Best Books About Grief That Actually Help

Not tidy, not redemptive, and not in a hurry. Recommended by people who were in it at the time.

1. 1. The Year of Magical Thinking

   by Joan Didion

   The clearest account of how grief distorts logic. Non-fiction, and the one most often passed along.

2. 2. Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

   by Max Porter

   A crow moves in with a widower and two boys. Short, strange, exactly right.

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   3. The Memory Fare On this site

   by Simran Mehta

   Cora's grief has become a daily procedure. The novel takes that literally and builds a machine out of it.

4. 4. H Is for Hawk

   by Helen Macdonald

   Training a goshawk after her father's death. Grief with something to do with its hands.

5. 5. A Grief Observed

   by C. S. Lewis

   Notebooks kept after his wife died. Still the least consoling and most useful.