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If you loved
Books like McTeague
A heavy, unsparing descent into the primal, greed-driven underbelly of human nature. These 12 books are the closest matches in mood, pace and themes, with what each one shares with McTeague.
- oppressive
- claustrophobic
- fatalistic
- grim
- desolate
- 01
John Barleycorn
Jack London · 1990
A rugged, unflinching memoir that wrestles with the romantic allure and existential devastation of addiction.
- 02
The brotherhood of the grape
John Fante
A boozy, tragicomic collision with the inescapable gravity of a stubborn, aging father and the chaotic warmth of family.
- 03
Wait until spring, Bandini
John Fante
A raw, freezing, and fiercely passionate portrait of a family tearing itself apart and clinging together in Depression-era America.
- 04
Mother
Maksim Gorky · 1987
A gritty, impassioned journey from suffocating despair to fierce revolutionary awakening in the heart of industrial Russia.
- 05
Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck · 1935
A boozy, sun-drenched mock-epic that elevates the lives of California outcasts into a bittersweet Arthurian tragedy.
- 06
Maggie, a girl of the streets
Stephen Crane · 1896
A bleak, unflinching plunge into the deterministic crush of the nineteenth-century slums.
- 07
Of Mice and Men & Cannery Row
John Stienbeck · 1947
A deeply human exploration of friendship, poverty, and the fragile dreams that sustain us in a harsh world.
- 08
The Winter of Our Discontent
John Steinbeck · 1961
A slow-burn psychological portrait of a good man rationalizing his way into moral bankruptcy.
- 09
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy · 1920
A lush, devastating portrait of a woman crushed by the relentless machinery of fate and social hypocrisy.
- 10
Predator's Gold (The Hungry City Chronicles)
Philip Reeve
A breathless, frostbitten chase across a frozen wasteland where survival means trusting the untrustworthy.
- 11
A Passionate Business
Stephanie James
A sparky, battle-of-wills romance where business arrangements collide with unexpected attraction.
- 12
The octopus, a story of California
Frank Norris · 1914
A sweeping, tragic epic where human lives are ground to dust beneath the unstoppable wheels of industrial greed and indifferent nature.
