We’re the first to admit that, sometimes, the best cure for a hard week, a long day or just a rainy weekend is a really sad book. One of the saddest, and most compelling, to come to our attention this week is Michael Kimball’s gutting new novel, Us, about the slow death of a spouse and its effect on her devoted husband, who can merely watch as the person he loves begins to fade away. We consumed the entire book in one subway ride, and got more than a few strange glances our way as Kimball’s novel caused us to convulse with sobs. It wasn’t until someone asked us if we actually enjoyed Us (we did) that we begin musing on the strange relationship between sad books and ourselves as readers, and we wondered: what other books are out there for those who, like us, enjoy the occasional full-body sob and feeling of abject desolation as we’re absorbed into our reading material?
Before we began casting our nets, we set a few parameters for ourselves. First, no young adult novels. If we’d gathered YA, it would dominate the list. Yes, we love Where The Red Fern Grows, but we had to draw the line somewhere. Second, no books where an animal’s death serves as the emotional linchpin (we’re looking at you, Marley & Me). What we ended up with were 10 of the most emotionally wrecking books that we absolutely love. Did we miss your favorite? Please tell us in the comments.
A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates
“I do it so it feels real,” Sylvia Plath once wrote, “I do it so it feels like hell.” That’s the best way to describe Joyce Carol Oates’ widowhood memoir A Widow’s Story. Upon the passing of her husband, Raymond Smith, Oates immediately descends into a state of simultaneous hyper-awareness and detachment, a state in which every whisper, every passing breeze, every found artifact within her home seems to indicate that she, herself, should force herself to follow suit. For an author who projects such a powerful sense of self into every one of her works (see: Foxfire), catching a glimpse of Oates this vulnerable, this broken, is disarming. The reader works through the loss at the same pace Oates herself does; which is to say that by the end, we’re still there.
Comments (87)
gad I hated Atonement. Sad? Sure. To the point of I-stopped-caring. Maybe it’s just me…but it didn’t hurt at the end. I was numb to it and stopped caring.
Chronology of Water, though, makes me cry ever 3 pages. Brutal.
I still maintain nothing gets more almost cruelly bleak than the inimitable “Jude the Obscure”
A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is one of the saddest and most memorable books I have ever read.
Oh yes, Jude the Obscure, great call. Though Tess of the d’urbervilles wasn’t exactly a cheery read either.
Try Bernard Malamud ‘The man from Kiev’…
The Kite Runner and Just Kids. The former is just one horrible thing after another. For the latter, I was really shocked by how gutted I was by the end of it, considering that I knew what was going to happen.
Two of the novels were made into films starring Keira Knightley. By the way, Atonement is the saddest novel I have ever read. I was depressed when I finished it. However, it is a terrific novel. The tragic story truly stays with you.
The strange, empty feeling you get at the end of Yukio Mishima’s “The Decay of the Angel”, knowing he committed ritual suicide the day he finished the manuscript, is hard to beat as far as devastating sadness goes
“Jude the Obscure” is an excellent call– that book just left me gutted. “Mayor of Casterbridge” is also rather bleak, but less of a tear jerker.
“Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King made me cry so hard I was more or less choking on my own snot. It’s probably the saddest thing I’ve ever read. In my opinion, it’s his best work.
“Atonement” was an unbearable read and ultimately did nothing for me.
I would argue that “When We Were Orphans” was Ishiguro’s most affecting work (over “Never Let Me Go”)
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is another book that I remember absolutely weeping in when I read it in high school.
In my opinion, “I Know This Much Is True” by Wally Lamb is MUCH more heartbreaking than “She’s Come Undone”. The first half of “The Hour I First Believed” is even better than the other two combined, but then it gets awful towards the end.
I read “Bastard Out of Carolina” By Dorothy Allison for a women’s lit class in college. I couldn’t put it down to the point that I read the entire time I sat in the dentist’s chair for a cleaning. I wept the entire last 50 pages of the book. And my mother loved me.
