Books like Harold and Maude
Harold Chasen, a rich nineteen-year-old who stages fake suicides to shock his mother and goes to strangers' funerals, meets Maude, a seventy-nine-year-old who goes to funerals too and loves being alive.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Harold and Maude
Ways of Dying
Toloki, a professional mourner in a South African city in the violent years before democracy, meets Noria, a woman from his village, at the funeral of her son.
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
In 1950s Lima, Mario, an eighteen-year-old law student working at a radio station, falls for his uncle's divorced sister-in-law Julia, while the station's new Bolivian scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, takes over the city with his radio serials.
The Ponder Heart
Edna Earle Ponder, who runs the hotel in Clay, Mississippi, talks a stranger's ear off about her generous, childlike Uncle Daniel, his marriages and the trial that has the whole town watching.
Treasure Island!!!
A directionless young woman who works at a pet-lending store reads Treasure Island and resolves to live by its core values of boldness, resolution, independence and horn-blowing, which goes badly for everyone around her, parrot included.
Pretend I'm Dead
A housecleaner in Taos, New Mexico drifts through odd jobs and stranger relationships, narrating her life with deadpan humour and unacknowledged pain.
The First Bad Man
Cheryl Glickman, a fussy, solitary employee of a women's self-defence nonprofit in Los Angeles, agrees to let her bosses' sullen twenty-year-old daughter move in with her, and her ordered life comes apart.
No One Belongs Here More Than You
Sixteen stories about lonely, awkward people reaching for one another in odd ways, among them a woman who teaches swimming lessons to elderly neighbours on her kitchen floor.
The Graduate
Benjamin Braddock, home in California after college with no idea what to do next, is seduced by Mrs Robinson, the wife of his father's business partner.
The Celebrants
Five friends from college once promised to hold a funeral for one another while they were still alive to hear the eulogies, and nearly thirty years on, Jordan calls them to a house in Big Sur to use his.
Big Swiss
Greta, who transcribes the recorded sessions of a sex and relationship coach in Hudson, New York, falls for a client she knows only as Big Swiss, and when she meets her by chance at the dog park, she starts an affair built on a lie.
Skipping Christmas
Luther and Nora Krank, their daughter abroad for the year, decide to skip Christmas and go on a Caribbean cruise instead, and their neighbours on Hemlock Street take it badly.
Bowlaway
At the turn of the twentieth century, a woman named Bertha Truitt is found unconscious in a Massachusetts cemetery with a bowling ball and fifteen pounds of gold, and goes on to found a candlepin alley that outlasts her.