Books like Possession
Two modern academics discover a cache of love letters between two Victorian poets and become entangled in a parallel romance of their own.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Possession
The French Lieutenant's Woman
A Victorian gentleman falls for a mysterious woman who walks the Lyme Regis shore, and the novel offers multiple endings to challenge the reader's assumptions about fate.
Angels & Insects
Two Victorian novellas: a naturalist back from the Amazon marries into a grand country family that resembles one of his ant colonies, and a circle of seance-goers tries to reach the dead friend of Tennyson's sister.
Galatea 2.2
A novelist trains a neural network to pass the Turing test using his own literary works, and the AI's emergence mirrors his own midlife dissolution.
The Gold Bug Variations
In 1957 a young geneticist tries to crack the genetic code, and in the 1980s a librarian and an art historian piece together his story, in a novel built on Bach's Goldberg Variations.
The Marriage Plot
At Brown in the early 1980s, Madeleine, an English major, is caught between Leonard, a brilliant, troubled biologist, and Mitchell, a religious-studies student who believes she is meant for him.
Asymmetry
Two stories that seem unconnected, a young editor's affair with a much older, famous writer and an Iraqi-American economist held at Heathrow airport, turn out to speak to each other.
Alias Grace
A servant girl in nineteenth-century Canada is convicted of double murder, and a doctor tries to determine whether she's a victim, a madwoman, or a killer.
Jane Eyre
A plain governess falls in love with her employer, only to discover his mansion hides a secret that makes their marriage impossible.
The Mill on the Floss
A young woman's passionate nature collides with provincial convention in mid-Victorian England, and the cost of being too much for your world is devastating.
Oscar and Lucinda
Oscar Hopkins, a nervous young Anglican priest with a gambling habit, and Lucinda Leplastrier, an Australian heiress who has bought a glassworks, meet on a ship bound for Sydney in the 1860s.
The Crow Road
Home for a funeral, student Prentice McHoan starts looking into the disappearance of his uncle Rory, a writer who vanished years before, in a novel that is part mystery, part family saga and part love letter to Argyll.
Far from the Madding Crowd
A shepherd, a soldier, and a gentleman farmer compete for a strong-willed woman in rural Wessex, and the pastoral landscape conceals real danger.