87 Books Like Dombey and Son

This book gripped me from the opening page. It’s everything I usually avoid—comics, suspense, memoir, psychology article—but the way it's calibrated invited me in, then wouldn’t let me leave until I’d lapped up every detail. By setting up her childhood review as a mystery that has to be solved through visual exploration, Alison Bechdel justifies every choice she makes. And they are all correct.

With deadpan humor and wry drawings, Fun Home gave me a thickly layered exploration of how queer elements impacted generations of her family. It never felt navel-gazing, and I found it impossible to imagine the story told any other way than in a graphics.

Hester, which came out in 1883, follows two central figures: Miss Catherine, an older woman who runs a bank – in itself quite a surprise to find in a Victorian novel – and Hester, her young relation, who is bored with her dull, ladylike life and wants something more.

What she really wants is to work, as Catherine does, but Catherine is determined that the bank will pass to a man. The novel focuses on their strained relationship – strained partly because they are so very alike. There’s so much I love about Hester, but I especially enjoy how it undermines and undercuts Victorian tropes about the novel and what is and isn’t a happy ending for a female character. It’s an absolutely fascinating read.

Published in 1848, The Half Sisters is the story of two sisters, Alice and Bianca, who grow up without knowing of the other’s existence.

Alice is middle-class, legitimate, and respectable, and goes on to have the life Victorian women were meant to have – namely, marriage. She is also bored and unhappy. Meanwhile, her sister Bianca, who is working-class, illegitimate, and definitively not respectable, chooses a different path.

Keen to make a career for herself, she becomes an actress, and throughout the novel passionately defends women’s right to work. The novel is engaging and accessible, though often forgotten now, and I love how it fantastically examines the different options open – and, indeed, closed – to women in the Victorian period.

Jill is a little-known but fascinating novel from 1884 about a young woman who, bored of her upper-class life, runs away from home to become a maid.

Jill is everything Victorian women weren’t meant to be: ambitious, scheming, brave, happy to lie, and much more interested in money than marriage. She’s also a bit in love with the woman she works for, which Victorian women certainly weren’t meant to be either.

There is so much I love about Jill, but one of my favourite things about it is how it turns Victorian tropes and expectations on their head, taking the set-up of a typically male adventure narrative and giving it to the character of Jill. It’s a wonderfully proto-feminist Victorian classic and well worth a read.

One of the reasons I like this book is because the author is a man writing about a woman’s inner thoughts and, unusually, doing a very good job.

The time and place: London, the 1890s. Single women are known as “the odd women,” the leftovers. Dr. Rhoda Nunn starts a school to train these women in secretarial skills (back then, most secretaries were men) so that they won’t be dependent on relatives or forced into unhappy marriages. Rhoda herself is proudly unmarried and independent – until she meets an absolutely wonderful man. Will she give up her advocacy for “odd women” and marry the man she loves? 

(Warning: this book is out of copyright, so shoddy rip-offs are being sold on Amazon. Make sure you get a legit copy.)

The writer and poet Blake Morrison had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with his overbearing father.

Arthur Morrison, a Yorkshire doctor, was a smooth talker, a small-time cheat, who took pleasure in outwitting the authorities, living out his motto "I may not be right but I’m never wrong."

He was forever invading his children’s space, a habit which his son found painfully hard to resist, leading him to take up writing to escape this domineering influence. But when his father contracted cancer and lay dying, he was overwhelmed with grief and guilt.

It’s a moving, angry, and sometimes harrowing account of a dysfunctional relationship, which yet manages to be funny, and is written with poetic and humane grace. 

With Laura Warrell’s lyrical book, I discovered a different sort of narcissist dad—the musician kind! Also, the womanizer kind. 

I don’t know much about jazz, but you don’t need to know about it to get swept up in Warrell’s story of a trumpeter with the great name Circus Palmer and the female players around him, including his yearning daughter Koko. I admire how Warrell brings you close to Circus and the many women characters: this is no simple story about a man ignoring or abandoning his loved ones.

Circus comes to life, you can almost hear him play, and the novel leaves you with the awareness that a young woman can love and be shaped by a dad, even an absent, maddening one—and even that relation can have a sweet melody.

I read two great memoirs for a panel I moderated about daughters and fathers. At the event, I enjoyed watching Leslie Absher and Leta McCollough Seletzky meet and realize how much they had in common.

Both authors had dads who kept secrets— big, political secrets. Leta Seletzky’s dad worked as an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s: he was “The Kneeling Man” in the famous photograph taken after King’s death. 

This may sound odd, but I related to Leta Seletzky’s emotional tale of how she gradually got to know her father, as an adult, by uncovering the many layers of his life story. 

As someone perpetually in search of a good romcom, I found this story of three sisters who have inherited their family’s wedding planning business delightful.

While there is no shortage of spats and disagreements as each sister attempts to define her role within the business and family, when disaster strikes, it’s lovely to see them rally together and help each other find her own happily ever after. 

This novel, set in sixteenth-century Venice, reminds us that the Italian Renaissance was a great time to be a devotee of the pictorial arts. And it does so without getting caught up in the scandals surrounding the Borgias, who are almost as overdone as the Tudors. Luca Vianello is the heir to Venice’s premier gondola maker, until tragedy sends him off on a journey through poverty and hard work that ends when he becomes the personal boatman of the painter Trevisan. Morelli, who trained as an art historian, is intimately acquainted with the former Italian city-states, and like the other novels on my list, hers immerses you in Renaissance everyday life at a very personal level.