Love, loss, grief: A reading list

Editor’s note: Grief literature can feel overwhelming and painful to even get through. But further down that road lies a world of collective catharsis. In this reading list, we reckon with the many faces of grief: mourning lovers and friends; the unimaginable loss of a child; the grief of losing a parent; the death of a beloved pet. From classic novels to memoirs and short stories, this list features emotional and powerful stories about putting parts of yourself back together and falling apart.

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Fiction

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

Theo is 13 when he survives a bombing at the museum. His mother does not. In the rubble, an elderly, dying man urges Theo to take Fabritius's The Goldfinch—his mother’s favourite—along with several other cryptic messages that Theo is unable to decode. In a daze, he picks up the painting. He has just committed a crime.

The coming-of-age story follows Theo as he grows older, winding through his adolescence and adulthood, all anchored by this one crime, this one painting. Filled with moments of guilt, despair, grief, longing, and, of course, growing up, this 800-page novel is emotionally rich, sometimes even frustrating, and sometimes filled with so much aching that Theo’s grief seeps through the pages.

A Man Called Ove by Frederik Backman (2012)

A 59-year-old irritable man lives alone. His wife has died and his house looks like there is little space for anybody else. He tries, unsuccessfully and several times, killing himself. And yet, Backman infuses this premise with unexpected empathy. As new neighbours move in, a pregnant woman among that, something in Ove’s heart breaks. He too was a young man once, in love with a girl he met. Loved her enough to sacrifice meals for her; loved her enough to not want to be living after her death. 

In his debut novel, the author straddles the weight of grief with the joy of companionship. It is a delicate balance and the merit of his writing ensures that the readers don’t feel shortchanged. 

Nora Webster by Colm Toíbín (2014)

A woman loses her husband and her world is upended. Toíbín is a fascinating author, commanding and persuasive in his writing. In this book, however, he brings the gentility too. Set in 1960s Ireland, the novel centers around a window whose husband has died. His passing away collapses her-self in many ways. The author sticks to the emotion and probes deep in Nora’s consciousness, tracking with his self-effacing words the little effort she undertakes, each day, every day, to deal with the aftermath of the tragedy. 

The prose is spare, offering no commiseration or judgement, but commits itself devotedly to the journey of Nora Webster. 

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami (1987)

There’s roughly a 50-50 split between the people that Murakami pisses off and the ones who adore him to death. Happily, we like to have a foot in each camp depending on our mood. What is undeniable, though, is his ability to distill human emotions down to their core, and bare himself through that vulnerable expression. Norwegian Wood, which showcased Murakami's sensitivity and empathy, was his breakout novel and served as the tipping point in his career, catapulting him to domestic and international fame. It’s a coming-of-age tale written in the voice of its memorably romantic protagonist, Toru Watanabe. The narrative is dripping with nostalgia, as Toru pines for a forgotten time, looking back at his life and the toll that personal grief and loss has taken on him. From the death of his best friend, Kizuzu, by suicide when they were still teens, to the two mercurial women, Naoko and Midori, who left a profound impact on his consciousness. 

Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (2024)

Rooney’s fourth novel follows two brothers, ten years apart in age, as they lead their (mostly) separate lives after the death of their father. Ivan, 22, is a former child prodigy entering into a relationship with 36 year old Margaret as his career stagnates. Peter is battling his love for two women: Naomi, much younger than him, trying to make ends meet in college, and Sylvie, his long-term friend and confidante—and ex-girlfriend. 

Through the novel, Rooney explores the fractured relationship between the brothers, and how they navigate their internal (and external) mess both alone as well as with the people they love. Rooney constructs a tender tale of love and loving, allowing different relationships—familial, romantic, platonic—to shine through her compelling storytelling and prose.

Nina Follows writes for the Courtauldian,

Moments of tension and pain are felt in their compelling tenderness, and not ‘resolved’ by any wave of an indulgent magic fictional wand. Miraculously, however, the novel somehow remains optimistic and uplifting. In the wake of loss, characters seem acutely aware of the fleeting beauty of life, and the value of spending time with loved ones.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (1996)

David Foster Wallace’s maximalist portrait of urban dystopia, widely cited as a modern classic, is a dense inquiry into the human condition. In his own words, “Fiction's about what it is to be a f**king human being.” The tortuous, hard-to-pin-down plot confronts ideas of addiction, depression, loneliness, obsession in great depth. But alongside, grief looms large. The Incandenza family, at the heart of the narrative, is reeling from the death of the family patriarch, James, an erratic experimental filmmaker who died by suicide. His three sons, his wife, and all the people connected to the family—they’re all reeling, in some form or the other, from this grave loss that defines part of their existence. While never a literal or direct examination of grief, the novel uses its impact and aftermath to, in ways both opaque and deeply emotional, understand modern life. 

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (1997)

Few books altered Indian writing in English quite like this one. This might be a tall claim but Roy’s heart-rending and endlessly quotable debut novel—“That's what careless words do. They make people love you a little less”—did something untranslatable with language and relationship. For one, it revealed how malleable they both are and can be. 

Set largely in Ayemenem, Kerala, the novel is primarily about a mother and her two children. Using this as the centrepiece, she echoes grief of various kinds. There is grief of lost childhood, grief of a young woman living her life largely unseen, and eventually, the grief of living in a society that refuses to look beyond itself. 

Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri (2003)

Who you are when you are uprooted? This question forms a recurrent theme in Lahiri’s oeuvre. And while her collection of short stories addressed them in fragments, her debut novel confronts the question headlong. At the centre of the story are Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, a newly married couple who settle down in the United States from India. And while their shared life in the foreign country is an accumulation of several losses (Ashima’s father dies in Kolkata while she howls in an empty room with Ashoke holding her), it comes full circle when Ashoke passes away. This propels their son, Gogol, to navigate the grief with a closer understanding of his father. The starting point becomes his name, chosen by Ashoke after his favourite author, the Russian novelist, Nikolai Gogol.

Nonfiction

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005)

In 2003, Joan Didion lost her husband, John Gregory Dunne. In this book, she chronicles her life after his passing, moving back and forth between memories and timelines. Wracked with grief, she imagines new possibilities, and wades through the waters of loss—while her daughter is in hospital. Didion’s memoir maps the year after John’s passing, exposing truths about how deeply and profoundly grief can change everything you know, and how illogical it can make you. The ‘magical thinking’ here is not so much literal, but more a contention with grief, and wanting to work around it. She writes,

We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

Known for her stunning literary prose and her incisive use of language, Didion is a master in this style. She carves out a real and candid depiction of loss while remaining honest and vulnerable, laying herself bare.

Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner (2021)

Michell Zauner, singer and guitarist of the band Japanese Breakfast, lost her mother, Chongmi, to pancreatic cancer in 2014. She wrote an essay about it called ‘Real Life: Love, Loss and Kimchi’, in which she talked about the many trips she took to H Mart, an Asian supermarket. The memoir emerged from this essay, tracing Zauner’s relationship with her mother, their bi-annual trips to Seoul, and how her memories of her have influenced her lifestyle even today. These trips to the supermarket, thus, became a reminder of what she shared with her mother, and what she lost when she died. Touching upon the complicated mother-daughter relationship, Sarah Shin in The Guardian writes:

Crying in H Mart takes the measure of the complex bond and the impassable, yet tender, interval between mother and daughter. Chongmi taught Zauner to “save 10 per cent, always, so there was something to fall back on”. When her mother dies, Zauner, “left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key”, examines the gaps left within her by that hidden fraction.

H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald (2014)

Grief can render one rudderless. Macdonald’s book explores this as she tries coping with the death of her father by training the goshawk. The act gives her a sense of purpose but, more crucially, distracts her from the crushing realisation of the finality of loss. And yet, as a writer, Macdonald refuses to look away; she sits with the stillness of the emotion till it feels claustrophobic.

A review in The Guardian states,

I can't remember the last time a book made me feel so many different things in such quick succession. It's difficult to be with grief. It's exhausting; your life-grabbing instinct is to get away from it, which is what makes it so lonely for those in its grasp.

Stay True by Hua Hsu (2022)

This Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir is an affecting contemplation on friendship. The pivotal incident is this: Hsu’s classmate Ken is murdered and that triggers a bout of introspection. But using that as a framework, the book expands on the intricacies and intimacy of grief. The writer understands that grief can be all-consuming but also self-serving in many ways. Were they really that close? Is the prolonged sadness that Hsu experiences a thing of his own making or justified in relationship to the bond they shared? These are uncomfortable questions and the author refuses to hide, choosing to acknowledge them and subject himself to it. 

Once More We Saw Stars by Jayson Greene (2019)

Jayson Greene, music critic at Pitchfork at the time, lost his two-year-old daughter, Greta, in 2015 to a tragic accident. Greta was with her grandmother for the weekend when a loose brick fell from the eighth floor of a building, hitting her in the head. She didn’t survive, and Greene and his wife, Stacy, decided to donate her organs. She said to him: “I need it to mean something.” Maybe this way, it won’t be for nothing.” In this devastating and remarkable memoir, published by Greene in 2019, he writes through the grief and disbelief that he and Stacy felt in the aftermath of this unthinkable tragedy. Really, it’s an attempt to make sense of the world through words. As he told The Guardian in an interview:

Trauma is a rip in your understanding of the universe. The idea that you can prepare for trauma is wrong. You can’t. Trauma is the unforeseen and the terrible. I think people are drawn to stories in which terrible things happen because in some ways they are one of the most proven mechanisms we have in making sense of the world and making sense of our emotions.

(Read an excerpt from Once More We Saw Stars.) 

Chicken Soup for the Grieving Soul (2003)

The Chicken Soup anthology series veer toward the world of self-help, helping people cope with loss and trauma through inspirational short stories. The titles around grief, in particular, feature around a hundred deeply personal and affecting stories of death, disease, tragedy, and loss; they’re written with an emotional honesty and openness, examining the messiness of grief upon losing a loved one. It’s a reminder to the reader that they aren’t alone in their journey. These are the kind of stories that, for example, you’d absently stumble upon in an old Reader’s Digest, realising halfway through that, as painful as the story may be, you have to get to the end to find meaning in all the senseless tragedy around us. The goal, really, is a kind of emotional catharsis that regular life doesn’t always provide, but art can. 

Poetry

Dog Songs by Mary Oliver (2013)

Mary Oliver’s poetry comprises themes like love, nature, and, of course, dogs. This collection focuses on Oliver’s love for canines, making clear the sweet and precious unique bond humans share with dogs. Dog Songs is a celebration of this love. Through small moments and quiet observations, she is able to touch upon greater ideas of friendship, connection, and grief. Oliver’s voice shines through in this collection, reminding us of the special relationship we share with dogs, and the rare innocence we have the privilege to encounter through it.

Graphic novel

‘Grief’ by Avani Karmakar (Longform 2025: An Anthology of Graphic Narratives)

Avani Kumar’s ‘Grief’ is an affecting portrait of the non-linear and unpredictable burdens of grief, and how it can strike you at any time. Read the full story here.