If you liked
Books like Beartown
by Fredrik Backman
Beartown is Fredrik Backman at his most serious: a dying town that lives for its junior hockey team, and the assault that forces everyone to choose between the truth and the win. It is the Backman book that trades warmth for moral weight. If you want more novels about a community under pressure, read on.
The shortlist
What to read next
A Man Called Oveby Fredrik Backman
“A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman 2012 review. A fifty-nine-year-old Swedish curmudgeon plans his suicide until a young family moves in across the courtyard. Backman's debut.”
Anxious Peopleby Fredrik Backman
“Anxious People by Fredrik Backman 2020 review. A failed bank robber takes a Stockholm apartment-viewing hostage. Backman's structurally most ambitious novel and the basis for the Netflix limited series.”
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fineby Gail Honeyman
“Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman 2017 review. A thirty-year-old Glasgow office worker develops her first adult friendship. British Book Award Book of the Year 2018.”
Demon Copperheadby Barbara Kingsolver
“Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 2022 review. A Dickensian retelling of David Copperfield in the opioid-crisis Appalachia of the 1990s and 2000s. Pulitzer Prize and Women's Prize 2023 and Kingsolver's defining late-career novel.”
Shuggie Bainby Douglas Stuart
“Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart 2020 review. A young boy navigates childhood with his alcoholic mother in 1980s post-industrial Glasgow. Booker Prize winner.”
The Nickel Boysby Colson Whitehead
“The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead 2019 review. Two boys at the segregated Nickel Academy reform school in 1960s Florida, based on the real Dozier School. Pulitzer Prize 2020 and the canonical contemporary American novel on institutional violence against Black children.”
FAQ
Common questions about Beartown read-alikes
- I want more Fredrik Backman.
- A Man Called Ove and Anxious People are his warmer, funnier books, if Beartown left you wanting the gentler side of him. They keep the deep empathy for ordinary people but ease off the heartbreak.
- I want another novel about a whole community.
- Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver puts an Appalachian town and the opioid crisis under the same unblinking, big-hearted lens, and it won the Pulitzer. It is the strongest match for Beartown's portrait of a place and its people.
- I want the hard-childhood, hard-town story.
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead both look clearly at young people in unforgiving places. Heavier than Backman, but they share his refusal to look away from what a community does to its most vulnerable.
- I want the emotional-underdog Backman feeling elsewhere.
- Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman gives you the same lonely, wounded, secretly loveable narrator. A quieter book than Beartown, but it hits the Backman soft spot.
The original