Recommendations
Books Like Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
What to read after Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
If Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine's voice — Eleanor's hyper-literal, slightly formal, quietly devastated perspective — and its story of profound isolation being broken by unexpected human connection affected you, these are the novels readers consistently find next.
- 1Buy
A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
A 59-year-old recently widowed man with rules for everything and contempt for everyone is planning to end his life, and is repeatedly interrupted by his new neighbors. The most direct analog to Eleanor Oliphant — another person in severe isolation who is unwillingly, comically rescued by community.
- 2Buy
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
by Rachel Joyce
A recently retired man receives a letter from a dying friend and decides to walk 600 miles to see her. Like Eleanor Oliphant, it's a novel about a person who stopped living fully some time ago — walking as a way of moving through the things he couldn't process otherwise.
- 3Buy
The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
Nora Seed finds herself in a library between life and death where every book represents a different version of her life. Haig writes about depression and the desire to stop living with the same directness and lack of sentimentality as Honeyman.
- 4Buy
Where'd You Go, Bernadette
by Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox, a brilliant and agoraphobic architect who stopped practicing fifteen years ago, begins disappearing. Told through her teenage daughter's assembled documents, it shares Eleanor Oliphant's combination of a very distinctive, sharp-edged protagonist and the questions of what broke her and what might fix it.
- 5Buy
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 a wife. The same comedy of a very rigid person being softened by an unexpected relationship, with a first-person voice that is funny in some of the same ways Eleanor's is.
- 6Buy
Anxious People
by Fredrik Backman
Eight very different people are held hostage in an apartment by an accidental bank robber who has no idea what they're doing. Backman structures the novel around the question of why any of them were there — and the answers involve the same kind of quiet desperation Eleanor carries.
- 7Buy
Attachments
by Rainbow Rowell
An IT security employee is supposed to be monitoring employee emails for inappropriate use, and falls in love with a woman through reading her messages to her best friend. Rowell's warmth and her interest in people who have been stuck somewhere they shouldn't still be make her the right recommendation for Honeyman readers.
- 8Buy
The Keeper of Lost Things
by Ruth Hogan
A recently widowed man has spent decades collecting items left on buses and park benches, promising himself to return each one to its owner. His assistant inherits his collection and his mission after his death. A gentler, more whimsical British version of the same premise: people collecting what they can't say directly.
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