Every so often, a book comes along that persuades millions of readers to fall head over heels for a man they would usually cross the road to avoid in real life. Fredrik Backman managed it in 2012 with A Man Called Ove, the story of a fifty-nine-year-old Swede who inspects his neighbourhood every morning with the joyless precision of a militant traffic warden. Ove has recently lost his wife, Sonja. He has decided, quietly and methodically, that he would rather join her than carry on without her. The universe, in the form of a heavily pregnant Iranian neighbour and a reversed trailer, has other plans.
The genius of it is simple. Underneath the complaints about people who cannot park, and the loathing of anyone who buys the wrong sort of car, sits a man drowning in grief and too proud to say so. We do not love Ove despite the grumbling. We love him because we understand exactly what the grumbling is hiding.
If you closed that book with a lump in your throat and an urge to go and shake hands with a stranger, here are seven novels to reach for next. Prickly people, soft centres, and the slow, stubborn business of letting other people in.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
The closest cousin on this list. Eleanor lives by her routines, eats the same lunch, tops up her Friday evenings with two bottles of vodka, and tells anyone who asks that she is completely fine. She is, of course, nothing of the sort. When she and Raymond from IT help an elderly man who has collapsed in the street, her carefully sealed little world develops a crack, and light works its way in whether she likes it or not. Funny, painful, and every bit as good at hiding a broken heart behind a briskly efficient exterior as Backman is.
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson (2010)
If Ove had grown up in an English village with a decent regimental blazer, he might have turned out like Major Ernest Pettigrew. Stiff, correct, faintly appalled by the modern world, the Major strikes up an unlikely friendship with Mrs Ali, the widow who runs the village shop, and discovers that a later-in-life romance can cause more scandal than a barn fire. It skewers small-town snobbery beautifully while never once losing its warmth. A comfort read with actual teeth.
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick (2016)
Arthur Pepper is a seventy-something widower with a routine so rigid you could set a kiln by it. On the first anniversary of his wife Miriam’s death, he finally clears out her wardrobe and finds a gold charm bracelet he has never seen before, engraved with a telephone number he does not recognise. What follows sends a man who rarely leaves his own front path off across the country and beyond, learning that the woman he shared forty years with had a whole life he knew nothing about. Gentle, big-hearted, and quietly devastating in the nicest possible way.
Britt-Marie Was Here by Fredrik Backman (2016)
Since Backman started this whole thing, it seems only fair to hand him a second slot. Britt-Marie first turned up as a supporting character elsewhere in his work, all passive-aggressive tutting and an unhealthy relationship with bicarbonate of soda. Here she commands her own stage. Newly separated from her cheating husband, she takes a caretaker’s job in a dying little town called Borg and finds herself, to her horror, coaching a hopeless children’s football team. She is Ove in a cardigan, essentially, and watching her thaw is every bit as satisfying.
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce (2012)
Harold posts a letter to a dying former colleague, then keeps walking. Six hundred and something miles, in a pair of yachting shoes never designed for the job, the length of England on foot because he has convinced himself that as long as he keeps going, Queenie will keep living. It is a book about a very ordinary, very buttoned-up man cracking open one mile at a time. If you want more, I wrote a whole list of books like The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry a while back.
The Last Stop Video Shop by Keith A Pearson (2026)
Forgive me for sneaking one of my own onto the shelf, but this is the book of mine that shares the most DNA with Ove. Kevin Kershaw is on the achy side of fifty, divorced, and spends his days processing insurance claims with all the enthusiasm you would expect. Then he stumbles on what might be the last surviving video shop in England, and the enigmatic bloke behind the counter hands him a VHS tape. When the static clears, Kevin is watching a memory of his late mother, one nobody ever filmed. Same grief, same wasted years, same quietly closing door as Ove faces down. I just gave mine a membership card and a machine that still eats the odd tape.
Why we keep falling for the grump
There is a reason this particular character never goes out of fashion. The world is full of Oves. The bloke who stands at the window logging which neighbour put the bins out on the wrong day. The old boy at the garden centre who audibly sighs at anyone reversing a trailer. We have all met one, and most of us, on a bad morning, have been one.
What these books understand is that the crossness is rarely the point. It is the packaging round something a person cannot bear to say out loud. Grief. Loneliness. The particular ache of loving someone who is no longer there to hear it. Ove polishes his tools and reorganises the recycling because if he stops moving, even for a second, the silence in the house becomes unbearable. Give a curmudgeon enough pages and enough patience, and he will always, eventually, surprise you.
One last recommendation, closer to home
If Ove taught you anything, it is that the quietest, most closed-off people are often carrying the heaviest loads, and that the right person turning up at the right moment can change everything. That happens to be the territory I have spent a whole career mining.
Alongside The Last Stop Video Shop and its grieving, drifting Kevin, you might try Waiting in The Sky, about a lonely young man named Simon who has spent almost thirty years convinced he is an alien waiting for his ride home; readers who loved Eleanor Oliphant tend to take to him instantly. Or The Way We Thunk, in which a committed pessimist called Jake, at his very lowest on a railway bridge one evening, has an unexpected encounter that nudges him back towards the living. Different books, same belief that ordinary, cussed, hurting people deserve a second act. Ove certainly thought so, even if he would never have admitted it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is A Man Called Ove about?
It follows Ove, a fifty-nine-year-old widower in a small Swedish community who, grieving the loss of his wife Sonja, plans to end his own life. His attempts suffer constant interruption from his boisterous new neighbours, and their persistent intrusion slowly draws him back into a life he thought he had finished with.
What books are most like A Man Called Ove?
The nearest matches are Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman, The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper by Phaedra Patrick, and Fredrik Backman’s own Britt-Marie Was Here. All three feature a rigid, isolated character whose armour cracks once other people force their way in.
Is A Man Called Ove sad or funny?
Both, deliberately. Backman uses genuine laugh-out-loud comedy to lower your defences, then lands an emotional punch when you are least braced for it. That balance of humour and heartbreak is exactly why the book resonated with so many readers, and why the novels above tend to work the same way.
What should I read after A Man Called Ove if I want something British?
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson and The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce both bring that curmudgeon-with-a-secret-heart quality into a very English setting, all understatement and buttoned-up feeling gradually coming undone.
Are there any Keith A Pearson books like A Man Called Ove?
Yes. The Last Stop Video Shop shares the grief and second-chances territory most directly, while Waiting in The Sky explores loneliness and belonging through an isolated young man readers often compare to Eleanor Oliphant. Both trade in ordinary people quietly running out of road, then finding an unexpected reason to keep going.