Books like Don Quixote
An ageing knight and his squire ride across Spain tilting at windmills, and the line between madness and idealism dissolves into the first modern novel.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Don Quixote
Candide
Candide, a naive young man taught that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is thrown out into a world of war, earthquake and cruelty that tests his optimism to destruction.
Dead Souls
A swindler travels through provincial Russia buying up the ownership papers of dead serfs, and the scheme exposes the absurdity and corruption of the entire system.
The Good Soldier Švejk
Josef Švejk, a dealer in stolen dogs in Prague and possibly an idiot, is called up when the First World War begins, and goes through the Austro-Hungarian army causing chaos.
The Hive
A few days in Madrid in 1943, through some three hundred people whose lives cross in and around Doña Rosa's café.
I Am a Cat
A nameless cat belonging to a Tokyo schoolteacher observes his owner and his owner's Meiji-era circle of scholars, businessmen and gossips with the cool contempt of his species.
The Elephant's Journey
A sixteenth-century Portuguese king transports an elephant from Lisbon to Vienna, and the absurd journey becomes a parable about power, spectacle, and the dignity of beasts.
Leo Africanus
Hasan al-Wazzan, born in Granada before its fall, tells his life: exile to Fez, travels through Africa, capture by pirates and a new life in Rome under the protection of the Pope.
Gulliver's Travels
Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon, visits four strange lands, of tiny people, giants, floating philosophers and wise horses, and each satire cuts closer to the bone of human nature.
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas
A dead man narrates his own life from the grave, skewering nineteenth-century Brazilian society with a wit that anticipates magical realism by a century.
Tom Jones
A foundling in eighteenth-century England careers through adventures, amorous encounters, and moral tests on his way to discovering his true parentage and winning the woman he loves.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A boy and an escaped slave raft down the Mississippi River, and the journey through antebellum America becomes a moral education in empathy, freedom, and the lies of 'civilised' society.
Colas Breugnon
A year in the life of Colas Breugnon, a fifty-year-old carpenter and wine-lover of Clamecy in Burgundy in the early 1600s, who tells his story through war, plague and family with unshakeable good humour.