What is a book you think deserves a sequel?
Some books do not need a sequel. They need another perspective.
I wrote recently about how much I enjoyed Anne Tyler’s Breathing Lessons https://theafterword.blog/2026/05/16/a-single-day/. It is a novel about one ordinary day in the life of a middle-aged married couple, Maggie and Ira Moran, as they drive from Baltimore to Pennsylvania for the funeral of a friend’s husband.
That does not sound like much of a plot, but Anne Tyler is very good at finding the weight of ordinary things. A car trip becomes a journey through a marriage. Old arguments return. Memories surface. Disappointments are exposed. So are the stubborn affections that have kept Maggie and Ira together.
Maggie is the more vivid presence. She is impulsive, hopeful, meddlesome, and convinced she can repair other people’s lives if she just tries hard enough. Ira is quieter, more restrained, and often exasperated by her.
That is why I would love to read the same story from Ira’s perspective. Not because I need to know what happened next. I would simply like to know what he was thinking.
His version would probably be less dramatic. But I suspect it would reveal the quieter griefs and accommodations beneath a long relationship. It might show what it costs to live beside someone like Maggie. Her hopefulness is generous, but it can also be exhausting. Her desire to mend things comes from love, but it can make life more complicated. Ira sees that. He knows how often life can’t be fixed.
But his perspective might also show why he stays. Long relationships are not held together only by romance or compatibility. They are held together by shared history, accumulated forgiveness, private jokes, old wounds, irritation, habit, loyalty, and the strange fact that another person has become part of your soul.
Ira’s silence may not be emptiness. It may be full of things he has learned not to say. It may contain disappointment, tenderness, fatigue, affection, and a kind of love that no longer needs to announce itself.
The Afterword 
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