Recommendations
Books Like A Man Called Ove
What to read after A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
If A Man Called Ove's combination of comedy, grief, and community — the story of a difficult man slowly rescued from isolation by the people around him — left you wanting more books that make you cry while making you laugh, these are the novels readers consistently reach for next.
- 1Buy
Anxious People
by Fredrik Backman
Eight strangers are held hostage in an apartment by an accidental bank robber who has no idea what they're doing. Backman's follow-up novel is structured as a mystery that is really about loneliness and the accidental ways people save each other.
- 2Buy
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant's completely regimented life is disrupted when she becomes obsessed with a musician and befriends a coworker who keeps being kind to her. The closest contemporary analog to A Man Called Ove — another person in severe isolation who is slowly, unwillingly brought back to life.
- 3Buy
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
by Rachel Joyce
A recently retired man receives a letter from a dying friend he hasn't seen in years and decides to walk from Devon to Berwick to see her — a journey of 600 miles. A novel about a man walking through the things he never processed.
- 4Buy
Where the Crawdads Sing
by Delia Owens
A girl abandoned by her family at age seven grows up alone in the North Carolina marshes, and decades later is accused of murder. Like Ove, Kya is a person whose circumstances have made her unreachable — and the novel is about who reaches her anyway.
- 5Buy
The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
Nora Seed, at the moment of her death, finds herself in a library between life and death where every book represents a life she could have lived if she'd made a different choice. A direct examination of the question A Man Called Ove circles: whether a life is still worth living.
- 6Buy
Beartown
by Fredrik Backman
Backman's most serious novel — a hockey town grapples with an assault involving the team's star player. Longer and more ambitious than Ove, it shares Backman's ability to make a community into characters and to show how collective silence destroys individuals.
- 7Buy
My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
by Fredrik Backman
A seven-year-old girl's grandmother dies and leaves her a map of apologies she must deliver to the neighbors she wronged. Backman's fairy-tale approach to grief — more whimsical than Ove, equally emotionally precise.
- 8Buy
The Rosie Project
by Graeme Simsion
Don Tillman, a genetics professor who suspects he is on the autism spectrum, designs a scientific survey to find an ideal wife, and falls for Rosie, who fails every one of his criteria. Shares Ove's comedy-of-rigidity framework — a very specific kind of person being softened by an unexpected relationship.
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