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Books like Here Goes Nothing

Steve Toltz · 2022 · Australia · literary fiction
★ 3.61 Goodreads · 3,913 ratings

A murdered man watches from a chaotic afterlife as his killer moves in with his pregnant widow, while a pandemic sweeps the world he left behind.

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12 books for readers of Here Goes Nothing

Damned

Chuck Palahniuk · 2011 · US 97% match ★ 3.41 Goodreads · 59,894 ratings
Book 1 of 2 in Damned
shares: afterlife, absurdist, dark humoured · ironic, easy read

Madison Spencer, the thirteen-year-old daughter of film stars, wakes up in Hell, which turns out to be run like a corrupt, bureaucratic high school, and sets out to make the best of it.

Quicksand

Steve Toltz · 2015 · Australia 97% match ★ 3.52 Goodreads · 3,734 ratings
shares: eccentric, absurdist, Australian, comic · funny, ironic

Liam, a failed writer turned police officer, tries to write a novel about his best friend Aldo, a man so unlucky that his life has become a catalogue of catastrophe.

A Fraction of the Whole

Steve Toltz · 2008 · Australia 97% match ★ 4.14 Goodreads · 25,331 ratings
shares: eccentric, Australian, dark humoured, comic · funny, ironic

Jasper Dean tells the story of his father Martin, a brilliant, paranoid philosopher full of grand schemes, and his uncle Terry, Australia's most beloved criminal, in a sprawling comic family saga.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Shehan Karunatilaka · 2022 · Sri Lanka 96% match ★ 3.89 Goodreads · 65,479 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, dark humoured, comic · funny, ironic

A war photographer wakes up dead in Colombo and has seven days to solve his own murder while navigating the Sri Lankan afterlife.

Bliss

Peter Carey · 1981 · Australia 96% match ★ 3.76 Goodreads · 3,662 ratings
shares: afterlife, Australian, dark humoured · funny, ironic

Harry Joy, an advertising man in an Australian city, is dead for nine minutes after a heart attack, and when he comes back he decides he is in Hell.

Lincoln in the Bardo

George Saunders · 2017 · US 94% match ★ 3.74 Goodreads · 186,693 ratings
shares: afterlife, ghost, dark humoured · uncanny, intimate

In February 1862, President Lincoln visits the crypt of his eleven-year-old son Willie, and a chorus of ghosts who refuse to admit they are dead watch the boy linger in the bardo.

A Confederacy of Dunces

John Kennedy Toole · 1980 · US 93% match ★ 3.89 Goodreads · 309,779 ratings
shares: eccentric, absurdist, dark humoured, comic · funny, ironic

A slothful, brilliant, hot-dog-cart-pushing medievalist wages war against modern New Orleans in one of literature's great comic antiheroes.

Severance

Ling Ma · 2018 · US 93% match ★ 3.87 Goodreads · 141,692 ratings
shares: epidemic, dark humoured, satirical · ironic, easy read

As Shen Fever spreads, trapping its victims in endless repetitions of their old routines, Candace Chen keeps going to her job at a New York publisher, until she joins a band of survivors heading for a mysterious facility.

Absurdistan

Gary Shteyngart · 2006 · US 93% match ★ 3.33 Goodreads · 14,162 ratings
shares: absurdist, dark humoured, satirical · funny, ironic

The 325-pound son of a Russian oligarch, barred from returning to his beloved New York, gets caught up in a civil war over oil in a tiny former Soviet republic.

Murphy

Samuel Beckett · 1938 · Ireland 92% match ★ 3.80 Goodreads · 6,730 ratings
shares: eccentric, absurdist, dark humoured, comic · funny, ironic

Murphy, an Irishman in London who likes nothing better than to tie himself naked in a rocking chair, is pushed by Celia, the prostitute who loves him, into finding a job, and finds one in a mental hospital.

Villa Incognito

Tom Robbins · 2003 · US 92% match ★ 3.69 Goodreads · 19,781 ratings
shares: absurdist, satirical, comic · funny, ironic

Three American soldiers listed as MIA in Vietnam have been living quietly in Laos for decades, until one of them is arrested in a Bangkok airport.

Dr. No

Percival Everett · 2022 · US 92% match ★ 3.68 Goodreads · 9,448 ratings
shares: absurdist, dark humoured, satirical · funny, ironic

A mathematics professor whose specialty is nothing is hired by a billionaire who wants to become a Bond villain and needs help stealing the nothing kept in Fort Knox.