Books like Moby-Dick
A whaling captain's monomaniacal hunt for a white whale becomes an epic meditation on obsession, nature, and the limits of human will.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Moby-Dick
Middle Passage
In 1830 Rutherford Calhoun, a freed slave and petty thief in New Orleans, stows away on a ship to escape a forced marriage, and finds it is a slaver bound for Africa.
Lord Jim
Jim, a young officer, jumps from the Patna when he believes it is sinking with eight hundred pilgrims aboard, and spends the rest of his life trying to redeem that moment.
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Blue van Meer, a precocious teenager who has spent her life moving between college towns with her father, a charismatic professor, enrols for her senior year at a North Carolina school and falls in with a clique of students devoted to a magnetic film-studies teacher.
Cloud Atlas
Six nested stories spanning centuries, from a nineteenth-century Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic future and back again, reveal how lives echo across time.
Sea of Poppies
A young Indian woman is torn from her family by the opium trade and cast onto a ship bound for Mauritius, in the first volume of an epic trilogy.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
A French professor and two companions become the prisoners and guests of Captain Nemo aboard his submarine, the Nautilus, on a voyage through the wonders and terrors of the world's oceans.
The Vivisector
Hurtle Duffield, sold as a small boy by his poor parents to a rich Sydney family, grows up to become a painter who will use everyone he loves as material.
The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
Riobaldo, an old rancher, tells a visitor about his years as a hired gunman in the backlands of Brazil, his pact with the devil and his love for his comrade Diadorim.
The Infatuations
María Dolz, an editor at a Madrid publishing house, has watched a happy couple at her café every morning, until she reads that the husband has been stabbed to death in the street, and she befriends his widow.
The Sea, the Sea
Charles Arrowby, a celebrated theatre director, retires to a house on the rocks by the sea to write his memoirs, and there meets Hartley, the girl he loved as a boy, now an unremarkable married woman in the village.
War and Peace
Five aristocratic families navigate love, ambition, and survival as Napoleon's invasion of Russia reshapes the world around them.
Life of Pi
When the ship carrying his family's zoo sinks, sixteen-year-old Pi Patel is left adrift in the Pacific on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker, and has to find a way to survive with him.