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Best Books About Grief

The most powerful books about grief, loss, and the long road back — reviewed by BookBrowse’s expert editors.

Grief is one of the most universal and least-mapped human experiences. The books that handle it best don’t offer easy comfort — they sit with you in the dark, bearing witness to loss without rushing toward resolution. Whether you’re navigating your own mourning or searching for language to give to someone you love, literature about grief does something no self-help book can: it makes you feel less alone in an experience that can be profoundly isolating.

The titles on this list range from searing memoir to quiet literary fiction, from the immediacy of sudden loss to the slow erosion of a long illness. Some are famous, some are surprises. All of them have been reviewed in full by BookBrowse’s expert editors, with discussion questions for readers who want to go deeper. These are the books about grief that endure — and that readers return to again and again.

The Year of Magical Thinking

by Joan Didion

'An act of consummate literary bravery, a writer known for her clarity allowing us to watch her mind as it becomes clouded with grief.'

H Is for Hawk

by Helen Macdonald

Winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award

Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

The Japanese Breakfast frontman’s memoir about losing her Korean mother to cancer is food memoir, grief memoir, and immigrant story in one. Zauner writes about smell and taste as containers for love — and what it means to carry a whole culture inside the person you’re mourning.

A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

Originally published under a pseudonym, Lewis’s journal of the months after his wife’s death shocked readers who expected comfort from the author of Narnia. Instead they got fury, doubt, and eventually a fragile, hard-won peace. Short, shattering, and unlike anything else on this list.

Wave

by Sonali Deraniyagala

A brave, intimate, beautifully crafted memoir by a survivor of the tsunami that struck the Sri Lankan coast in 2004 and took her entire family.

When Breath Becomes Air

by Paul Kalanithi

Winner of the 2016 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award

For readers of Atul Gawande, Andrew Solomon, and Anne Lamott, a profoundly moving, exquisitely observed memoir by a young neurosurgeon faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis who attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

by Max Porter

Experimental in form — part poetry, part prose, part play — Porter’s debut imagines Ted Hughes’s crow arriving to look after a grieving father and his two boys. Strange, funny, achingly sad, it expands what a book about grief can look like.

The Lovely Bones

by Alice Sebold

A luminous and astonishing novel that builds out of grief the most hopeful of stories. In the hands of a brilliant new writer, this story of the worst thing a family can face is transformed into a suspenseful and even funny novel about love, memory, joy, heaven, and healing.

Ordinary People

by Judith Guest

A suburban family attempts to reassemble itself after the death of one son and his brother’s subsequent suicide attempt. Guest’s quiet, precise novel was the first work of fiction published by Viking Press in 26 years — and won the National Book Award. It remains the definitive literary account of family grief.

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Levels of Life

by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart.