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.

Clare Pooley's The Authenticity Project is the cafe-table cousin of Anxious People, built on the same faith that strangers carry whole hidden lives behind their polite faces. An elderly artist leaves a small green notebook in a London cafe with one instruction: write the truth about yourself.

A barista, a recovering drinker, a new mother, and a lonely widower each pick it up and add a confession, and the notebook stitches them into a ragtag family none of them went looking for. Pooley writes the same trick Backman loves, the slow reveal that everyone is quietly falling apart and quietly trying to help.

The comedy stays gentle, the ache stays real, and the whole thing earns its hugs. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a warm ensemble where confession, not crisis, is what pulls the misfits together.

Sara Nisha Adams's The Reading List works the same emotional territory as Anxious People, where lonely people circle one another until they accidentally become a family. A widowed grandfather in West London and a teenage girl hiding from grief in her local library both stumble onto the same handwritten list of novels, slipped to them by a stranger.

As they read their way down it, the books become a bridge between two people who would never otherwise speak. Adams keeps the cast wide, the humor soft, and the loneliness honest, and she lets each character's pain surface at its own pace.

The book shares Backman's belief that the smallest gesture, a list, a notebook, a conversation, can rewire a life. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a multigenerational ensemble where books are the rope thrown between drowning strangers.

Britt-Marie Was Here is Backman writing in the exact register Anxious People readers came for, so it is the safest next step on the shelf. Britt-Marie, a fussy 63-year-old who has just left her cheating husband, takes a job in the dying town of Borg and ends up coaching a children's soccer team she knows nothing about.

She is rigid, particular about cutlery drawers, and convinced everyone is doing everything wrong, which makes her exactly the kind of difficult, lovable mess Backman builds his books around. The town's misfits adopt her before she notices it happening.

The comedy is dry, the loneliness underneath is real, and the ending earns its warmth without forcing it. Recommended for Anxious People readers who simply want more Backman, with the same prickly heart and small-town family that grows around a person who insists she does not need one.

Ruth Hogan's The Keeper of Lost Things is the quietly magical cousin of Anxious People, built on the same idea that ordinary people carry enormous unseen grief. An elderly writer has spent decades collecting lost objects, a single glove, a puzzle piece, a tin of ashes, each tagged with the date and place he found it, hoping to one day return them.

When he dies, he leaves the whole collection and the impossible task to his assistant Laura, a divorced woman hiding from her own life. As Laura tries to reunite the objects with their owners, she pulls a gardener, a neighbor's daughter, and a few ghosts into a makeshift family.

Hogan keeps the tone tender and faintly whimsical, with the same loneliness Backman tucks under his comedy. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a warm ensemble where every lost thing turns out to belong to a hidden story.

Libby Page's The Lido is the feel-good community novel Anxious People readers reach for when they want the warmth without the standoff. Rosemary, an 86-year-old widow, has swum at her Brixton outdoor pool every day for decades, and the lido holds every memory of her late husband.

When a developer moves to close it, a shy young journalist named Kate is sent to cover the story and ends up leading the fight to save it. The two women, sixty years apart, become unlikely best friends, and the campaign pulls the whole neighborhood into one loose, scrappy family.

Page keeps the stakes gentle and the heart front and center, with the same belief Backman has that a community is just strangers who decided to show up for each other. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want an uplifting ensemble about loneliness, friendship, and the small places that hold people together.

Steven Rowley's The Guncle hits the same nerve as Anxious People, where humor and grief share the same page and a reluctant adult becomes the family two children need. Patrick, a faded sitcom star hiding in Palm Springs, suddenly inherits his niece and nephew after his best friend and brother are gone.

He has no idea how to raise kids, his rules are absurd, and his apartment is not built for sticky hands, but the three of them stumble into something real. Rowley writes the same tonal trick Backman loves, a setup that should be unbearably sad played for warmth and wit instead.

The jokes are sharp, the grief never gets cheap, and the makeshift family earns every tear. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a funny, big-hearted story about a mess of a person learning to show up for the people who land in his lap.

Annie Hartnett's The Road to Tender Hearts, published April 2025, is the freshly minted Anxious People readalike, a warm and absurd comedy where strangers and stragglers become a family on the move. PJ Halliday is 63, newly rich from a lottery ticket, and grieving a life that never quite worked.

When two orphaned children turn out to be his estranged brother's grandkids, he loads them, his adult daughter, and a cat that can predict death into a car and drives across the country to woo his first love at a retirement community. The setup is sad on paper and hilarious on the page, exactly the trick Backman pulls.

Hartnett keeps the cast oddball and the heart enormous. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a 2025 release where a busted-up family heals itself one ridiculous mile at a time.

Colleen Oakley's Jane and Dan at the End of the World, published March 2025, is the closest structural match to Anxious People on this list, a comic hostage situation that turns into a story about the people trapped inside it. Jane has booked dinner at an absurdly fancy clifftop restaurant to tell her husband Dan she wants a divorce.

Before the second course, a bumbling group of eco-activists storms in and takes the room hostage, and Jane realizes their every move mirrors the failed novel she once wrote. To survive, she and Dan have to work together, and the marriage they came to end starts looking worth saving.

Oakley plays the standoff for warmth and laughs the way Backman does, finding the soft human core inside the crisis. Recommended for Anxious People readers who want a 2025 release that takes the comic-hostage frame and runs.