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

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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Fiction Contemporary Humor

On the shelf

Pick 02

A Man Called Ove: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

4.4/ 5Excellent

This is the original: a rigid, grieving widower whose careful plan to end his life keeps getting interrupted by the chaotic family that just moved in next door. If you arrived at this list from a companion read, it's worth doubling back to where the formula started, a grump who earns every bit of the warmth Backman eventually lets him have.

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Pick 03

Firefly Lane

by Kristin Hannah

4.7/ 5Outstanding

Kristin Hannah trades Ove's single stubborn heart for two: best friends from a 1970s cul-de-sac who spend thirty years colliding over ambition and motherhood before a betrayal tests whether the friendship survives it. It has the same faith that the people who annoy us most are usually the ones we can't live without, just stretched across decades instead of a single street.

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Pick 04

The Things We Leave Unfinished

by Rebecca Yarros

4.7/ 5Outstanding

A woman rebuilding her life at her late great-grandmother's Colorado estate finds the manuscript of a scandalous novel her great-grandmother never finished, and Rebecca Yarros runs both women's stories side by side until they meet. Like Ove, it trusts that the person who seems most finished with their story usually has the most left to tell.

Kindle$9⁹⁹

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Fiction Humor Contemporary

Pick 05

Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

4.6/ 5Outstanding

More Backman, and arguably his funniest: a failed bank robber traps eight squabbling strangers at an apartment viewing, and every one of them turns out to be carrying something heavy. The same trick as Ove works on a whole ensemble here, comedy up front, grief and grace underneath.

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Fiction Contemporary Women's Fiction

Pick 06

Road Trip

by Mary Kay Andrews

4.5/ 5Outstanding

Two estranged sisters get shoved into a car together after a Savannah funeral and end up chasing a possibly priceless painting all the way to Ireland. Mary Kay Andrews writes the kind of grudge-holding, secret-keeping family that Ove would recognize instantly, funny on the surface and grieving underneath, with reconciliation earned the hard way instead of handed over.

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Pick 07

It Ends with Us: A Novel

by Colleen Hoover

4.7/ 5Outstanding

Lily Bloom is torn between the first love she never got over and a brilliant, volatile neurosurgeon who complicates everything. Colleen Hoover writes the same kind of flawed, fully human people Ove readers root for despite themselves.

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Fiction Literary Fiction Contemporary

Pick 08

The Correspondent

by Virginia Evans

4.6/ 5Outstanding

Sybil Van Antwerp is a retired lawyer who says almost everything through letters instead of out loud, which makes her every bit as prickly and guarded as Ove ever was. Virginia Evans lets that guard down one page at a time, and the old wound underneath turns out to be worth the wait.

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Fiction Women's Fiction Literary Fiction

Pick 09

Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel

by Shelby Van Pelt

4.6/ 5Outstanding

A widowed night cleaner at a small aquarium and the sardonic octopus who decides to help her make an unlikely-friendship story worthy of Ove himself. Van Pelt shares Backman's faith that routine, competence, and small courtesies are how wounded people say I love you.

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Fiction Literary Fiction Contemporary

Pick 10

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

by Gabrielle Zevin

4.2/ 5Excellent

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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