The Minister's Restoration

by Hana Sambrook

Like MacDonald's minister, your protagonist here grapples with moral judgment and hidden truths that challenge everything respectable society believes about a person's character. Brontë writes with that same unflinching Scottish-adjacent sensibility—she won't let you comfort yourself with easy answers about who deserves redemption.

by Gallix/François

This is my surprise pick for you—it's contemporary literary fiction rather than historical, but Ishiguro does something MacDonald does beautifully: he lets a man slowly recognize the ways his own choices and self-deceptions have shaped his life, and the recognition arrives almost too late. The quiet devastation of watching someone finally see themselves clearly will feel familiar.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

If you loved the Scottish setting and the moral complexity of MacDonald's work, Stevenson gives you that landscape with adventure woven through it. But what makes this work for you specifically is how both authors use Scotland itself as a character that tests and refines their protagonists' understanding of loyalty, truth, and what they're actually made of.

by Anthony Trollopoe

Trollope was writing in the same era as MacDonald, and he shares that gift for showing how a community's judgment of a person can be both devastating and utterly wrong. His novel sprawls across multiple characters, but the architecture is the same: watching respectable people navigate secrets, ambition, and the gap between appearance and reality.

by Jean-Pierre Naugrette

Collins pioneered the detective novel, but what matters for you is his obsession with hidden identities and the way secrets reshape entire households. Like MacDonald, he builds suspense not through action but through the slow, agonizing revelation of what people have been hiding—and why that unveiling, however painful, might be exactly what's needed.