15 Sad Books That Will Emotionally Wreck You

A kaleidoscopic family saga told through the fractured lives of three siblings, alongside a faltering, recovering love story, The End of Loneliness is a stunning meditation on the power of our memories, of what can be lost and what can never be let go. With inimitable compassion and luminous, affecting prose, Benedict Wells contends with what it means to find a way through life, while never giving up hope you will find someone to go with you.

From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love — “a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).

An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama.

A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.

The bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait delivers a luminous portrait of a marriage, a family ravaged by grief, and a boy whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time. “Of all the stories that argue and speculate about Shakespeare’s life … here is a novel … so gorgeously written that it transports you” (The Boston Globe).

In the spirit of Colleen Hoover and Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You, an unforgettable and heartbreaking love story with an earth-shattering secret at its core that asks the question: Is love worth risking everything for?

Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.

Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs — a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan’s devastation in the wake of World War II.

From bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Having fled a harrowing past in England, Lucy Snowe begins a new life teaching at a boarding school in the great capital of a foreign country. There, as she tries to achieve independence from both outer necessity and inward grief, she finds that her feelings for a worldly doctor and a dictatorial professor threaten her hard-won self-possession. Charlotte Brontë’s final masterpiece powerfully portrays a woman struggling to reconcile love, jealousy, and a fierce desire for independence.

This gorgeous debut novel is written as a letter from a son to his mother, who cannot read. It is a coming-of-age story about growing up as an immigrant in America and about finding and holding on to one’s identity. Written with beautiful and poetic language, this book will leave a lasting impression.

This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?

A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.