A few years back, I wrote a novel called A Page in Your Diary. It follows a man in his fifties who returns to his home town, discovers what became of the girl he dumped on a phone call from Exeter Uni in 1987, and gets handed a miraculous chance to go back to 1988 and steer her away from the catastrophe his younger self set in motion. I marketed it as time travel. Reading it back, the truth is closer: a midlife crisis story in costume.
The trouble with writing about a man slowly suspecting he peaked at the office Christmas do in 1989 is that you can’t help noticing the same shape in everyone else’s books. Once you spot it, you spot it everywhere. A grumpy widower who’s quite seriously planning to hang himself in the porch; a bloke walking five hundred miles in yachting shoes for reasons he can’t articulate; an American literature professor whose marriage has cooled into a polite arrangement around a kettle; a moderately successful novelist fleeing his own birthday across three continents. Different jumpers, same quiet panic.
What follows is a list of the seven novels I’d hand to anyone currently doing the maths on whether they could afford a divorce, a kayak, or both. Divorce, for the record, is more affordable than people think; a great deal depends on the kayak. Some are funny, some will properly hurt, and all of them get closer to the truth of midlife than the cliché of the sports car and the regrettable earring.
1. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
Ove is fifty-nine, recently widowed, recently made redundant, and quite seriously planning to hang himself in the porch when his neighbours’ poorly-driven Saab interrupts proceedings. From there it becomes a book about how stubborn people get hauled, against their will, back into being part of the world.
What lifts it above sentiment is Backman’s refusal to give Ove an arc that pretends grief has a tidy schedule. The man stays grumpy. He just becomes useful. There’s a long-running gag about Saabs versus Volvos clearly cooked up by someone who’s clocked too much time at a parts counter, and the ending lands somewhere between a smile and a quiet sit-down with a tissue.
2. About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Hornby is the British male midlife voice in the way Larkin is the British male misery voice; you can argue, but you’ll lose. About a Boy gives us Will, thirty-six, professionally idle, living off a single song his dad wrote in the 1960s, and ironically distant from anything that might count as a life. He fakes being a single father to chat up women at a group called SPAT (Single Parents Alone Together), accidentally adopts a twelve-year-old called Marcus, and drifts in the general direction of becoming a person.
It’s funny. It’s also far sadder than people remember once you read it past forty. The Hugh Grant film charmed audiences; the book hits harder, especially around the bit where Will realises his entire personality has been a series of manoeuvres designed to avoid the moment he’s currently having.
3. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
Harold, sixty-five, retired, gets a letter from a woman dying in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed and decides to walk there from Devon. Five hundred miles in yachting shoes. He doesn’t tell his wife why. His wife doesn’t ask, because their marriage has long since reached the point where conversation feels like negotiating across a glass partition.
Joyce manages something quietly brilliant: she makes the actual walking secondary to the things Harold notices when he isn’t busy avoiding himself. A man with a Border collie at a roadside layby. The specific weight of a sausage roll bought at half three when you’re already exhausted and your blister has its own pulse. It’s uplit, but it earns its uplift the slow way… by the mile, on bad feet.
4. Stoner by John Williams
If you’ve not read Stoner, brace yourself. It’s a novel about an American literature professor who has a quietly disappointing life and then dies. That’s the whole plot. It’s also one of the most devastating books ever written, and the reason it works is John Williams’ refusal to dramatise any of it.
William Stoner makes one or two genuine choices in his life. Then, gently and across decades, the people who care less than he does grind him down. He loves his work, loses his daughter to a slow tragedy, loves a woman briefly and decently, and has to give her up before they can build anything from it. By the final chapter you’ll have done the maths on your own life at least once, possibly twice if you lingered. Pour something stiff before you start the last forty pages.
5. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
Arthur Less, a moderately successful gay novelist, turns fifty in a few weeks. His ex-boyfriend is getting married. Rather than attend the wedding and admit defeat, he accepts a string of minor literary invitations around the world: a panel in Mexico, a residency in Berlin, a desert retreat in Morocco, a teaching post in India where the goats outnumber the students. The whole thing becomes a slow-motion comedy of a man fleeing.
What Greer pulls off is a Pulitzer-winning comedy that genuinely raises actual laughs. Most “comic novels” extract a polite huff out of you on page eighty and call it a day. Less keeps landing while accumulating a quiet ache underneath; by the final scene the humour reveals itself as the costume the heartbreak came dressed in. If you’ve ever booked somewhere expensive specifically to avoid thinking, this is your book.
6. The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Nora Seed, thirty-five, decides to end it all. Instead of dying she finds herself in an infinite library between life and death, where every book contains a version of her life if she’d made one different choice: stayed with the boyfriend, stuck with the swimming, said yes to the band, taken the job in Australia. Each book is a parallel reality she gets to try on for size.
It isn’t subtle, but subtlety isn’t the point. Haig writes for the reader currently sitting in a kitchen at two in the morning wondering whether they took the wrong turn at twenty-seven. The book exists to say: probably not, probably yes, probably both, and either way the version you’re in is the one that needs you. I’ve written a longer piece about it over here if you fancy a deeper dive.
7. A Page in Your Diary by Keith A Pearson
And yes, my own. I’d feel grubby putting it on this list if it didn’t fit, but it does. A Page in Your Diary follows Sean Hardy, fifty-something, returning to his home town and stumbling on what became of Jackie Benton, the girlfriend he dumped on a phone call from Exeter Uni back in 1987. Sean, like all the protagonists on this list, has spent thirty-three years quietly aware he behaved like a selfish little sod at twenty. Then he gets handed an unlikely shot at 1988, with a fortnight to befriend his teenage first love, keep his real identity hidden, and try to steer her away from the tragedy he helped set in motion.
I wrote it because I couldn’t find quite the book I wanted to read at the time. I wanted something which took midlife regret seriously without going operatic, leaned hard on nostalgia without choking on syrup, and made me laugh while it did all of that… because anyone who’s actually had a midlife wobble knows it’s mostly comedy with the occasional weep on the way back from the pub. If the moral weight of Stoner and the speculative pull of Midnight Library appeal to you, this one sits somewhere in the middle of the two.
What These Books Share
Every novel on this list is, underneath the plot machinery, asking the same question: how did the person I am end up so far from the person I thought I’d be, and is there anything to do about it now? Stoner answers no. Ove answers yes, slowly. Hornby answers eventually, after a series of compromises. Joyce, Greer, Haig, and yes, me, all answer somewhere in between.
What none of them say, thankfully, is the answer is a sports car. One of the great myths about midlife crisis is the cinematic image of the bloke buying a Mazda MX-5 and growing a goatee. The real version, in my limited experience, is quieter and far more specific. It’s catching yourself doing the maths on which decade you’ll be in when your kids finally leave home. It’s noticing you now know more songs from the wrong end of your life than the right one. It’s the specific hum of dread some Sunday afternoon in February, when the house has gone quiet and you remember you used to want to be a drummer. It’s the bloke at the next petrol pump glancing across, recognising you from school, and thinking “Christ, he’s let himself go” just before you think exactly the same about him.
Books help with this. Not because they fix anything, but because they remind you it’s a recognised condition, with a literature, a back catalogue, the occasional Pulitzer, and people willing to write 1,500-word listicles about it on a Wednesday morning. There are worse clubs to belong to — even if the membership fee is, broadly speaking, your forties.
If you want to start somewhere, start with whichever of those covers you’d happily be seen reading on a long train journey. Then, when you’ve finished, you might fancy giving A Page in Your Diary a go. It belongs in the same drawer.