Authors Like Matt Haig

Charles Dickens

British · A Christmas Carol (1843), Great Expectations (1861)

Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812 and worked in a blacking factory as a boy while his father was held in a debtors’ prison. A Christmas Carol, in which the miser Ebenezer Scrooge is shown his past, present and future in a single night, sold out its first edition within days in December 1843.

Every book by Charles Dickens →

Kurt Vonnegut

American · Cat’s Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Vonnegut (1922–2007) was born in Indianapolis and, as an American prisoner of war, survived the firebombing of Dresden in 1945 in an underground meat locker. Slaughterhouse-Five sends Billy Pilgrim back and forth in time between Dresden and an alien zoo.

William Styron

American · Sophie's Choice (1979), Darkness Visible (1990)

Styron (1925–2006) was born in Newport News, Virginia, and won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel narrated by the leader of an 1831 slave rebellion that many Black critics condemned as racist stereotyping. Darkness Visible, which began as a 1989 Vanity Fair essay, describes the severe depression that first struck him in 1985.

Andrew Solomon

American · The Noonday Demon (2001), Far from the Tree (2012)

Solomon was born in New York in 1963. The Noonday Demon, which mixes his own depression with history, science and interviews, won the National Book Award in 2001. Far from the Tree draws on interviews with hundreds of families whose children are very different from their parents.

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Kate Atkinson

British · Life After Life (2013), A God in Ruins (2015)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951 and won the Whitbread Book of the Year with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995). In Life After Life, Ursula Todd, born in 1910, dies and is born again many times, living through the Blitz in different versions; it and A God in Ruins both won the Costa Novel Award.

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Claire North

British · The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (2014), Touch (2015)

Claire North is a pen name of the British writer Catherine Webb, born in 1986, who also writes as Kate Griffin. The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, about a man who lives his life over again each time he dies, won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 2015. As North, Webb also won the World Fantasy Award in 2017 for The Sudden Appearance of Hope.

Fredrik Backman

Swedish · A Man Called Ove (2012), Anxious People (2019)

Backman was born in Sweden in 1981 and worked as a blogger and columnist before his first novel. In A Man Called Ove a widower who has decided to die keeps being interrupted by his new neighbours; the novel became an international bestseller and was filmed in Sweden and the United States. Anxious People is about a bungled bank robbery that turns into a hostage situation at a flat viewing.

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Rachel Joyce

British · The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), The Music Shop (2017)

Joyce was an actor and a writer of radio drama before her first novel. In it, Harold Fry, a retired brewery salesman in Devon, receives a letter from a dying former colleague, Queenie Hennessy, and sets out to walk the length of England to see her. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and filmed in 2023.

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Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Japanese · Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015), Before Your Memory Fades (2018)

Kawaguchi was born in Osaka in 1971 and is also a screenwriter and director. Before the Coffee Gets Cold began as a stage play in 2010 and became a novel in 2015, translated into English by Geoffrey Trousselot in 2019. In Funiculi Funicula, a café in a Tokyo back alley, one seat lets a customer travel into the past, but nothing they do will change the present, and they must return before their coffee goes cold.

Oliver Burkeman

British · The Antidote (2012), Four Thousand Weeks (2021)

Burkeman, born in 1975, wrote the Guardian column “This Column Will Change Your Life” for many years. The Antidote argues against positive thinking and goal-setting in favour of uncertainty and failure; Four Thousand Weeks, named for the length of an average human life, argues against the fantasy of mastering time. Meditations for Mortals followed in 2024.

Every book by Oliver Burkeman →