Reading List

Authors Like Rachel Joyce

Q: What should I read after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?

Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons for a marriage on the road, Graham Swift’s Last Orders for a journey across England for a dead friend, and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove for the same mix of grief and humour.

Q: Is Harold Fry part of a series?

Yes. The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (2014) tells the same story from Queenie’s side, and Maureen (2022), also published as Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, follows Harold’s wife ten years later.

Q: Does Rachel Joyce have a new book?

Her newest novel is The Homemade God (2025), about four siblings who gather at Lake Orta in Italy after their father, the painter Vic Kemp, drowns there; it came out in paperback in 2026. No later book had been announced at the time of writing.

Q: Which Rachel Joyce book should I read first?

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), her first novel, is the usual starting point. If you want something lighter, The Music Shop (2017) is a love story set in a record shop in 1988.

Harold Fry is sixty-five, retired from a brewery and living in Kingsbridge on the Devon coast, when a letter arrives from Queenie Hennessy, a former colleague who is dying in a hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed. He walks out to post a reply and keeps going: 627 miles in 87 days, in yachting shoes. Rachel Joyce, born in 1962, had acted with the Royal Shakespeare Company and written more than twenty plays for BBC Radio 4 before The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012) was longlisted for the Booker Prize; she also wrote the screenplay for the 2023 film. Her later novels send an unmarried teacher to New Caledonia in search of a golden beetle and follow a record-shop owner who will only sell vinyl. In The Homemade God (2025) four adult siblings gather at a lake in Italy after their father, a famous painter, drowns. The ten writers below share her subject: ordinary people setting out, often late, to repair something.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary fiction · Journeys · Second chances · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Rachel Joyce, start with Anne Tyler, whose Breathing Lessons (1988) is a long-married couple’s one-day drive to a funeral. Graham Swift’s Last Orders (1996) is another English journey with a dead friend at its end, and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove (2012) has the same grief, humour and stubborn older man. Further down: the seventeenth-century pilgrim behind Harold, and a Nobel laureate whose road trip offers no redemption at all.

10 authors like Rachel Joyce

The first pilgrim

John Bunyan

English · Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

Bunyan (1628–1688) was a tinker and Puritan preacher from Bedfordshire who spent twelve years in Bedford jail for preaching without a licence. The Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory in which a man called Christian leaves his home and family and walks to the Celestial City, meeting helpers and temptations on the way. It became one of the most widely read books in English.

The ancestor of every English pilgrimage story, Harold Fry’s included: a man who sets out on foot with no preparation, meets strangers who test or help him, and finds the journey changes him more than the destination. Joyce’s version is secular and gentle, but the shape is Bunyan’s.

— Lisanne

Quiet lives, closely watched

Barbara Pym

British · Excellent Women (1952), Quartet in Autumn (1977)

Pym (1913–1980) wrote comedies of English parish life, spinsters and curates. Her publisher dropped her in 1963, and she was rediscovered in 1977 when Philip Larkin and Lord David Cecil both named her the most underrated writer of the century in the Times Literary Supplement. Quartet in Autumn, about four office workers near retirement, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year.

Pym is the English forerunner for Joyce’s overlooked people: single women, retired men, colleagues who never quite speak. Quartet in Autumn is especially close to Harold Fry’s world of people near the end of their working lives. Pym is drier and funnier; Joyce more openly tender.

— Lisanne

Every book by Barbara Pym →

A journey without redemption

Kazuo Ishiguro

British · The Remains of the Day (1989), Never Let Me Go (2005)

Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki in 1954 and moved to England as a child. In The Remains of the Day, which won the Booker Prize, an ageing butler, Stevens, drives across the West Country in 1956 to visit a former housekeeper, Miss Kenton, and slowly reveals what his lifetime of service cost him. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017.

The book that most complicates Harold Fry. Both are about a reserved Englishman who travels across the country towards a woman from his past, but Ishiguro withholds the healing that Joyce offers: Stevens understands his life too late, and the reader understands it before he does.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kazuo Ishiguro →

Long marriages, short journeys

Anne Tyler

American · The Accidental Tourist (1985), Breathing Lessons (1988)

Tyler was born in Minneapolis in 1941 and has set most of her novels in Baltimore. Breathing Lessons, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989, follows Maggie and Ira Moran, married for twenty-eight years, on a single day’s drive to a friend’s husband’s funeral. In The Accidental Tourist a travel writer who hates travel tries to live on after the death of his son.

Tyler and Joyce share a subject: a long marriage with a grief at its centre, seen with humour and patience. Breathing Lessons is the closest American relative of Harold and Maureen’s story, and The Accidental Tourist shares its lost child.

— Lisanne

Every book by Anne Tyler →

An English road trip with ashes

Graham Swift

British · Waterland (1983), Last Orders (1996)

Swift was born in London in 1949. Last Orders, which won the Booker Prize in 1996, follows four men from south London who drive to Margate to scatter the ashes of their friend Jack, a butcher, each of them remembering their own part in his life along the way.

A journey across England made for someone who is dead or dying, by people who are not used to talking about their feelings. Swift tells it in many voices, Joyce in one, but both let a short trip open up a whole life of regrets and loyalties.

