Books like Anxious People

A Man Called Ove is Backman's breakout novel and the closest match to Anxious People in his entire catalog. Ove is a fifty-nine-year-old curmudgeon who has given up on life after losing his wife, but his new neighbors keep dragging him back into the world through sheer persistence and need. Like Anxious People, the novel uses comedy as a delivery system for emotional devastation.

Ove's gruff exterior hides a lifetime of quiet kindness, and Backman peels back the layers with the same structural cleverness he uses in Anxious People, revealing backstory at exactly the right moments. Both books share a conviction that communities form in unlikely ways and that the people who seem most difficult are often the ones carrying the heaviest loads. The humor is drier here, more situational than absurdist, but the emotional payoff hits just as hard.

If Anxious People was your first Backman, this should be your second.

Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine follows a socially awkward office worker whose tightly controlled routine masks years of trauma and isolation. Like Anxious People, the novel uses a deceptively light tone to approach serious subjects: loneliness, abuse, the difficulty of asking for help. Eleanor's voice is distinctive and often unintentionally funny, and the gradual revelation of her past mirrors Backman's technique of withholding key information until the reader is ready for it.

Both novels argue that connection between unlikely people can be genuinely transformative. Where Backman works with an ensemble, Honeyman focuses tightly on one woman's interior life, but the emotional architecture is similar: funny on the surface, devastating underneath. The friendship between Eleanor and her coworker Raymond provides the same kind of unlikely human bond that powers Backman's best work.

Readers who loved the way Anxious People balanced wit with genuine feeling will find Eleanor Oliphant working the same territory with equal skill.

Amor Towles's A Gentleman in Moscow confines Count Alexander Rostov to the Metropol Hotel for the rest of his life after the Bolsheviks declare him an unrepentant aristocrat. What sounds like a prison story becomes something else entirely: a warm, witty, deeply humane novel about building a meaningful life within severe constraints. Like Anxious People, the book takes a confined setting and uses it to bring a cast of sharply drawn characters into unexpected relationships.

Towles writes with elegance and humor, and the Count's determination to find purpose and connection inside his gilded cage shares Backman's fundamental optimism about human nature. Both novels insist that the small acts of daily life, a shared meal, a conversation with a stranger, a moment of generosity, matter as much as grand gestures. The pacing is more leisurely than Backman's, but the emotional rewards are just as rich.

This is a book about choosing grace when the world gives you every reason not to.

Shelby Van Pelt's Remarkably Bright Creatures tells the story of Tova Sullivan, a seventy-year-old widow who works the night shift at an aquarium, and Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus who is far more observant than anyone gives him credit for. The novel juggles multiple timelines and perspectives with the same structural playfulness that Backman uses in Anxious People.

Secrets accumulate across chapters, and the connections between characters reveal themselves gradually, creating those satisfying moments when everything clicks into place. Like Backman, Van Pelt writes characters who are lonely but not pathetic, people whose isolation is circumstantial rather than chosen.

The octopus narration could have been gimmicky but instead becomes the novel's emotional anchor, offering a perspective on human behavior that is both alien and surprisingly tender. Readers who enjoyed the way Anxious People made them care about a roomful of strangers will find the same magic at work here, just with more tentacles.

Nick Hornby's A Long Way Down opens with four strangers meeting on the roof of a London building on New Year's Eve, all of them planning to jump. The premise sounds grim, but Hornby handles it with the same blend of dark humor and genuine empathy that defines Anxious People. Each character narrates in turn, and their voices are distinct, funny, and frequently unreliable.

Like Backman, Hornby understands that people at their lowest are often also at their most absurd, and he refuses to treat despair as something solemn and untouchable. The group dynamic that develops among the four would-be jumpers mirrors the unlikely community that forms during Backman's hostage situation. Both novels use an extreme premise to bring mismatched people together and then let the real story be about how those people learn to tolerate, help, and eventually care about each other.

The tone is more British and sardonic than Backman's Swedish warmth, but the underlying humanity is the same.

Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry follows a grumpy, widowed bookshop owner on a tiny island whose life changes when a mysterious package appears in his store.

Like Backman, Zevin writes about curmudgeons who are softened by circumstances beyond their control, and the novel shares Anxious People's insistence that even the most closed-off people can be cracked open by the right combination of love, community, and absurd good fortune. The book-within-a-book structure gives it a literary playfulness, and the supporting cast of islanders provides the same warmth and humor as Backman's ensemble of hostages. Both novels move through time in ways that let you watch characters evolve slowly, and both deliver endings that earn their emotions through accumulation rather than manipulation.

If you loved Anxious People for its faith in second chances and its belief that grumpy people are just sad people who need better neighbors, this book operates on exactly the same frequency.

Helen Simonson's Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is a gentle, witty novel about a retired British major in a small Sussex village who strikes up an unlikely friendship, and then romance, with Mrs. Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper. Like Anxious People, it is a novel about prejudice and connection, about the gap between what people present to the world and what they actually feel.

Simonson writes with a light touch that disguises the sharpness of her social observations, and the village setting creates the same kind of enclosed community that Backman uses in his apartment-viewing hostage scenario. Both novels feature characters who surprise themselves by caring about people they would normally overlook, and both treat their characters' flaws with compassion rather than judgment. The pace is quieter than Backman's, more afternoon tea than bank robbery, but the emotional intelligence is comparable.

This is a book for readers who want the warmth and humanity of Anxious People in a more traditional setting.