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

Indelible Ink

Fiona McGregor · 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
❤️

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

Midlife CrisisElderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes · 152 pages

By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a

Midlife CrisisElderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
❤️
TattoosSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Beauty of Men

Andrew Holleran · 280 pages

Lark's mourning over the loss of his youth and of friends and acquaintances, his visits to his dying mother, and his actual and remembered visits to boat docks and baths comprise a narrative of loneliness, aging, and obsessive desire.

Midlife CrisisLiterary FictionElderly ProtagonistSelf-Discovery
❤️

The New Moon's Arms

Nalo Hopkinson · 329 pages

THE NEW MOON?S ARMS is a mainstream magical realism novel set in the Caribbean on the fictional island of Dolorosse. Calamity, born Chastity, has renamed herself in a way she feels is most fitting. She?s a 50-something grandmother whose mother disappeared when she was a teenager and whose father has just passed away as she begins menopause. With this physical change of life comes a return of a spe

Midlife CrisisElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

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.

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

Miss Garnet's Angel

Salley Vickers · 365 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

The Scenic Route

Binnie Kirshenbaum · 317 pages

Divorced, alone, and unexpectedly unemployed, Sylvia Landsman flees to Italy, where she meets Henry, a wistful, married, middle-aged expatriate. Taking off on a grand tour of Europe bankrolled with his wife's money, Henry and Sylvia follow a circuitous route around the continent—as Sylvia entertains Henry with stories of her peculiar family and her damaged friends, of dead ducks and Alma Mahler. H

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

Until I Find You

John Irving · 824 pages

TattoosSelf-DiscoveryLiterary 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.

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
❤️

Tirra Lirra by the River

Jessica Anderson · 160 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂
Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

The Forty Rules of Love

Elif Shafak, lyf shfq · 354 pages

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

Mary Ann in Autumn

Armistead Maupin · 320 pages

Midlife CrisisElderly ProtagonistLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

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

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

The English Major

Jim Harrison · 255 pages

Cliff, a sixty-something man, divorced and robbed of his farm by a late-blooming real estate shark of an ex-wife, takes a road trip across America, armed with a childhood puzzle of the United States and a mission to rename all the states and state birds to overcome the banal names men have given them. Cliff's adventures take him through a whirlwind affair with a former student from his high school

Elderly ProtagonistMidlife CrisisLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Summer Before the Dark

Doris Lessing · 248 pages

With her children grown and her husband away in America for several months, Kate Brown finds herself alone for the first time in twenty years.

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

Snakes and Earrings

Hitomi Kanehara · 128 pages

TattoosLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

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

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

Praisesong for the Widow

Paule Marshall · 256 pages

A middle-aged, successful Afro-American woman journeys to the small Caribbean isle of Carriacou where she discovers a past and a culture she learns to cherish.

Elderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

All Passion Spent

Vita Sackville-West · 296 pages

Elderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

Indecision

Benjamin Kunkel · 240 pages

Dwight B. Wilmerding is only twenty-eight, but he's having a midlife crisis. Of course, living a dissolute, dorm like existence in a tiny apartment and working in tech support at the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are not especially conducive to wisdom. And a few sessions of psychoanalysis conducted by his sister have distinctly failed to help with his biggest problem: a chronic inability to make up

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Uncommon Reader

Alan Bennett · 128 pages

The Uncommon Reader is none other than HM the Queen who drifts accidentally into reading when her corgis stray into a mobile library parked at Buckingham Palace. She reads widely ( JR Ackerley, Jean Genet, Ivy Compton Burnett and the classics) and intelligently. Her reading naturally changes her world view and her relationship with people like the oleaginous prime minister and his repellent advise

Elderly ProtagonistSelf-DiscoveryLiterary FictionFemale Lead
🙂

Steppenwolf

Hermann Hesse · 246 pages

A story that focuses on the loneliness and suffering of the protagonist, Harry Haller, who feels that he has no place in a world filled with meaningless frivolity. Having decided to take his own life a chance encounter causes him to change his views and he begins to learn ways to enjoy life. One of the most misunderstood of his novels the book is, according to Hesse, about the possibilities of tra

Midlife CrisisSelf-DiscoveryLiterary Fiction

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.