If what hooked you was how, on New Year’s Day, no one dies and Saramago turns that premise into a meditation on meaning—then narrows to death’s violet letters and her bond with the cellist—The Brief History of the Dead will resonate. Brockmeier imagines a city where the dead persist only as long as someone among the living remembers them, following Laura Byrd’s polar journey while society and the afterlife shift around her. Like the state–church negotiations and the “maphia” euthanasia ring in Death with Interruptions, this book probes how communities, ethics, and memory reorganize when mortality’s rules change.

If you smiled at Saramago’s deadpan scenes of ministries, bishops, and undertakers scrambling after death stops—and at the way Death herself fumbles with human feelings for the cellist—then Mort is a delight. Here, Death hires an apprentice, Mort, and the job’s tidy certainties unravel when Mort decides not to collect a princess. The fallout—bureaucratic bottlenecks, moral quandaries, and a very personable Grim Reaper—mirrors the comic, tender tension you enjoyed in the violet-letter era when fate becomes a matter of administration and empathy.

If the surreal audacity of death personified—sending missives, going incognito, and upending a whole country’s routines—was your favorite part, The Master and Margarita hits the same pleasure centers. Woland and his chaotic entourage descend on Moscow, staging a magic show that humiliates the pious and the powerful, much as Saramago skewers the prime minister–cardinal alliance and the funeral trade when immortality breaks the script. It’s exuberant, uncanny, and uses the fantastic to pry open the hypocrisies of real institutions.

If you loved the genial, omniscient voice that drifts from officials to families to Death and finally lingers with the cellist—offering asides, loops, and sly commentary—Midnight’s Children offers similar narrative pleasures. Saleem Sinai tells his story with panoramic omniscience, linking his life and the telepathic midnight-born to the fate of a nation. The voice is expansive and mischievous, echoing the way Saramago’s narrator can pivot from the “maphia” to ministers to a single apartment where Death learns what sleep feels like.

If the funniest parts for you were institutional absurdities—the state and the church negotiating procedures for a world without funerals, or the grim entrepreneurial boom around the undying—then White Noise is a sharp next step. After an “airborne toxic event,” Jack Gladney’s town is flooded with experts, warnings, and dubious fixes, while Jack and Babette chase a pill that promises freedom from fear of death. It’s the same comic-bleak register as the panic and profiteering that erupt between New Year’s Day and the return of those violet envelopes.