Books like The Death of Ivan Ilyich
A successful judge confronted by his own mortality realises that his entire life has been a lie, and the novella's forty pages contain a complete philosophy of dying.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Notes from Underground
A bitter clerk in St. Petersburg writes a confession that swings between self-loathing and grandiosity, inventing the template for every unreliable narrator who followed.
The Kreutzer Sonata
On a train across Russia a grey man tells a stranger how he came to murder his wife, and implicates marriage, music, and middle-class Christianity in what he did.
Hadji Murád
An Avar commander who has fought for the rebel imam Shamil defects to the Russians in 1851 to save his family, and finds himself trusted by neither side.
The Overcoat
A lowly clerk in St. Petersburg has his overcoat stolen, and the bureaucracy's indifference to his suffering turns a comic story into a ghost story and a scream of protest.
Leaf Storm
In Macondo in 1928, a retired colonel insists on burying a doctor who has hanged himself, a man the whole town hated, while his daughter and small grandson keep vigil beside the coffin.
Nausea
A philosopher in 1930s France discovers that the sheer existence of objects fills him with revulsion, and his diary charts the horror of a world without meaning.
The Fall
A man in an Amsterdam bar confesses to a stranger, and his monologue reveals a life of moral failure, self-deception, and the impossibility of escaping judgment.
A Happy Death
Patrice Mersault, an Algiers shipping clerk, kills a rich, crippled man and takes his money, then sets out to buy the time to be happy.
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student in St. Petersburg murders a pawnbroker and is slowly consumed by guilt, paranoia, and a detective who knows exactly what he did.
Samskara
When Naranappa, a Brahmin who broke every rule, dies in a south Indian village, the other Brahmins can't decide who should perform his last rites, and Praneshacharya, the most learned of them, faces his own crisis.
The Age of Reason
Over two days in Paris in the summer of 1938, Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher who prizes his freedom above everything, tries to raise the money for his mistress's abortion.
The Tartar Steppe
A young Italian officer is posted to a remote fortress on the edge of a desert where the enemy has been expected for a century, and he learns how to wait.