@Sonia: The end of “The Hour I First Believed” was so bad I think I completely forgot it existed
I recently finished a couple of Murakami’s books: Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart, both left me with that bitter-sweet flavor of melancholy.
good call on shes come undone. i thought i was the only person who read and loved that book. also, a very sad book that never gets any play, lullabies for little criminals by heather o neal. its devastating
I’d include Lydia Millet’s My Happy Life and Susan Henderson’s Up from the Blue on the list.
Great list. Would add Cold Mountain. Cried my eyes out reading that one.
yes to Never Let Me Go and to Norwegian Wood. would add Cat’s Eye (best thing M Atwood has written in my opinion) and Sound and the Fury. and The Collector. these are books which feature in my art/studio practice.
the Plath quote? I use it all the time in my clinical work, but then I live with someone who wrote a book called Trauma and Human Existence (it’s not a comedy!).
Two books recently made me weep, and I am generally a hypercritical and dry-eyed reader: “Tonio Kroger” by Thomas Mann, and “Deep Creek” by Dana Hand.
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A Prayer for the Dying by Stewart O’Nan. A bleak account of a man trying to cope with a diphtheria outbreak ravaging a small midwestern town in the 19th century.
Anthropology of an American Girl by Hilary Thayer Hamann
[...] However, if you really want to draw out the self-inflicted pain, the best option might just be a devastatingly sad book. If a depressing book is what you are looking for, Flavorwire has you covered with a list of “10 Devastatingly Sad Books.” [...]
Devastatingly Sad, Devastatingly pedestrian. Joyce Carol Oates, if ever brave, was so at the start of her career. Now, long since the lost days of her youth, Oates has authored what I currently consider a vanity. This memoir, or any reflective musings, are best practiced and penned by anyone other than a fiction writer.
It adds nothing to a life lived reading subjective, plodding texts, inclusive of every cankering slight, life shift, the unfortunate death of a spouse or a sudden awareness, driven by self-pity, that the entire populated earth has experienced what Oates purports to have gone through. She is a singularly selfish being who engenders nearest to nil compassion. Leave the author to her niche, though indeed unrecognized by the larger awards, her short stories and the dentist to his legitimately earned memoir.
everything’s illuminated should be on here
As I Lay Dying.
House of Sand and Fog.
A Prayer For Owen Meany would be on my list for saddest novels, along with The Mayor of Casterbridge, A Moon For the Misbegotten (O’Neill), The Pawnbroker (E. L. Wallant, The World According to Garp (John Irving, Lonesome Dove (Larry McMurtry), The Centaur (John Updike), God Knows (Joseph Heller), Bel Canto (Ann Patchett), Cry, the Beloved Country (Alan Paton), Beloved (Toni Morrison), Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak), Gilead (Marilynne Robinson), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Muriel Spark), On Chesil Beach (Ian McEwan), Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez).
Oh, definitely “Deep Creek”! I cried and cried, especially when Joe and Grace finally reconcile, and wept again over the forgotten, innocent deaths of all the Chinese, and the Nez Perce as well. What I like about this novel, though, is that it moves from darkness into light.
The mother of all depressing books – “Sophie’s Choice”
Never Let Me Go is my favorite book and every time I read the last few pages I cry, even if that’s all I read. Partially it’s an emotional response (a girl I loved recommend the book blah blah blah), but also it’s just incredible. Thank you so much for including it.
@Chris…re: the JCO memoir…wow. Just….wow.
another yes on ishiguro. last time i reread i started crying during the opening lines–which you wouldn’t on your first read, but knowing what these kids are going to go through, and hearing that voice. ach.
hands down the most devastating book i’ve read is NOTICE by heather lewis. for me it’s the literary equivalent of dreyer’s THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC–incredibly beautiful, but the terrible things that are inflicted on the woman at the center of it are almost too much to bear.
This list is incomplete without ‘The Art of Racing in the Rain’ by Garth Stein. Has anyone ever finished it with a dry eye?
The Book Thief. I could barely even see the last few pages I was crying that much.
