Books like Fredrik Backman

Macon Leary writes travel guides for people who hate travel and has organized his life to minimize surprise. After a devastating loss, however, his careful routines collide with Muriel, a gloriously persistent dog trainer who refuses to behave predictably.

Like Backman, Anne Tyler can turn an eccentric habit into both a joke and a revelation of grief. Nobody is reduced to a lovable quirk: every awkward exchange exposes how frightened people are of needing one another. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, this is Tyler’s tragicomic precision at its finest—a quiet novel whose characters become almost embarrassingly real.

A record-obsessed eleven-year-old Scout arrives to do chores for Ona Vitkus, a formidable 104-year-old Lithuanian immigrant. His questions about her life—and his conviction that she might qualify for a Guinness World Record—awaken ambitions Ona thought she had outlived.

The kinship with Anxious People lies in how the story gathers lonely, difficult people and gradually revises our first impressions of them. Wood makes lists, chores and improbable schemes funny, then charges those same details with longing. It is an extraordinarily tender novel about the strange routes by which people enter one another’s lives, and it deserves far more readers than it has had.

This is the darker recommendation, but perhaps the deepest match. Yolandi is a struggling writer trying to keep her brilliant concert-pianist sister, Elf, alive. Their situation is harrowing; their conversations are irreverent, impatient and often shockingly funny.

Toews shares Backman’s refusal to treat despair as either sentimental or humorless. Her characters joke not because their pain is trivial, but because comedy is one of the tools available to people who love each other and cannot fix each other. Winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the novel has the fierce, unruly humanity of a book readers carry with them long after its final page.