If you were captivated by Nora Seed testing different versions of her life—from the failed pub dreams with Dan to that stark glaciologist stint in Svalbard—then Life After Life will hit the same nerve. Ursula Todd repeatedly restarts her life at each death, making different choices and watching the ripples reshape family, love, and even the war around her. Like Nora paging through the “Book of Regrets” with Mrs. Elm, Ursula learns how tiny pivots accumulate into meaning. It’s the same high-concept what-if, delivered with aching humanity.

Nora’s nights in the Midnight Library are framed by a quiet philosophical question: what makes a life worth keeping? In The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, Addie strikes a Faustian bargain for freedom and spends centuries being forgotten by everyone she meets—until she isn’t. As Nora weighs lives with rock-star acclaim or academic prestige against simple connection (like finally calling her brother Joe), Addie weighs freedom against belonging, art against oblivion. Both stories linger on memory, purpose, and the price of the choices we think will save us.

If the most affecting part of Nora’s journey was her raw interior struggle—those suicidal thoughts, the numbing regrets about Voltaire the cat, and the brave step toward help after her time with Mrs. Elm—then Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine offers that same deep dive into a wounded mind finding its way back. Eleanor’s rigid routines, awkward missteps, and gradually widening circle echo Nora’s halting move toward connection. It’s tender, sometimes painful, and ultimately redemptive in the same spirit.

If you loved how Nora’s story turns from despair to a gentle belief that small kindnesses and honest choices can remake a life, The House in the Cerulean Sea will delight you. Bureaucrat Linus Baker arrives on Marsyas Island with a rulebook and a lonely heart, and—like Nora choosing a life anchored in connection—he’s transformed by the care of Arthur Parnassus and a group of extraordinary children. It has that same soft glow of hope that made Nora’s final choice feel like sunlight after a storm.

Nora slips between lives from a hushed library overseen by Mrs. Elm; in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, people slip through time from a tiny Tokyo café—if they follow the rules and return before the coffee cools. As with Nora’s brief stays in the rock-star and Olympic-swimmer versions of herself, each visit here is limited, bittersweet, and illuminating: a chance to say what was unsaid or understand what once seemed fixed. It’s the same gentle, low-key magic used to heal very human regrets.