[...] just collected 10 Devastatingly Sad Books, a list with some great and unexpected [...]
I was stumped for about fifteen minutes after finishing Never Let Me Go, but at minute sixteen, realized the entirety of it all and bawled for about an hour straight.
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich. A silent scream for our nuclear era.
Another vote for Jude the Obscure, though I actually hate the book with all the passion I have. I’ve never read a more depressing book in my life, like it sucked the happiness out of me by the end. But I do have to say Thomas Hardy knew how to write a sad, sad book.
On the other hand, I adore Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The difference, for me, is that Tess ends with hope while Jude ends with despair. That, to me, is key. However sad a story may be, I need to find hope at the end, even if it’s just a tiny glimmer.
Out Stealing Horses by Per Pettersen. Profound and spare. After finishing the last pages, I was literally still for an hour. Cannot recommend it enough.
I can’t believe The Time Traveler’s Wife hasn’t been mentioned. I wept my face off at that book, promptly re-read it, and then gave my tear-stained copy to my best friend. I recommended it to about 5 other friends, all of whom called me when they finished, hiccupping with sobs. Heartbreaking.
Gillead by Marilynne Robison and the mother of them all: Sophie’s Choice
“Brother,I’m Dying” by Edwidge Danticat. OMG I bawled at the end of that book.
I also vote for “Atonement”, I loved that one too.
The Time Traveler’s Wife is the saddest book I’ve ever read. I cried for 30 minutes when I read it the first time, and two hours when I read it the second time. Completely devastating and also amazing. Probably my favorite book, but a whole-box-of-kleenex undertaking.
A thousand splendid suns was devastatingly sad…I kept thinking things would improve in the plot and they only became worse. I agree about the Book Thief being very sad too…but it is one of my favorite books of all time and left me forever changed.
“Everything is Illuminated” makes me sob every time I read it, which I have been doing once a year since 2005.
“Revolutionary Road” is devastating. It is not a book that makes me cry, but it does make me feel empty and horrible and sad about the desolate lives depicted within it. This is my favorite book and I cannot recommend it enough. P.s. the movie with Leo and Kate does not do it justice.
A few people have mentioned JSF’s “Everything is Illuminated,” but I think his “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” is FAR more heartbreaking. Wonderful and readable, but devestatingly sad. I hear it’s going to be made into a movie soon.
“The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint” by Brady Udall. Bonus: One of the best opening lines to a novel you’ll ever read.
Everyone has come up with my picks, but worth reiterating: “The Book Thief”, “Atonement”, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”, and “Sophie’s Choice” but how could no one have mentioned “Cutting for Stone”? (Abraham Verghese)
Mila 18 by Leon Uris about the Polish underground against the Nazis. Devastating.
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks..personal loss set against the indescribable tragedy of the first world war
Another vote for Never Let Me Go. I would also add The Sparrow by Maria Doria Russell.
I don’t understand all the fuss over Never Let Me Go. It wasn’t that great, and in spite of its (contrived) story, I didn’t find it all that sad.
I would add Meghan O’Rourke’s “The Long Goodbye” to this list.
Sophie’s Choice
House of Sand and Fog
A Fine Balance
The last one, you’ll want to slit your wrists when you’re done. At the least, sit on the floor and weep for 3 hours.
I haven’t read through each and every comment that has been posted but, thus far, I have yet to see “Angela’s Ashes”, which I would say is probably one of the saddest books I’ve ever read.
Midnight Cowboy by James Leo Herlihy.
Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham.
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo.
Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser.
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.
winter birds by jim grimsley
The the last quarter of AS Byatt’s Children’s Hour devastated me.
Michael Rosen’s Book of Sad is the saddest book ever. It is a Quentin Blake illustrated book written by Rosen about his grief in response to the loss of his son. I wept two pages in, in the book store.
The unbearable lightness of being
Cold Mountain. I’d never actually sobbed over a book (wept quietly maybe)until that one.
