What did you love about Forrest Gump?
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
The 100-Year-Old Man gives you another person who wanders through history changing everything without trying to.
A Man Called Ove
A Man Called Ove shows you what someone becomes when the person they loved kept slipping away.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Curious Incident follows a boy who processes the world differently but sees truths everyone else missed.
6 books like Forrest Gump
- A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman — A curmudgeonly old man who lives by rigid rules finds his solitary life disrupted by loud, messy nei…
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving — A tiny, strange-voiced boy believes God has a plan for him — and the novel follows his life from a f…
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon — A fifteen-year-old with an unnamed condition (the novel implies autism) investigates a neighbor's mu…
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer — A nine-year-old boy finds a key in his dead father's closet after 9/11 and goes door to door across …
- The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson — Allan Karlsson escapes his nursing home on his hundredth birthday and stumbles into a suitcase full …
- The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin — A misanthropic bookshop owner finds a toddler abandoned in his store and reluctantly raises her, and…
Picked for the feeling of Forrest Gump, not its genre. Each one is explained below. One movie isn’t much to go on: rate four more and the books are picked for you.
Why these books
Forrest Gump works because it uses a man who doesn't understand the world to illuminate the world perfectly — his simplicity cuts through the noise of every decade he stumbles through. These books share that trick: protagonists whose unusual perspective reveals truths that the rest of us are too sophisticated to see, wrapped in stories that cover decades of life in a single generous sweep.
A Man Called Ove
A curmudgeonly old man who lives by rigid rules finds his solitary life disrupted by loud, messy neighbors — and gradually reveals the love story and losses that made him this way. Backman shares Zemeckis's gift for making you laugh and then blindsiding you with emotion. Ove is Forrest's opposite in temperament but his twin in function: a simple man whose stubbornness turns out to be a form of devotion.
Read it with your book club →
A Prayer for Owen Meany
A tiny, strange-voiced boy believes God has a plan for him — and the novel follows his life from a fatal Little League game through the Vietnam era, as his bizarre conviction slowly proves to be right. Irving shares the film's structure (one extraordinary life as a lens for American history) and its emotional strategy: you think you're reading a comedy until it hits you that you're reading a tragedy told by someone too innocent to know the difference.
Read it with your book club →
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
A fifteen-year-old with an unnamed condition (the novel implies autism) investigates a neighbor's murdered dog and uncovers family secrets he's not equipped to process. Haddon shares the Forrest Gump move of using a protagonist who sees the world differently to make the reader see it differently too — but where Forrest is warm and open, Christopher is precise and logical, and the contrast with the messy adult world around him is equally devastating.
Read it with your book club →
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
A nine-year-old boy finds a key in his dead father's closet after 9/11 and goes door to door across New York trying every lock. Foer uses a child's logic to navigate adult grief the way Zemeckis uses Forrest's innocence to navigate Vietnam and Watergate. The quest is impossible and irrational and exactly the right response to a loss too big to process rationally.
Read it with your book club →
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Allan Karlsson escapes his nursing home on his hundredth birthday and stumbles into a suitcase full of cash — then the novel flashes back through a life where he accidentally participated in the Manhattan Project, the Cold War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's the Swedish Forrest Gump, lighter and more deliberately absurd, but built on the same chassis: an ordinary man blundering through the twentieth century's biggest moments.
Read it with your book club →
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
A misanthropic bookshop owner finds a toddler abandoned in his store and reluctantly raises her, and over the years his life fills back up with the connections he'd sworn off. Zevin's novel has the same arc as Forrest and Jenny's story: someone who seems ill-suited for love and parenthood turns out to be made for it, and the realization arrives so gradually you don't notice you're crying.
Read it with your book club →Is Forrest Gump based on a book?
Forrest Gump is based on Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump.
What should I read if I loved Forrest Gump?
Start with A Man Called Ove, A Prayer for Owen Meany and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. 6 books on this page were picked for the feeling of Forrest Gump, not its genre, with a reason for each.
Which book is most like Forrest Gump?
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. A curmudgeonly old man who lives by rigid rules finds his solitary life disrupted by loud, messy neighbors — and gradually reveals the love story and losses that made him this way.
These are for everyone who loved Forrest Gump. Want books picked for you?
Someone who loved Forrest Gump and Dune: Part Two reads different books from someone who loved Forrest Gump and Howl's Moving Castle. One movie isn’t much to go on. Rate four more — Forrest Gump already counts — and the books are picked for you.
Rate four more moviesOr read it with your book club and talk about it while you’re still reading.