Recommendations
Books Like Where'd You Go, Bernadette
What to read after Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
If Where'd You Go, Bernadette's sharp-tongued dark comedy about a brilliant woman coming apart and reassembling herself — told through emails, FBI reports, and her daughter's documentary instinct — left you wanting more novels that take a formally inventive approach to a very funny and very serious story, these are the books readers find next.
- 1Buy
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant's severely regimented life of near-total isolation is disrupted by a musician she becomes obsessed with and a coworker who keeps being kind to her. The most direct emotional analog to Bernadette — both novels follow a woman with a very distinctive, sharp-edged voice who has sealed herself off from the world and is slowly, unwillingly brought back to it.
- 2Buy
Today Will Be Different
by Maria Semple
Semple's follow-up novel — an illustrator with a chaotic life resolves to be a better mother, wife, and person, and is immediately derailed. Less formally inventive than Bernadette but the same Semple voice: very funny, very Seattle, and underneath the comedy, genuinely sad.
- 3Buy
Attachments
by Rainbow Rowell
An IT employee falls in love with a woman through reading her emails. Shares Bernadette's epistolary format and its interest in what people reveal in writing that they would never say in person.
- 4Buy
The Rosie Project
by Graeme Simsion
A genetics professor who suspects he is on the autism spectrum designs a scientific survey to find an ideal wife. The same comedy of a very rigid, brilliant person encountering the world sideways, and the same warmth underneath.
- 5Buy
A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
A 59-year-old recently widowed man with rules for everything and contempt for everyone is saved by his new neighbors. Different in register — Swedish rather than American, melancholy-comedic rather than satirical — but the same emotional movement: a person who has shut down, and what it takes to reach them.
- 6Buy
Big Little Lies
by Liane Moriarty
Three women in an elite school community navigate friendship and domestic abuse toward a death at trivia night. Moriarty and Semple share the same instinct for satirizing upscale community norms while taking the women in those communities completely seriously.
- 7Buy
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
by Jonas Jonasson
A centenarian escapes his nursing home through a window on the morning of his own 100th birthday party and goes on an adventure, while the police and various criminals try to find him. The same tone as Bernadette — very funny, very deadpan, and entirely unconcerned with being taken seriously by the kind of people who take things seriously.
- 8Buy
Overnight Guest
by Heather Gudenkauf
A thriller about a woman in a remote farmhouse and the mystery of what happened to the children who were held there years ago — for readers who want to stay in the 'woman alone, something is wrong, we piece it together from fragments' structure of Bernadette but in a darker genre register.
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