of self-discovery in a foreign land, overcoming societal constraints.
Villette begins with its famously passive protagonist, Lucy Snowe, age 14, staying at the home of her godmother Mrs. Bretton in "the clean and ancient town of Bretton", in England. Also in residence ... (Wikipedia)
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
by Anne Brontë
An exploration of 19th-century gender roles, revealing a woman's struggle for independence.
The novel is divided into three volumes. Part One (Chapters 1 to 15): Gilbert Markham narrates how a mysterious widow, Mrs Helen Graham, arrives at Wildfell Hall, a nearby mansion. A source of ... (Wikipedia)
The Magus
by John Fowles
A man's search for truth, enlightenment and freedom amid a web of deception.
The story reflects the perspective of Nicholas Urfe, a young Oxford graduate and aspiring poet. After graduation, he briefly works as a teacher at a small school, but becomes bored and decides to ... (Wikipedia)
Lady Audley's Secret
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
A young woman's descent into madness, unraveling the secrets of her past.
The novel opens with the marriage in June 1857, of Lucy Graham, a beautiful, childlike blonde who enchants almost all who meet her, to Sir Michael Audley, a middle-aged, rich, and kind widower. Lucy ... (Wikipedia)
A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare
Comedy of mistaken identities, love and dreams set in a mythical forest.
The play consists of four interconnecting plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen, Hippolyta , which are set simultaneously in the woodland and ... (Wikipedia)
The Rape of the Lock
by Alexander Pope
A satirical poem that humorously describes the trivial event of a young woman having a lock of hair cut off.
A satirical poem that intentionally over-dramatizes an incident in which a lock of a woman's hair is cut without her permission. ... (Goodreads)
