Recommendations
Books Like The Evening Star by Larry McMurtry
For readers of the Aurora Greenway sequel
If you loved The Evening Star — Aurora in her late 60s, raising Emma's troubled children, the household chaos, the new psychiatric suitor, the sense of a formidable woman in her last brilliant phase — these novels share the same emotional territory: difficult older women, family dysfunction after loss, and the comedy of being too much personality for the world you live in.
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Buy on AmazonTerms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's original — the essential predecessor; The Evening Star's entire emotional weight depends on having experienced Terms of Endearment; Aurora and Emma's relationship, Garrett Breedlove, Emma's illness and death; the foundation for everything in the sequel.
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Buy on AmazonOlive Kitteridge
by Elizabeth Strout
Strout's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in stories — Olive is the Maine coastal companion to Aurora Greenway; both women are formidable, impossible, loving, and too much for the worlds they live in; the most important contemporary character companion to Aurora.
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Buy on AmazonThe Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Franzen's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a parent and adult children navigating dysfunction after loss; Alfred Lambert's decline is the literary, more intense version of what Aurora experiences managing Emma's problematic children.
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Buy on AmazonLonesome Dove
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece — the companion in his full range; the epic Western is the opposite pole from The Evening Star's Houston domestic world, showing the breadth of McMurtry's Texas fiction and his interest in characters who are too much for the world.
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Buy on AmazonA Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
Backman's bestselling novel about an impossible old man whose community slowly reveals what he is beneath the cantankerousness — the Swedish, male, more gentle version of what McMurtry is doing with Aurora; both characters are impossible on the surface and genuinely loving underneath.
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Buy on AmazonOrdinary People
by Judith Guest
Guest's debut novel about a family trying to function after a son's death — the companion in American fiction about raising children in the aftermath of a devastating family loss; the Jarrett family's therapeutic recovery is the Midwestern, psychologically focused version of Aurora's household chaos.
- 7Buy on Amazon
Terms of Endearment
by Larry McMurtry
The essential predecessor — read Terms of Endearment before The Evening Star; the sequel's emotional weight depends entirely on Aurora and Emma's relationship, established in Terms.
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Buy on AmazonThe Last Picture Show
by Larry McMurtry
McMurtry's breakout novel — the companion in his Texas fiction; Anarene's dying small-town Texas is the earlier, rural counterpart to The Evening Star's Houston domestic world; the two novels together show the poles of McMurtry's Texas geography.
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