Books like The Bad Beginning
After a fire kills their parents, the three Baudelaire orphans are sent to live with their distant relative Count Olaf, an actor with designs on their fortune, in a narrator's warning against reading any further.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Bad Beginning
The BFG
Sophie, an orphan, is snatched from her bed by the Big Friendly Giant, who blows good dreams through children's windows at night, and together they set out to stop the other giants, who eat children.
Matilda
Matilda Wormwood, a girl genius who teaches herself to read by three, is ignored by her crooked parents and terrorised by her monstrous headmistress, until she discovers she can move things with her eyes.
The Mysterious Benedict Society
Four gifted children who answer a newspaper ad for puzzle-solvers are recruited by the eccentric Mr. Benedict and sent undercover into an island school where hidden messages are being broadcast into people's minds.
Uncle Silas
After her father's death, young Maud Ruthyn is sent to live as the ward of her uncle Silas, a reclusive man still shadowed by an old scandal, in his decaying house in Derbyshire.
Starling House
Opal, a broke young woman raising her brother in a dying Kentucky town, takes a job cleaning the strange old Starling House for its lone heir, and learns what the house is keeping in.
The Phantom Tollbooth
A bored American boy drives a toy tollbooth into a kingdom at war between the forces of Letters and Numbers and has to rescue two imprisoned princesses named Rhyme and Reason.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
A bored English girl follows a waistcoated rabbit down a hole into a world where logic is the joke and every adult she meets is a different kind of nonsense.
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
When his father Rashid, a storyteller in a sad city, loses his gift of the gab, Haroun travels to Kahani, the earth's second moon, to save the Sea of Stories from being poisoned.
Dr. No
A mathematics professor whose specialty is nothing is hired by a billionaire who wants to become a Bond villain and needs help stealing the nothing kept in Fort Knox.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
Twelve-year-old September, bored in Omaha, is carried off to Fairyland by the Green Wind and a Leopard, and soon finds herself on a quest against the tyrannical Marquess, with a library-loving dragon for company.
Coraline
Coraline finds a door in her new home that leads to another version of it, where her Other Mother has black button eyes, and everything is better, until the Other Mother decides to keep her.
The Graveyard Book
Nobody Owens, a boy raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his family is murdered, grows up learning the ways of the dead, while the man who killed his family is still looking for him.