If you finished Anxious People and immediately wanted to hand it to someone — or read the last fifty pages again — this list is for you. What makes Backman’s novels work isn’t the premise (bank robber turns hostage-taker, grumpy old man, whatever). It’s the specific quality of attention he pays to people who are quietly struggling. The characters in his books are failing and hopeful and often inadvertently funny, and the combination breaks you open in the most satisfying way.
These books like Anxious People share that DNA. Some are funny-devastating. Some are slow-burn. All of them believe that ordinary people trying to live their lives with a little dignity are worth your full attention.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The spiritual twin of a Backman novel: a character who seems difficult and strange and is actually deeply, secretly hurting in a way the book reveals slowly and with great care. Eleanor has a perfectly organized life and almost no human contact, and the book watches what happens when that changes. It’s funny in the way loneliness is sometimes funny, and devastating when you finally understand why she is the way she is. Save this one for a weekend when you can read it in one go.
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Listen: Audible
The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley
A lonely old man writes in a green notebook about his real life — not the performance of it, but the actual thing — and leaves it in a café. Someone finds it and adds their own truth. Then another person. And another. A novel about the unlikely connections that happen when people are brave enough to say what’s actually going on with them. Pooley has that same quality Backman does: a belief that being honest about your mess is a radical act of connection.
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Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
A grieving widow, a young man looking for something he doesn’t know how to name, and a giant Pacific octopus who has been watching both of them very carefully. Van Pelt’s novel has that same structural trick Backman uses — multiple perspectives building toward a moment of connection you see coming but still feel genuinely hit by. The mystery is almost incidental. The real subject is loneliness and the way strangers (and cephalopods) sometimes save us.
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A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for the rest of his life, and the novel follows him there for thirty years. What sounds like a tragedy becomes something else entirely — a book about the extraordinary depth of a life lived in a small space, about dignity and friendship and the pleasure of paying attention. It’s longer and more deliberate than Backman, but it has the same warm intelligence, the same deep fondness for its protagonist.
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Listen: Audible
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Harold Fry receives a letter from an old friend who is dying in a hospice 600 miles away. He writes a reply. Then he walks to post it. Then he keeps walking. He decides, on almost no rational grounds, that if he walks the whole way to Berwick-upon-Tweed, she’ll survive long enough for him to arrive. This book is about all the things Harold was too frightened to say or do, and what happens when he finally stops being frightened. Quiet, British, deeply moving.
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Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in the 1960s who keeps being told she can’t do the things she is, demonstrably, doing. She ends up hosting a cooking show, where she teaches housewives chemistry while the network calls it a cooking show. This book is funny in a way that’s grounded in real fury — the absurdity of being capable and dismissed — and it has a warmth for its characters that earns every emotional payoff. A different texture from Backman but the same beating heart.
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Listen: Audible
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
A retired British army officer and his Pakistani-British neighbor discover, slowly and despite themselves, that they’re falling in love. The novel is gentle and dry and full of the specific texture of English village life, and it takes its characters’ dignity completely seriously — which is what makes all their small moments of connection feel so earned. This is a book to read slowly, with a cup of tea, on a Sunday.
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The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
Allan Karlsson is one hundred years old. He does not want a birthday party. So he climbs out the window of his nursing home in his slippers and walks off into an adventure involving a suitcase full of money, a criminal gang, and an improbable series of coincidences. The chapters alternate between his current caper and flashbacks to a life that somehow intersected with every major world event of the twentieth century. Pure, absurdist fun — for when you need the Backman humor without the weight.
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Where’d You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
Bernadette Fox is brilliant, reclusive, and maddening to everyone around her — especially the neighbors. Her daughter Bee is trying to figure out where she went and why. Told in documents — emails, letters, reports, journal entries — it’s a funny and surprisingly tender portrait of what happens when a gifted person finds no way to use their gifts. Bee’s voice is one of the most endearing in contemporary fiction.
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The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
A fourteen-year-old girl with a secret runs away from her angry, grieving father and ends up in a house full of beekeeping sisters in 1960s South Carolina. The sisters are strange and extraordinary and the bee mythology is real and the book holds all of it — race and grief and mothering and female power — with complete confidence. It’s the kind of novel that feels like it was written for you, regardless of whether your life looks anything like Lily’s.
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Listen: Audible
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
A man lives alone in a house that contains the ocean and infinite statues and tidal halls, and he doesn’t know why. This book is utterly unlike anything else on this list — stranger, quieter, structured like a mystery that unfolds very slowly. But it belongs here because of what it does in its final sections, which is remind you that the world is strange and worth paying attention to, and that the things that seem most inexplicable often make complete sense when seen from a different angle. An unexpected gem.
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If you have a Backman book you haven’t read yet — Beartown, Britt-Marie Was Here, Us Against You — go read that first. But when you’re ready to branch out, start with Eleanor Oliphant. You’ll know what I mean.
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