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Books Like A Man Called Ove: Curmudgeons, Community, and Heart

If you loved A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman.

A Man Called Ove works a very specific magic: it hands you a grump, then spends three hundred pages revealing the grief underneath until you’d fight anyone who’s mean to him. If you want more fiction like that — prickly people, stubborn kindness, communities that refuse to give up on their loneliest members — these reviewed novels deliver the same warm ache.

Why these match

  • grief
  • friendship
  • community
  • loneliness
  • second chances
  • kindness
  • hope
Cover of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: Reese's Book Club: A Novel by Gail Honeyman

Pick 01 · Top match

Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine: Reese's Book Club: A Novel

by Gail Honeyman

4.7 - Outstanding
FictionWomen's FictionContemporary

Eleanor is Ove's truest sibling in fiction: a Glasgow office worker whose rigid routines, blunt pronouncements, and vodka-quiet weekends are armor over a wound she refuses to examine. Gail Honeyman plays the social misfires for laughs, then reveals the grief underneath in stages, and the friendship that rescues Eleanor is every bit as unglamorous and stubborn as the one that rescues Ove. If the Backman formula works on you, this is the essential next read.

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Cover of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Pick 04

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

4.2 - Excellent
FictionLiterary FictionContemporary

Gabrielle Zevin doesn’t give you a grump on a stoop, but she gives you something Backman fans will recognize immediately: two prickly, difficult people who need each other more than either will admit, and thirty years to slowly figure that out. Like Ove, Sadie and Sam wall themselves off after loss, and the novel’s quiet triumph is watching stubborn, unglamorous loyalty do the work romance usually gets credit for. It’s about friendship and grief and creative partnership, but the emotional register, earned warmth after real damage, is pure Ove.

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Kindle$1399Paperback$1016$19.00−47%Hardcover$1069$28.00−62%

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Cover of Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel by Maria Semple

Pick 05

Where'd You Go, Bernadette: A Novel

by Maria Semple

4.1 - Excellent
FictionHumorWomen's Fiction

Bernadette is what happens when the neighborhood curmudgeon is a MacArthur-winning architect with twenty years of stalled genius to answer for. Semple's comedy is sharper-elbowed than Backman's, told in emails and school memos, but the engine is the same: a difficult, secretly wounded person dragged back to life by someone who refuses to give up on her.

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Cover of Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus

Pick 06

Lessons in Chemistry

by Bonnie Garmus

4.6 - Outstanding
FictionLiterary FictionWomen's Fiction

Elizabeth Zott is prickly for different reasons than Ove, a 1960s chemist sick of being underestimated rather than a widower sick of the world, but Bonnie Garmus builds the same kind of unlikely community around her: people who refuse to give up on someone difficult. Funny, warm, and angrier underneath than it first looks.

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Kindle$1399$19.00−26%Paperback$1090$19.00−43%Hardcover$1354$29.00−53%

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Cover of Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Pick 07

Before the Coffee Gets Cold

by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

4.0 - Excellent
Read it free on Kindle Unlimited
FictionMagical RealismContemporary

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Tokyo café runs on a gentler magic than anything in Ove’s world, but the ache is the same: regret, and the quiet hope that understanding the past might change how you carry it forward. Four customers travel back for a few minutes each, only until their coffee cools, in a slim, sentimental novel built for readers who loved Ove’s tenderness toward grief.

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Kindle$1399Paperback$2599$32.00−19%Hardcover$1011$19.99−49%

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Cover of Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Pick 09

Convenience Store Woman

by Sayaka Murata

4.0 - Excellent
FictionLiterary FictionContemporary

Sayaka Murata’s Keiko Furukura is an outsider in the same spirit as Ove, someone who has built a stable, workable life out of rhythms other people find strange, and who refuses every attempt to be ‘fixed.’ It’s slimmer and stranger than Backman’s novel, deadpan where Ove is warm, but just as protective of a character the world keeps underestimating.

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Kindle$867$16.00−46%Paperback$959$17.00−44%Hardcover$1244$19.22−35%

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Cover of Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Pick 10

Me Before You

by Jojo Moyes

4.5 - Outstanding
FictionRomanceContemporary

Jojo Moyes pairs a chatty, unstoppable young woman with a bitter man who has shut the world out after tragedy, and lets their friction do what Ove’s neighbors do for him: warm someone back into caring about being alive. It shares Backman’s willingness to let grief and humor sit side by side without cancelling each other out.

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Kindle$1199$33.00−64%Paperback$899$9.46−5%Hardcover$1199

Prices may vary.

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