10 Classic Books Made Big Again on TikTok

After Jack Edwards, a prominent book influencer, posted his review of Dostoevsky’s novella, sales quickly skyrocketed. In 2024 alone, White Nights, first published in 1848, sold over 50,000 copies, all thanks to TikTok’s visual language. 

Although the book is only eighty pages long, it packs a punch, following a young narrator over the course of four nights.

The unnamed narrator is experiencing many of the feelings that accompany youth—including restlessness, guilt, and love—and as such, the reading journey is highly sensory and ultimately moving. 

Another short pick, Ethan Frome follows the titular character as he struggles against his meek existence, working on a farm and living with his hypochondriac wife, Zeena. 

But when Zeena’s cousin visits, Ethan’s life is upended, and he finds himself obsessing over her and the alternative existence she comes to embody. Although drastically different from Wharton’s other works, it has become regarded as her magnum opus. 

If you’ve ever gone looking for a recommendation from TikTok, I Who Have Never Known Men is sure to have cropped up—and rightfully so! Largely considered a modern classic, Jacqueline Harpman, inspired by her own background as an exile during World War II, writes the story of thirty-nine women trapped in an underground cage. 

Guards police the women, who have no memory of their lives before or how they wound up imprisoned. But one young girl, the fortieth prisoner who keeps to herself, will be the key to breaking them free. 

Particularly today, this important piece of feminist speculative fiction, which has only recently been reprinted for the first time since 1997, is proof that it only takes one person to spark a movement. 

Baldwin’s second novel, Giovanni’s Room, was released to much controversy—the focus being a same-sex relationship, during a period of rampant homophobia. Although his publisher initially turned down the book and even advised him to burn it, Baldwin refused—and we’re grateful!

Now, the novel is regarded as a seminal work in LGBTQ+ literature, paving the way for future, transformative queer literature. The story, set in 1950s Paris, follows an American who, despite his desire to conform to convention, finds himself embroiled in an affair with an Italian bartender, only after proposing to a young woman. 

Throughout, he is torn between his true identity, where he finds love and passion, and the life he forces himself to lead, where hurt and loss are inevitable outcomes. 

Largely considered to be a 20th-century masterpiece, expertly weaving satire and fantasy, The Master and Margarita could only be published after the author’s lifetime, and in a censored version at that. 

First translated from Russian and published in English in 1967, the story is a scathing portrait of the Soviet Union. The story is divided into two parts: the first set in contemporary Moscow, and the other in ancient Jerusalem. Each features a wonderful cast of characters and flashes with startling historical imagination that rings true, even into today. 

A bestselling Turkish novel, Madonna in a Fur Coat experienced a rebirth when it was published in English for the first time in 2016—thanks to translator Maureen Freely.

To many, the principal character, a young, shy man, has become the epitome of yearning, as he becomes infatuated with a woman after a brief meeting. 

Set in the vibrant 1920s Berlin, among crowded streets and a flourishing art scene, he will come to be haunted by this woman and the eventual relationship they form, for the remainder of his existence. 

Upon its release in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray was widely banned (are we starting to notice a theme?), for, most significantly, its portrayals of homosexuality.

Another celebrated work, considered ahead of its time, Wilde paints a harrowing picture of what happens to a young aesthete when he sinks into the debauchery of late-19th-century England.

Although Dorian Gray has led a life of crime and sensuality, miraculously, his youth and beauty are retained. Meanwhile, a recently painted portrait of Dorian grows more sinister, day by day, bearing the brunt of his perceived atrocities. 

Oscar Wilde’s only novel was later used as evidence in his trial, where he was convicted for gross indecency, as a result of supposed immorality, and suggested homosexuality. 

First published in French by the author Albert Camus in 1942, Matthew Ward’s English version won the PEN Translation Prize in 1989 and has continued to introduce new audiences to this classic of twentieth-century literature since. 

The story follows an ordinary man who is drawn into an incomprehensible murder on an Algerian beach. The Stranger is a key representation of Camus’ philosophy of Absurdism, in which humans search for meaning in an inherently meaningless universe (a rather bleak read, but no less necessary!).

If you have been scrolling on TikTok in recent weeks, perhaps you’ve come across the trailer to Emerald Fennell’s reimaging of Wuthering Heights, set against a remix of “Everything is Romantic” by Charli XCX. 

Although many of us are apprehensive about this heralded classic, there is always the source material to fall back on. The story centers on the recounting of the passionate love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. 

Told with raw emotional intensity, the reader, much like the central character, relives the tragedy in a work that has remained influential since its publication in 1847. 

Leo Tolstoy has long been celebrated as a master of the subject of death, and as the name implies, The Death of Ivan Illyich is no different. The story follows the titular character, a high court judge who never considers the inevitable occurrence of death.

But, one day, when death visits him, Ivan is forced to contemplate his own morality and the life he has led—for better or for worse.