Books like Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
What should you read after Gail Honeyman’s novel? It depends on what you loved most about it.
- Gail Honeyman
- 2017
- Contemporary fiction
What did you love about it?
Choosing one reorders everything below.
Best books to read after Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Ranked overall. Pick what you loved above to re-rank them.
Best overall matchA Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
A prickly, rule-bound solitary who is rude to everyone and gets slowly adopted by neighbours refusing to take the hint. Same shape, same ambush of feeling.
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- Learning ordinary life late
- An older man, not a young woman
Great matchThe Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion
A narrator who applies rigorous logic to a life that will not accept it, funny precisely because he cannot hear how he sounds.
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Deadpan formal diction
- Learning ordinary life late
- Romantic comedy structure
Best for the voiceThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
The book that made this kind of narrator viable: precise, literal, describing distress in exactly the same tone as bus timetables.
- Deadpan formal diction
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- A past revealed slowly
- A teenage narrator
Great matchThe Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
A man walks out to post a letter and simply keeps walking, and the reason he cannot stop is disclosed a piece at a time. The same slow release of an old grief.
- A past revealed slowly
- Learning ordinary life late
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- A road-trip structure
Great matchThe Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin
A rude, grieving bookseller has a child left in his shop and finds he cannot go on being rude about it. The community-repairs-a-person plot, done briskly.
- Learning ordinary life late
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- Kindness from an IT guy
- Rather more plot-driven
Great matchWhere'd You Go, Bernadette
Maria Semple
A woman whose contempt for everyone around her is very funny and also a symptom. Semple lets you laugh for a hundred pages before showing you the injury.
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Deadpan formal diction
- A past revealed slowly
- Told in emails and documents
Worth a look — with a warningThe Language of Flowers
Vanessa Diffenbaugh
A young woman leaves care with no idea how to be around people and a private system of meaning she trusts more than conversation. The loneliness is far less funny here.
- A past revealed slowly
- Learning ordinary life late
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Considerably sadder throughout
Great matchThe Keeper of Lost Things
Ruth Hogan
Lonely people and a house full of other people's mislaid objects, arranged so that everybody finishes slightly less alone than they started.
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- Kindness from an IT guy
- Learning ordinary life late
- Cosier and lighter
Great matchMy Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry
Fredrik Backman
Backman again, on a child who does not fit and a block of flats full of people who turn out to be more than their complaints. Funnier than it sounds.
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Mummy on the phone
- A fairy-tale framing device
Great matchThe Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
A single woman finds herself gathered up by a community that has decided she belongs to it now. The adoption plot, told in letters, with jokes.
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- Kindness from an IT guy
- Learning ordinary life late
- Told in letters throughout
Worth a look — with a warningThe Light Between Oceans
M. L. Stedman
Here for readers who want the buried-grief half of Eleanor rather than the comic half, and it is unrelenting about what one decision costs.
- A past revealed slowly
- Vodka and weekends alone
- Mummy on the phone
- No humour at all
Great matchThe Fault in Our Stars
John Green
A narrator who defends herself with vocabulary and irony, and a friendship that gets past it anyway. Green's voice does what Honeyman's does.
- Deadpan formal diction
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Teenagers, terminal illness
Great matchThe Help
Kathryn Stockett
Distinct first-person voices, a woman outside her own social world, and the same conviction that being properly seen changes what a person can do.
- A friendship that starts with a fall
- A narrator who misreads everyone
- Learning ordinary life late
- 1960s Mississippi setting
What should you read after Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine?
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman works on several levels at once, and which book you should read next depends on which of those levels got you. For most readers the closest match is A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman — a prickly, rule-bound solitary who is rude to everyone and gets slowly adopted by neighbours refusing to take the hint. Same shape, same ambush of feeling.
If what stayed with you was a narrator who misreads everyone, read The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion instead: a narrator who applies rigorous logic to a life that will not accept it, funny precisely because he cannot hear how he sounds. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is the other strong option — the book that made this kind of narrator viable: precise, literal, describing distress in exactly the same tone as bus timetables.
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