I can’t believe Sophie’s Choice didn’t make the top ten. I would also add The Joy Luck Club which makes me weep in both book and movie form. Any work that details losing a child and/or the troubled bonds between mothers and daughters just destroys me. And yes, anything by Leon Uris.
I have to add two that I didn’t see posted,
The Tiny One by Eliza Minot (will bring back memories you didn’t know you had)
Dog Years by Mark Doty (Completely heart crushing)
What about The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosinksi? Also, I felt like killing myself after the end of John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent.
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Reading them at the same time, as I did, is not recommended. Also, Night by Elie Wiesel.
[...] response to Russ Marshalek’s excellent post on devastatingly sad books last week, we’ve decided to try and lift your spirits a little during this rainy week by [...]
@meg: night is amazing.
i know it’s kind of lame, but ‘tuesday’s with morrie’ was the first book that ever made me cry.
I can’t believe no ones mentioned “Requiem for a Dream”. And then “where the red fern grows” of course.
Shusaku Endo’s “Silence” should be on this list. Incidentally, Scorcese is turning it into a movie. He loves sadness, right?
The Lovely Bones. Also, YES to Anthropology of an American Girl.
not yet mentioned: “harry potter and the half-blood prince.” i guess the whole book isn’t devastatingly sad, but the ending… so many tears.
also not mentioned: “my sister’s keeper.”
i saw the movie of “atonement” before i read the book, so i was more prepared, but the description of it feeling like a “stab in the throat” is so true.
i finished “the book thief” on the way to yoga class and had to sit outside for a good 10 minutes before i was composed enough to go in.
[...] posted these annotated suggestions last week. And of course readers promtly chimed in with their own [...]
I would say Little Bee by Chris Cleave. I couldn’t finish it because I felt so depressed, yet the writing itself was great.
@Jackie oh, god, Little Bee. I had to walk around a grocery store for like four hours to clear my head after that one.
[...] Ten devestatingly sad books (must reads) [...]
[...] Finally, because I like to read sad books, I was naturally drawn to this list of ten devastatingly sad books (of which I’ve of course already read 2/3!) (Hat tip: Lisa Romeo [...]
I’m surprised Never Let Me Go is on here. The book was okay. There was a terribly sad aspect to it, but I don’t see it making a top ten list. I’m surprised The Awakening by Kate Chopin is not on here. That book has stayed with me for years. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so much after reading any other book.
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” dare you not weep buckets about children living in American urban poverty in early 20th c.
“The Corner” non-fiction but a must read to grasp the unrelenting sadness of children living in drug destroyed American city today
Ah yes to Jude the Obscure, certainly as the bleakest, but must add Beloved to this list. I was inconsolable at that one.
I would have thought ton of people would have said The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. By far one of the best books ever written. I would also add Dew Breaker A Lesson in Dying and Plainsong.
Not the book, just the short story: ‘Flowers for Algernon’
[...] disposition on the summer reading lists. Personally, we’re planning to steer clear of the 10 Devastatingly Sad Books. But maybe that’s your thing. We’d rather watch video of one of Jimmy Fallon’s Do Not [...]
[...] just makes us feel a little, well, antisocial. In the same way that at times we just want to curl up with a devastatingly sad book, sometimes we really want to rock out to some bleak tunes. If you, like us, are having “glass [...]
The Horse Whisperer-read it after seeing the film and was flabberghasted! Cold Mountain……….and almost anything by John Steinbeck but especially The Grapes Of Wrath-Human cruelty with small acts of kindness just sink you lower and lower…
On the big white oak by Corrine Coleman
“jesus saves,” by darcy steinke. it made me want to set myself on fire and take the whole world down with me.
[...] to be more devastating than the last. Film not your thing? Check out our lists of sad music and sob-worthy books. Did we miss your favorite? More tragedy — let us know in the [...]
Yes, Never Let Me Go — it just goes down, down, down.
Also, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.
And, from when I was a kid – Where the Red Fern Grows
Oh, and Brokeback Mountain
I never read Sophie’s Choice, but the movie made me scream…and then cry.
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