When you're in the mood to cry
Tears release oxytocin and endorphins! Get a good cry in with one of these books.
25 books
★ 5Foster
Claire Keegan
A small Irish girl is sent to stay with relatives for a summer and finds unexpected tenderness. Perfect, and I mean perfect.
★ 5Small Things Like These
Claire Keegan
A coal merchant in small-town Ireland has to decide whether to look away. Tiny book, enormous moral weight. Cried, naturally.
★ 5Ordinary Human Failings
Megan Nolan
A tabloid reporter circles an Irish family in London after a child dies, and Nolan slowly peels back what really happened. Bleak and beautifully written.
Tilt
Emma Pattee
A very pregnant woman is mid-errand when a massive earthquake levels Portland, and she has to get across the city. Tense, and over almost too fast.
Perfection
Vincenzo Latronico
A young expat couple in Berlin with the perfectly curated life and a creeping sense that none of it means anything. Short and quietly devastating.
Memorial Days
Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks on the sudden death of her husband and the grief she finally let herself feel. Quiet and devastating.
★ 5Grief Is for People
Sloane Crosley
Sloane Crosley on losing her closest friend to suicide, braided with a burglary. Funny and raw at once.
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong
This debut novel, a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read, is more than anything a work of poetry, one so rich and moving it clearly draws on lived experience. I’m not a big re-reader, but I’d like to go back to both of these.
★ 5In Memoriam
Alice Winn
A devastating and gorgeous WWI story about two teenage boys who fall in love in the trenches. It will wreck you. If you finished Shuggie Bain, Demon Copperhead, and/or The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and wanted more, this one’s for you.
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
An Irish family unravels one member at a time, each section funnier and sadder than the last, building to an ending I'm still not over. Long but I inhaled it.
★ 5Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver
Kingsolver reworks David Copperfield into Appalachia and the opioid crisis, and it's devastating. That kid's voice will wreck you.
Crying in H Mart
Michelle Zauner
Zauner — the musician behind Japanese Breakfast — wrote this memoir after losing her Korean mother to cancer. It’s about grief, yes, but mostly it’s about food as love language, and what happens when the person who fed you is gone. Multiple friends have finished it in a single sitting, then called their mothers. You will too.
★ 5Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
The story behind the death of Shakespeare's son, centered on his wife. Luminous. I cried.
★ 5Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart
I read Shuggie in three hours during a sleepless night (in retrospect, it probably exacerbated my insomnia rather than curing it.) This novel is relentless. The setting and situation—a crowded tenement apartment in 1980s Glasgow—is bleak when Shuggie begins, and things get bleaker. And bleaker. And bleaker. If you can stand the emotional flagellation, Shuggie will reward you. The characterization
Trespasses
Louise Kennedy
Northern Ireland during the Troubles, a young teacher and an older married man. Kennedy writes tension you can feel in your chest. Excellent.
Stay with Me
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
A Nigerian marriage strained to breaking by infertility and family pressure. Gutting.
The Great Believers
Rebecca Makkai
The AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago, braided with a mother searching in present-day Paris. Devastating and unforgettable.
★ 5The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller
Achilles and Patroclus, retold as a love story. You know how it ends and it still wrecks you.
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
A brutal, beautiful, devastating novel about four friends and the trauma one of them carries. Be warned it's a lot — I sobbed. Not for everyone but I couldn't shake it.
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
A young neurosurgeon writes about his own dying as terminal cancer takes hold. Unbearably moving and somehow not depressing. Cried, of course.
The Light Between Oceans
M.L. Stedman
A lighthouse keeper and his wife keep a baby that washes ashore — and it wrecks everyone. Cried.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Boarding-school kids whose purpose slowly, quietly reveals itself. Devastating in the calmest possible way.
Me Before You (Me Before You, #1)
Jojo Moyes
Yes, the quadriplegic-and-his-caregiver one. Cried, naturally.
★ 5And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini spanning generations and continents from one act of separation. He always wrecks me.
★ 5A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Dave Eggers
Eggers raising his little brother after both parents die, told with wild, self-aware energy. Funny and gutting.