The 8 books on this stack
Tap “Want to read” on the ones that catch your eye. No account needed, we'll keep them for you.
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Max Porter 2015
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times /Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize. 'Amazing and unforgettable.' THE TIMES 'Dazzlingly good.' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'Unlike anything I've read before.' GUARDIAN 'Captivating, poetic, and surprising.' CILLIAN MURPHY In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness. In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family and threatens to stay until they no longer need him. This extraordinary debut, full of unexpected humour and emotional truth, marks the arrival of a thrilling and significant new talent.
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Sonali Deraniyagala 2013
A profoundly moving, piercingly frank memoir of learning to live with grief--that begins in Sri Lanka on Dec. 26, 2004, when the author lost her parents, her husband, and her two young sons in the tsunami she miraculously survived.
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Michelle Zauner 2020
From the indie rockstar Japanese Breakfast, an unflinching, deeply moving memoir about growing up dual-heritage, Korean food, losing her Korean mother, and forging her own identity. 'I bawled my eyes out, but I also loved it and I hope you do too' - Dua Lipa 'Incredible . . . So, so emotional' - Natalie Portman ' Crying In H Mart destroyed me . . . It's fantastic' - Olivia Rodrigo In this story of family and food, grief and joy, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up the only Asian-American kid at her school; of struggling with her mother's expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; and of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaped plates of food. But, as she grew up, her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and honest, Michelle Zauner's voice is as alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share and reread. What readers are saying about Crying in H Mart : 'I recommend this for anyone who likes memoirs, food, and who's ever felt lonely' (*****) 'I was captivated by this coming-of-age story which resonated with mine and other friends' stories' (*****) 'A must for people looking to be hooked in memories that span between joy, sadness and love' (*****) *Crying in H Mart was a #1 New York Times bestseller w/c 17.04.2023
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Helen Macdonald 2006
Soon to be a Major Motion Picture starring Claire Foy and Brendan Gleeson One of the New York Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century One of Kirkus Reviews’s Best Books of the 21st Century One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year One of Slate's 50 Best Nonfiction Books of the Last 25 Years ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20) The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of nature's most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel's temperament mirrors Helen's own state of grief after her father's death, and together raptor and human "discover the pain and beauty of being alive" (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from one of our most unique and transcendent voices.
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C. S. Lewis 1961
In April 1956, C.S. Lewis, a confirmed bachelor, married Joy Davidman, an American poet with two small children. After four brief, intensely happy years, Lewis found himself alone again, and inconsolable. To defend himself against the loss of belief in God, Lewis wrote this journal, an eloquent statement of rediscovered faith. In it he freely confesses his doubts, his rage, and his awareness of human frailty. In it he finds again the way back to life.
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Julian Barnes 2013
Julian Barnes, author of the Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending, gives us his most powerfully moving book yet, beginning in the nineteenth century and leading seamlessly into an entirely personal account of loss -- making Levels of Life an immediate classic on the subject of grief.
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Meghan O'Rourke 2011
"Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From the author of The Invisible Kingdom , one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.
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Joan Didion 2005
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage—and a life, in good times and bad—that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later—the night before New Year’s Eve—the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This powerful book is Didion’ s attempt to make sense of the “weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself.