Matt Haig’s The Humans begins with an alien arriving naked on a road outside Cambridge, appalled by more or less everything. Clothes baffle him. Noses baffle him. Our habit of covering food in other food baffles him most of all. A few hundred pages later, the same creature has fallen hopelessly for a wife, a teenage son, a scruffy dog and a jar of peanut butter, and concluded that our daft little species might be worth the bother after all.
I spend my working life sending ordinary people into extraordinary situations. Haig runs the trick backwards: he drops something extraordinary into the most ordinary life imaginable, then questions why anyone would choose to live this way. Once you’ve finished it, you tend to want that feeling again … the world made strange, then quietly lovely. So here are the novels I’d press into your hands next, each one using the same ingredients as Haig’s bestseller.
What makes a proper The Humans readalike
Alien invasions are ten a penny; that isn’t the appeal here. The magic of Haig’s novel is the outsider who studies us with fresh eyes and slowly falls for the small stuff: peanut butter, Emily Dickinson, the way a dog loves you for no good reason. The best companions share that DNA. Some feature actual aliens or robots. Others simply hand the story to a narrator wired differently from everyone around them. All of them use that outside view to smuggle in a truth about being human.
Waiting in The Sky by Keith A Pearson
Yes, one of mine … and I’d leave it off the list if the fit were anything short of uncanny. Simon Armstrong has spent almost thirty years convinced he isn’t of this world. He shares a house with an antisocial cat called Merle, keeps human contact to a bare minimum, and waits patiently for “Them” to arrive and take him home; a man at a rural bus stop who long ago accepted the timetable is a work of fiction. Then he stumbles on a clue about who he really is. Like The Humans, it uses the alien-on-Earth premise to sneak up on something tender about loneliness and belonging. The truth, when it lands, stretches deeper than interstellar space.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Klara is an Artificial Friend, a solar-powered companion robot who begins the novel in a shop window, watching passers-by with the patient attention of someone learning a foreign language entirely from adverts. When a family takes her home, she brings that same guileless wonder to their kitchen, their arguments and their heartbreak. Ishiguro wrote Klara as his first novel after winning the Nobel Prize, and she ranks among the most quietly devastating narrators in modern fiction: a machine who grasps love more clearly than the humans paying for her. If Haig’s alien taught you to notice the ordinary, Klara will have you weeping over sunlight.
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata
Keiko Furukura, thirty-six, has worked the same Tokyo convenience store for eighteen years. She copies her colleagues’ clothes and speech to pass as a normal person, because the shop’s staff manual is the only rulebook for human behaviour she has ever found reliable. Everyone around her keeps asking why she won’t marry, or aim higher, or want the things a woman her age supposedly should; Keiko genuinely cannot see the point. Sayaka Murata, in Ginny Tapley Takemori’s crisp English translation, writes the funniest and most unsettling outsider since Haig’s alien filed his first field report. Short, strange and oddly liberating.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Christopher Boone, fifteen, finds a neighbour’s dog dead on the lawn and decides to investigate, in the manner of Sherlock Holmes and with roughly the same tolerance for other people’s nonsense. Mark Haddon never labels his narrator, yet Christopher meets the world with a logic so precise it makes the rest of us look faintly deranged: he can reel off prime numbers for fun but cannot fathom why anyone would lie about their feelings. It shares with The Humans that priceless double vision: the everyday turning alien, the alien turning oddly sensible.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Eleanor Oliphant has her routines, her frozen pizza, her weekend vodka and precisely no idea how to talk to another human being without causing minor structural damage to the conversation. Gail Honeyman’s debut hands us a narrator so socially adrift that a simple lunch reads like first contact between species. Underneath the comedy sits real pain and, in time, real repair. Anyone who loved the slow thaw of Haig’s alien, the creeping realisation that other people might actually be the point, will recognise Eleanor at once. Do keep tissues within reach.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
If The Humans leaves you wanting more Haig, this is the obvious next stop. Nora Seed, at the lowest point of her life, finds herself in a library sitting somewhere between living and dying, every shelf holding a version of the life she might have led had she chosen differently. It swaps aliens for infinite parallel selves, yet the engine underneath runs identically: a soul learning, against its own better judgement, that an ordinary human life brims with reasons to stay. Haig writes hope without ever tipping into schmaltz, which is a good deal harder than he makes it look.
One more, if the outsider is what you love
Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove works the same seam from a different angle: not an alien, just a widower so out of step with the modern world he might as well hail from another one, until a pregnant neighbour and a stray cat drag him back into the human race. If that flavour of prickly, bewildered warmth is your thing, I’ve rounded up plenty more in my lists of books like A Man Called Ove and books like The Rosie Project.
So what are we really reading for?
Strip away the aliens, the robots and the convenience-store name badges and every book on this list plays the same sly hand. It borrows an outsider’s eyes so it can point you back at the stuff you stopped noticing years ago: a decent cup of coffee, a person who’s pleased to see you, the small mad miracle of a Monday morning without drama. We seem to need the alien to point at it before we remember to look. That, I think, is why these stories resonate with readers.
If the alien-on-Earth premise is the hook for you, I’ve written my own version, and it remains one of the most personal things I’ve published. Waiting in The Sky follows Simon Armstrong, a man who has spent nearly three decades certain he’s from somewhere else, right up until the day the truth ambushes him. For a quieter, sadder cousin of that story, The Last Stop Video Shop hands a lonely, middle-aged insurance clerk a VHS tape of a memory that never happened, and asks whether he’d rather keep rewinding his life or press eject. Both, like The Humans, circle the same daft, gorgeous business of being human … and deciding to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Humans by Matt Haig about?
The Humans follows an alien from an advanced civilisation who takes over the body of Cambridge mathematician Andrew Martin, in order to erase a mathematical breakthrough humanity supposedly isn’t ready for. The visitor finds human life repellent at first, then slowly falls for Martin’s family, for music and poetry and peanut butter, and begins to question his mission. Matt Haig published it in 2013, and it remains his warmest, funniest look at what makes our species worth saving.
What should I read if I loved The Humans?
For the closest match in spirit, try Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, whose robot narrator watches humanity with heartbreaking innocence, or Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman, whose narrator feels like a visitor from another planet in her own life. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine both share Haig’s gift for making the ordinary world look wonderfully strange through an outsider’s eyes.
Are there any funny books like The Humans?
Plenty. The Humans balances real emotion with genuine comedy, and the same holds for Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Convenience Store Woman, both of which mine deadpan laughs from a narrator who cannot read a social situation to save her life. My own novel Waiting in The Sky leans the same way: its hero believes he’s an alien awaiting extraction, which produces exactly the sort of awkward, quietly moving encounters you would expect.
Is Waiting in The Sky similar to The Humans?
Very. Both novels build on the alien-on-Earth premise to explore loneliness and belonging, and both use that outsider’s viewpoint to say something tender about ordinary human life. Where Haig’s alien arrives fully grown and appalled, my character Simon Armstrong has spent almost thirty years quietly certain he’s not one of us, waiting for a rescue that never comes. If The Humans moved you, Waiting in The Sky travels very similar ground, with a distinctly British accent.
What other Matt Haig books are like The Humans?
The Midnight Library is the natural companion piece: another warm, philosophical novel about a soul learning that an ordinary life holds more than enough reason to keep going. Haig’s non-fiction Reasons to Stay Alive covers similar emotional territory from a personal angle. Between the two, you have the full range of what makes The Humans so beloved: the humour, the ache, and the stubborn hope underneath.