Lists

8 Moving Novels About Grief & Healing

Leah Rachel von Essen

Senior Contributor

Leah Rachel von Essen reviews genre-bending fiction for Booklist, and writes regularly as a senior contributor at Book Riot. Her blog While Reading and Walking has over 10,000 dedicated followers over several social media outlets, including Instagram. She writes passionately about books in translation, chronic illness and bias in healthcare, queer books, twisty SFF, and magical realism and folklore. She was one of a select few bookstagrammers named to NewCity’s Chicago Lit50 in 2022. She is an avid traveler, a passionate fan of women’s basketball and soccer, and a lifelong learner. Twitter: @reading_while

Celadon Books, publishers of Penitence, the thrilling new novel by Kristin Koval

For readers of Ann Patchett and Celeste Ng, Penitence is a poignant exploration of love and forgiveness. It’s a suspenseful, addictive page-turner filled with insight that compels readers to consider whether the worst thing we’ve ever done is all that defines us.

Spanning decades, Kristin Koval’s debut novel Penitence is an examination of the complexities of familial loyalty, the journey of redemption, and the profound experience of true forgiveness.

Pick up Penitence by Krisin Koval, wherever books are sold.

Grief is a universal human struggle. In a world where all things and all people die, grief is an emotion we all must wrestle with at some point in our lives. Some people have suggested that the Western world, particularly the U.S., no longer knows how to cope with grief, trying to fit it all into private emotion rather than a public network of support and empathy.

Meanwhile, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a “grief pandemic” of its own, as thousands mourned the death that occurred around them, and many more tied those emotions to their frustration at being unheard and abandoned as mandates expired and the world “moved on.”

Many of you reading this have success in processing your emotions, in empathizing, in feeling catharsis, through the act of reading fiction. I know I do—I’ve often been reduced to tears by a book only to realize I’m crying also about something else. Books both take us out of ourselves, living someone else’s story, and also ground us in our deepest emotional centers, calling up feelings evoked by the protagonists and by the writing.

Many writers over the years have turned their focus on grieving, on its liminal in-between-ness, on its confusion and sometimes near-madness, on the ways it can be delayed, buried, resurfaced, and dealt with. These eight moving books about grief and healing all approach the topic in their own way.

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty is a grad student who keeps her walls up, always. She’s never quite recovered from her brother’s death by overdose in his childhood. But while she mourned, her mother crumbled into a deep depression. Now, they are both still grieving in their own ways, both struggling with how the other deals with Nana’s death. Gifty is influenced both by her upbringing in the church and her belief in the science that she studies, and the two push and pull at her as she tries to make sense of where she wants to land.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

A young Vietnamese man writes to his mother about their relationship, his queerness, her history, both of their individual traumas and much more, all despite the fact that he knows his mother is unable to read. Among other things, he writes about a young man he fell in love with named Trevor and the way that opioids and addiction ravaged their small-town community. This is a poetic, rich book about so many different kinds of grief—personal and local, internal and everywhere.

Memento Mori by Eunice Hong

An unnamed protagonist, a Korean woman, tells a version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to her little brother. And he asks a question she doesn’t expect: “Did she want to come back? Did he ask?” As she deals with the sting of trauma, with the death of someone she loves, with her desire for them to be brought back from the brink by any kind of medical science or magic, our protagonist struggles with the grief in her body, with the things she wishes she could forget.

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

This book is a superb example of why YA is not only for tweens and teens, but can have a huge impact on all of us. In this book (inspired by late writer Siobhan Dowd), Patrick Ness writes of a boy named Conor who hasn’t slept well since his mother got sick. A monster appears at his window, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this is a scary book…but in this book with vivid, gorgeous illustrations, the monster is here to help Conor face what he otherwise cannot. Warning: this book will cause many, many tears.

The Thirty Names of Night by Zeyn Joukhadar

A Syrian American trans boy has struggled for years over the death of his mother, an ornithologist. His life doesn’t exactly inspire. He’s closeted and spends all his time avoiding the people who know him as well as helping his grandmother. The only good thing is his nightly trips to paint murals. But when one night he discovers a journal by a painter who had encountered the same rare, unusual bird as his mother did before her death, it starts off a journey of discovery and healing.

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated by Saskia Vogel

A mother wanders the beachside town, searching for her missing daughter, an undocumented refugee who both does and doesn’t exist. Time blurs, reality blurs. They can’t go to their war-torn home, it’s not possible, and yet they also can’t move forward, can’t settle in any real way. All throughout, a parallel story of a woman who saw the daughter die by suicide finds herself miscarrying and haunted by deaths past and present. Karam’s story deals with grief that can’t be contained, that has no place to go.

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

In the midst of his career, William Shakespeare lost a son. From that biographical note, O’Farrell spins a story of indescribable grief, and of how a family copes with the unbearable. From the first page, the reader knows the death that’s coming, but O’Farrell’s brilliant writing keeps the suspense taut. It’s a zoomed-in novel about death’s cruelty, about grief, about how different ways of coping with a heavy weight can pull a family in a dozen different directions.

Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy

Sometimes, the grief is both personal and existential. In this near future, almost all animals are extinct. One woman has a reckless mission. She wants to follow what might be the final group of Arctic terns on the longest migration in the world, from Greenland to the Antarctic. Protagonist Franny has lost so much in her own life, and while sometimes gutting, this novel ultimately is a source of catharsis (it has made me sob on every reread) and genuine, searing hope.


Want more recommendations? Check out our list of books that will break your heart and put it back together again, or our list of ten excellent young adult books about grief.