— Lisanne

Kindness in a small town

Kent Haruf

American · Plainsong (1999), Our Souls at Night (2015)

Haruf (1943–2014) set all his novels in Holt, an invented town on the plains of eastern Colorado. Plainsong follows a pregnant teenager taken in by two elderly bachelor brothers on their cattle farm. Our Souls at Night, published after his death, is about a widow and widower in their seventies who decide to spend their nights together for company.

Haruf shares Joyce’s belief that ordinary decency can change a life, and her interest in people who find a second chance late. His prose is plainer and his landscape emptier, but readers who love Harold and Maureen tend to love Haruf’s old couples too.

— Lisanne

Every book by Kent Haruf →

Grief with a grumpy face

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.

The European writer closest to Joyce in tone: comedy and grief on the same page, and an unremarkable older man drawn back into life by strangers. Backman is broader and more sentimental; Joyce lets more of the sadness stay.

— Lisanne

Every book by Fredrik Backman →

Loneliness, with a way out

Gail Honeyman

Scottish · Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017)

Honeyman lives in Glasgow, and her first novel won the Costa First Novel Award in 2017. Eleanor Oliphant is a finance clerk in her thirties who lives by strict routines, and the novel follows the friendship with a colleague that slowly brings her past into the open.

Readers who loved Harold Fry often go on to Eleanor Oliphant, and the reason is method: a lonely, buttoned-up narrator, a slow reveal of an old wound, and the kindness of an ordinary stranger. Honeyman’s heroine is younger and funnier, but the arc is the same.

— Lisanne

Every book by Gail Honeyman →

An unlikely journey to London

Mark Haddon

British · The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)

Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone sets out to investigate the death of a neighbour’s dog in Swindon and ends up travelling alone to London, discovering the truth about his parents’ marriage on the way. The novel won the Whitbread Book of the Year.

Like Harold, Christopher is an unlikely traveller who sets off without preparation and learns about his family by leaving it. Haddon writes from inside a teenage mind and Joyce from inside an old one, but both make the ordinary British journey feel like an expedition.

— Lisanne

Hard women, softly told

Elizabeth Strout

American · Olive Kitteridge (2008), Olive, Again (2019)

Strout was born in Portland, Maine, in 1956. Olive Kitteridge, thirteen linked stories about a retired maths teacher in a small Maine town and the people around her, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009; Olive, Again follows her into old age and a second marriage.

Strout’s Olive is a cousin of Joyce’s Maureen: a sharp, difficult wife whose grief and love are hidden under her temper. Both writers give a second book to a character readers first met from the outside, and let her be understood.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elizabeth Strout →

Where to start if you loved Rachel Joyce

If you loved Harold Fry, read Anne Tyler.

Breathing Lessons is a long marriage in a single day’s drive.

If you want another English journey with a death at its end, read Graham Swift.

Last Orders: four men, one car, a friend’s ashes and the road to Margate.

If you want the darker version, read Kazuo Ishiguro.

The Remains of the Day is a road trip in which the realisation comes too late.

If you want the same warmth and humour, read Fredrik Backman or Gail Honeyman.

A Man Called Ove and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine are the usual next books for Joyce’s readers.

If you want to go back to Joyce herself, read Miss Benson’s Beetle or The Homemade God.

Miss Benson’s Beetle (2020) is her most adventurous novel; The Homemade God (2025) is her newest.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Rachel Joyce

Who writes like Rachel Joyce?

Anne Tyler, Kent Haruf and Elizabeth Strout write the same kind of tender, funny novels about long marriages and late second chances. Fredrik Backman and Gail Honeyman are the usual next reads for her fans, and Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro wrote the classic English journeys that Harold Fry’s walk echoes.

What should I read after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?

Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons for a marriage on the road, Graham Swift’s Last Orders for a journey across England for a dead friend, and Fredrik Backman’s A Man Called Ove for the same mix of grief and humour.

Is Harold Fry part of a series?

Yes. The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (2014) tells the same story from Queenie’s side, and Maureen (2022), also published as Maureen Fry and the Angel of the North, follows Harold’s wife ten years later.

Does Rachel Joyce have a new book?

Her newest novel is The Homemade God (2025), about four siblings who gather at Lake Orta in Italy after their father, the painter Vic Kemp, drowns there; it came out in paperback in 2026. No later book had been announced at the time of writing.

Which Rachel Joyce book should I read first?

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012), her first novel, is the usual starting point. If you want something lighter, The Music Shop (2017) is a love story set in a record shop in 1988.

Is Rachel Joyce like Fredrik Backman?

In tone, yes: both mix comedy and grief and write older characters drawn back into life by other people. Backman is broader and more sentimental; Joyce’s endings leave more sadness in place.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Rachel Joyce

10 authors like Rachel Joyce

John Bunyan

Barbara Pym

Kazuo Ishiguro

Anne Tyler

Graham Swift

Kent Haruf

Fredrik Backman

Gail Honeyman

Mark Haddon

Elizabeth Strout

Where to start if you loved Rachel Joyce

Frequently asked questions about authors like Rachel Joyce

Who writes like Rachel Joyce?

What should I read after The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry?

Is Harold Fry part of a series?

Does Rachel Joyce have a new book?

Which Rachel Joyce book should I read first?

Is Rachel Joyce like Fredrik Backman?

Lisanne Swart

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