Books like Us
Tenderness edged with embarrassment, rueful laughter, and the ache of loving people you cannot quite reach: these novels inhabit the same bittersweet emotional weather.
If you liked Us, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Us, and we tell you exactly what.
For the comic generosity of Us, start here. Graham’s second wife, Audra, is exuberantly sociable; his first, Elspeth, is forbiddingly composed; Graham himself watches both with bewildered affection. Their son’s intense enthusiasms add another layer to a household that never behaves as neatly as anyone hopes.
Heiny is exceptionally funny about irritation without making affection seem foolish. Like Nicholls, she understands marriage as an accumulation of private jokes, compromises and failures of attention. This word-of-mouth favourite is one of the rare contemporary novels whose jokes make its tenderness sharper rather than safer.
Nicholls’s Douglas keeps discovering that sincerity does not guarantee understanding; Anne Tyler builds an entire marriage around that painful truth. Michael and Pauline fall in love young, then spend decades confronting the distance between romantic certainty and daily compatibility.
Tyler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning master of ordinary family life, notices the revealing domestic detail: the recurring quarrel, the gesture misread, the grievance polished through repetition. She refuses to appoint a villain. Instead, she makes two imperfect people wholly legible, producing the same chastening recognition as Us: you can love someone deeply and still be disastrously unskilled at loving them.
Retired literary agent Joe Allston is dry, defensive and uncomfortably aware of age. When an old postcard prompts him and his wife to revisit a diary from years earlier, their shared past begins to feel less settled than either had supposed.
The kinship with Us lies in the rueful male voice and in the way memory exposes both self-deception and durable intimacy. Stegner’s prose is more austere than Nicholls’s, but his portrait of a long marriage has the same mixture of exasperation, loyalty and belated understanding. Winner of the National Book Award, it is a quietly devastating novel about what spouses know, conceal and preserve for one another.