AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Scenic Route

Binnie Kirshenbaum · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

Ellen in Pieces

Caroline Adderson · 315 pages

When middle-aged, single mother, Ellen McGinty sells the house she raised her daughters in and sets out in search of a new life, she runs directly into the path of a man twenty years younger. Told from multiple points of view, the story explores concepts of love, the nature of regret and the hope of recovery.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Mermaid Chair

Sue Monk Kidd · 335 pages

It's about a woman named Jessie Sullivan who has to return to her former home Egret island to take care of her mother. Within a monastery resides a chair carved with mermaids that supposedly was dedicated to a mermaid.Jessie meet a monk and falls for him although she is already married.....

Character-DrivenMidlife CrisisLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
❤️
Character-DrivenMidlife CrisisLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Art of Fielding

Chad Harbach · 512 pages

At Westish College, a small school on the shore of Lake Michigan, baseball star Henry Skrimshander seems destined for big league stardom. But when a routine throw goes disastrously off course, the fates of five people are upended. Henry’s fight against self-doubt threatens to ruin his future. College president Guert Affenlight, a longtime bachelor, has fallen unexpectedly and helplessly in love

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Rebecca Miller · 239 pages

Pippa seems to have everything in life. But suddenly she finds her world beginning to unravel. Amid the buzzing lawnmowers and suburban coffee mornings, she starts to wonder how she came to be in this place. The answer is a story of wild youth, unexpected encounters, affairs and betrayals, and the dangerous security of marriage. It brilliantly reveals the challenges of modern life - and all the po

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

Disobedience

Naomi Alderman · 240 pages

By the age of 32, Ronit has left London and transformed her life. She has become a cigarette-smoking, wise-cracking, New York career woman, who is in love with a married man.But when Ronit's father dies she is called back into the very different world of her childhood, a world she thought she had left far behind. The orthodox Jewish suburb of Hendon, north London is outraged by Ronit and her prov

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
❤️

Ladder of Years

Anne Tyler · 336 pages

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKBALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION, declares the headline. Forty-year-old Delia Grinstead is last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing nothing more than a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To her husband and three almost-grown children, she has vanished without trace or reason. But for Delia, who f

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenContemporary FictionMidlife Crisis
❤️

Flight Behavior

Barbara Kingsolver · 436 pages

Written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Orange Prize-winning author of The Lacuna and million-selling The Poisonwood Bible, and brought to you by FaberShop, Flight Behaviour is a novel about catastrophe and denial. On the Appalachian Mountains above her home, a young mother discovers a beautiful and terrible marvel of nature. As the world around her is suddenly transformed by a seeming miracle, can the

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

The Doctor's Daughter

Hilma Wolitzer · 288 pages

Alice Brill struggles to come to terms with the hidden truths of her life--her unrealized aspirations as a writer, her lackadaisical marriage, her troubled younger son, and her father, who is slipping into senility in a nursing home.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
❤️

Adultery

Paulo Coelho · 255 pages

"A woman around her thirties begins to question the routine and predictability of her days. In everybody's eyes, she has a perfect life: a solid and stable marriage, a loving husband, sweet and well-behaved children and a job as a journalist she can't complain about. However, she can no longer bear the necessary effort to fake happiness when all she feels in life is an enormous apathy. All that ch

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
❤️

Less

Andrew Sean Greer · 273 pages

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
🙂

Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout · 288 pages

Olive Kitteridge: indomitable, compassionate and often unpredictable. A retired schoolteacher in a small coastal town in Maine, as she grows older she struggles to make sense of the changes in her life. She is a woman who sees into the hearts of those around her, their triumphs and tragedies. We meet her stoic husband, bound to her in a marriage both broken and strong, and a young man who aches

Literary FictionMidlife CrisisCharacter-DrivenContemporary Fiction
🙂

Five Days

Douglas Kennedy · 416 pages

For twenty years, Laura has been a good wife and mother. She's supported her husband through redundancy, she's worried about her son, she's encouraged her daughter. She has been constant, caring and selfless. She's stopped thinking about her own dreams, the places she'd like to go and the books she'd like to talk about. But a chance meeting with a man in a hotel lobby - and the five days that foll

Character-DrivenMidlife CrisisLiterary FictionContemporary Fiction
🙂

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

Dorthe Nors · 192 pages

Mirror, shoulder, signal is a poignant, sharp-witted tale of one woman's journey in search of herself when there's no one to ask for directions.

Literary FictionCharacter-DrivenMidlife CrisisSelf-Discovery
🙂

While I Was Gone

Sue Miller · 291 pages

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
🙂

Paradise Park

Allegra Goodman · 360 pages

Allegra Goodman has delighted readers with her critically acclaimed collections Total Immersion and The Family Markowitz, and her celebrated first novel, Kaaterskill Falls, which was a national bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Abandoned by her folk-dancing partner, Gary, in a Honolulu hotel room, Sharon realizes she could return to Boston--and her estranged family--or listen to that

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

The Vacationers

Emma Straub · 372 pages

Celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary and their daughter's high-school graduation during a two-week vacation in Mallorca, Franny and Jim Post confront old secrets, hurts, and rivalries that reveal sides of themselves they try to conceal.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionMidlife CrisisContemporary Fiction
🙂

Paris, He Said

Christine Sneed · 324 pages

"Jayne Marcus feels directionless and is struggling to pay her bills in Manhattan when she is given the opportunity to move to Paris with her wealthy lover and benefactor, Laurent Moller, who owns and operates two art galleries, one in New York, the other in Paris. He offers her the time and financial support she needs to begin her career as a painter and also challenges her to see who and what sh

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
🙂

Blueprints for Building Better Girls: Fiction

Elissa Schappell · 304 pages

"From the acclaimed author of Use Me, eight provocative and darkly funny linked stories that explore the commonly shared, but rarely spoken of experiences that build girls into women and women into wives and mothers, mapping America's shifting cultural landscape from the late 1970s to the present day"--

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
🙂

The Sixteen Pleasures

Robert Hellenga · 368 pages

The Italians called them "Mud Angels," the young foreigners who came to Florence in 1966 to save the city's treasured art from the Arno's flooded banks. American volunteer Margot Harrington was one of them, finding her niche in the waterlogged library of a Carmelite convent. Within its walls she discovered a priceless Renaissance masterwork: a sensuous volume of sixteen erotic poems and drawings.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
🙂

The Dive From Clausen's Pier

Ann Packer · 413 pages

Twenty-three-year-old Carrie Bell feels suffocated and wants to leave her life in Wisconsin, but when her fiancé is paralyzed in a diving accident, she must ask, how much do we owe the people we love? How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? These questions lie at the heart of Ann Packer's intimate and emotionally thrilling new

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
🙂

State of Wonder

Ann Patchett · 353 pages

As Dr. Marina Singh embarks upon an uncertain odyssey into the insect-infested Amazon, she will be forced to surrender herself to the lush but forbidding world that awaits within the jungle. Charged with finding her former mentor Dr. Annick Swenson, a researcher who has disappeared while working on a valuable new drug, she will have to confront her own memories of tragedy and sacrifice as she jour

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionSelf-Discovery
🙂

The Red Car

Marcy Dermansky · 206 pages

When Leah's former boss and mentor, Judy, dies in an accident and leaves Leah her red sports car, Leah takes off to San Francisco to claim the car, revisiting past lives and loves in a self she abandoned years ago.

Character-DrivenLiterary FictionContemporary FictionFemale Lead

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.