Books like Arcadia by Jim Crace

In an elite New England college, a charismatic classics professor lures a group of eccentric students into obsessive study, leading them from intellectual curiosity to corruption, betrayal, and ultimately murder.

A lyrical saga that follows fifteen‑year‑old Holly Sykes, a psychic teenager who awakens a network of mystical forces and secret societies, while her family's lives intertwine across continents and centuries amid a hidden war between mystics and their enemies.

Set in the 1830s Midlands, George Eliot’s Middlemarch intertwines village life, politics, and the struggles of its characters to explore social reform, gender roles, and community hypocrisy.

Alma Singer, a fourteen‑year‑old New Yorker, searches for a book that might cure her mother’s loneliness, while Leo Gursky, an immigrant in the city, hunts the hidden author of a novel that once inspired his love in Polish exile.

Sinclair Lewis’s classic satire follows George F. Babbitt, a successful Midwestern real‑estate agent whose pursuit of social conformity leads to an existential crisis.

A satirical exploration of American capitalism and political corruption through the experiences of a businessman in Atlanta.

Sinclair Lewis’s classic novel follows Carol Kennicott as she adjusts to the conformity of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, exposing the commercialism and decline of individual freedom in 1920s America.

In 1970s western New York a group of idealists establish the Arcadia commune, a utopian experiment that rises and falls as its members, led by the charismatic Handy, navigate love, family, and the promise of a world beyond the decaying mansion.

Martin Dressler traces the rise of a young entrepreneur from a cigar shop to creating the Grand Cosmo, a grandiose amusement park that embodies both the ambition and madness of the American Dream.

Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son follows the proud industrialist Paul Dombey and his family, exposing how commercial ambition can corrupt personal bonds while hinting at redemption through love.

A series of stories set in Avonlea, focusing on characters and events in a small Canadian town, suitable for young adults or children, including tales of Aunt Cynthia, and featuring characters like David Spencer and Miss Emily.

Over five novels and two collections of stories Tessa Hadley has earned a reputation as a fiction writer of remarkable gifts, and been compared with Elizabeth Bowen and Alice Munro. In her new novel three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past - their mother took them there when she left their father - but now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic surface, there are tensions. Roland has come with his new wife and his sisters don't like her. Kasim, the twenty-year-old son of Alice's ex-boyfriend, makes plans to seduce Molly, Roland's teenage daughter. Fran's children uncover an ugly secret in a ruined cottage in the woods. Passion erupts where it's least expected, blasting the quiet self-possession of Harriet, the oldest sister. A way of life - bourgeois, literate, ritualised - winds down to its inevitable end. With uncanny precision and extraordinary sympathy, Tessa Hadley charts the squalls of lust and envy disrupting this ill-assorted house party, as well as the consolations of memory and affection, the beauty of the natural world, the shifting of history under the social surface. From the first page the reader is absorbed and enthralled, watching a superb craftsman at work --

In post‑Soviet Moscow, former bureaucrat Max Borodin balances wealth, family, and rival mafias while manipulating truth to further his business empire.

In 1928, Nora Hartley and Lark Marin build a bohemian haven on Cape Cod’s Truro, inviting friends into their "True House" and navigating the joys and brutal realities of 15 years of community life.