Life after Life is a six-episode series by Ricky Gervais. A Man Called Ove is a novel by Fredrick Backman.

Both film and novel feature a man whose wife has recently died.

Tony, played by Ricky Gervais who wrote the story, watches videos left by his wife and considers suicide--his overwhelming grief leaving him with no reason to live without her. "I"d rather be nowhere with her than somewhere with anyone else," he says.

At the cemetery, he meets a recently widowed older woman who befriends him and advises him to keep on living and do what he can to leave his little patch of world a better place. At his father's nursing home, he meets a compassionate nurse.  As a reporter for the local free paper,  he meets a drug addict, a prostitute, and a cast of quirky characters in his town, each of whom impact him in some way.

A Man Called Ove is a story about an older man, also recently widowed.  I'm not far into the book, but I'm loving the way the author captures the inner life of a man struggling to find meaning without the woman he loves, a man like Tony in Life After Life who's considering suicide.

"Won't it be nice to slow down a bit?" they said to Ove yesterday at work.  While explaining that there was a lack of employment prospects and so they were "retiring the older generation."  A third of a century at the same workplace, and that's how they refer to Ove.  Suddenly he's a bloody "generation." Because nowadays people are all thirty-one and wear too-tight trousers and no longer drink normal coffee.  And don't want to take responsibility.  A shed-load of men with elaborate beards, changing jobs and changing wives and changing their car makes.  Just like that.  Whenever they feel like it.