Here are 100 books that The Adult Orphan Club fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. My work has been widely staged in London, across the UK, and internationally. I’ve had the honor of receiving the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary Award, and I was also nominated for Political Play of the Year. Before I began writing, I worked as an anthropologist. Happy Death Club is my first nonfiction book.
The characters in Maggie O'Farrell's book are so real and compelling that they make historical figures feel like your next-door neighbors. I've always been obsessed with Shakespeare, and it's fascinating to learn more about how much Shakespeare was inspired by the death of his son Hamnet. It shows Shakespeare the man but also brings to life the other people in his life, especially the women, who history has forgotten about.
Behind every great man is an army of unseen women, and O'Farrell's novel gives those women voice and agency, showing what life (and death) was like for women in previous centuries, and showing that the experience of grief is universal.
WINNER OF THE 2020 WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION - THE NO. 1 BESTSELLER 2021 'Richly sensuous... something special' The Sunday Times 'A thing of shimmering wonder' David Mitchell
TWO EXTRAORDINARY PEOPLE. A LOVE THAT DRAWS THEM TOGETHER. A LOSS THAT THREATENS TO TEAR THEM APART.
On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?
Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I’m an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. My work has been widely staged in London, across the UK, and internationally. I’ve had the honor of receiving the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary Award, and I was also nominated for Political Play of the Year. Before I began writing, I worked as an anthropologist. Happy Death Club is my first nonfiction book.
I've been a huge fan of mortician Caitlin Doughty for years, and this nonfiction book (which sees Doughty traveling from Japan to Colorado to Indonesia, looking at different things people do with the bodies of their deceased loved ones and how it helps them cope with loss) made me laugh like no other death book, and it taught me a lot, too.
I was especially intrigued by the chapter on human composting: the idea that it's possible to let a body decompose naturally in the earth, so it turns to compost. When my father died I had him buried in a compostable coffin made of banana tree, without any preservatives, and I like the idea of his body feeding flowers and bugs and becoming part of the harmonious web of life.
Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty embarks on a global expedition to discover how other cultures care for the dead. From Zoroastrian sky burials to wish-granting Bolivian skulls, she investigates the world's funerary customs and expands our sense of what it means to treat the dead with dignity. Her account questions the rituals of the American funeral industry-especially chemical embalming-and suggests that the most effective traditions are those that allow mourners to personally attend to the body of the deceased. Exquisitely illustrated by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity is an adventure into the…
When I was a young adult, I lost someone whom I’d loved intensely. In the aftermath, I experienced a grief that would not subside for more than a year and interfered with my ability to function. This is known as complicated grief. As a result, I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject, looking for books that present complicated grief in a humane and understandable manner. While there is a place for self-help books, I’ve found creative literature to be more helpful, especially books written in the first person that offers a metaphorical hand to the reader. I published a detailed essay in Shenandoah on this topic.
C.S. Lewis is best known for his Narnia books, but the book of his that sticks with me the most is this one, a first-person contemporaneous account of the famed fiction writer’s mourning for his wife. He began a journal shortly after she died and stopped when he reached the end of the notebook and then published it.
When I read it, I was dealing with intense grief that I felt no one around me understood, and reading Lewis’ journal/memoir made me feel like someone living in the same headspace had reached out his hand to me. One of the early statements in the book struck such a chord with me that I remember it to this day, more than 30 years later: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
The perennial classic: this intimate journal chronicling the Narnia author's experience of grief after his wife's death has consoled readers for half a century with its 'sensitive and eloquent' magic (Hilary Mantel)
'An intimate, anguished account of a man grappling with the mysteries of faith and love ... Elegant and raw ... A powerful record of thought and emotion experienced in real time.' Guardian
'Raw and modern ... This unsentimental, even bracing, account of one man's dialogue with despair becomes both compelling and consoling ... A contemporary classic.' Observer
'A source of great consolation ... Lewis deploys his genius for…
Stealing technology from parallel Earths was supposed to make Declan rich. Instead, it might destroy everything.
Declan is a self-proclaimed interdimensional interloper, travelling to parallel Earths to retrieve futuristic cutting-edge technology for his employer. It's profitable work, and he doesn't ask questions. But when he befriends an amazing humanoid robot,…
I’m an award-winning playwright and screenwriter. My work has been widely staged in London, across the UK, and internationally. I’ve had the honor of receiving the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary Award, and I was also nominated for Political Play of the Year. Before I began writing, I worked as an anthropologist. Happy Death Club is my first nonfiction book.
This book re-tells the myth of Orpheus from the perspective of his wife, Eurydice, who struggles to decide whether she wants her husband to rescue her and bring her back to the world of the living or if she'd actually prefer to stay in the Underworld with her dead loved ones.
Since I lost my family, I've spent a lot of time pondering on what happens after you die. I still don't know what I believe, but this play fired my imagination in a way nothing else has: what if being in the land of the dead is okay and actually better than being alive? Would we be less scared of death if being dead turned out to be actually pretty great?
“Eurydice is a luminous retelling of the Orpheus myth from his beloved wife’s point of view. Watching it, we enter a singular, surreal world, as lush and limpid as a dream—an anxiety dream of love and loss—where both author and audience swim in the magical, sometimes menacing, and always thrilling flow of the unconscious… Ruhl’s theatrical voice is reticent and daring, accurate and outlandish.” —John Lahr, New Yorker
A reimagining of the classic myth of Orpheus through the eyes of its heroine. Dying too young on her wedding day, Eurydice journeys to the underworld, where she reunites with her beloved…
Memoirs have crept up on me as favorites. I could list many more. Please let me! As a psychoanalyst, I listen to the pains and struggles of individuals trying to become more at ease with themselves. They engage with their demons and try to make sense of how to manage the way their personal history has created their worldview and how to expand it enough to enter a present. Memoirs are another way of addressing such struggles. They have an elegance and a universality that emerges out of their individual stories. We learn about the other and we learn about ourselves.
Lisa’s husband dies as he is being treated for cancer. She writes about the first year after in which grief, madness, confusion, isolation, and fury coincide with Britain’s beginning Brexit madness. Nothing can be made sense of and yet we need words to express what’s happening. And then words provide for consoling and managing.
After the death of her partner of thirty-two years, Lisa Appignanesi was thrust into a state striated by rage and superstition in which sanity felt elusive. Then, too, the cultural and political moment seemed to collude with her condition: everywhere people were dislocated and angry.
In this electrifying and brave examination of an ordinary enough death and its aftermath, Everyday Madness uses all Lisa Appignanesi's evocative and analytic powers to scrutinize her own and our society's experience of grieving. With searing honesty, lashed by humour, she navigates us onto the…
Since 2012, when I was fortunate to be a companion to my dying father, I have gained a deep appreciation for the topics of death, dying, grief and bereavement. Being with him during his final moments was a vitally transformative event in my life, and subsequent developments led me to become a writer and curator of content in this field. I am now an end-of-life educator and preparedness facilitator, whose role it is to assist others to prepare for their inevitable, eventual death. Being prepared, by making informed choices and documenting them, can be one of the greatest gifts we give to our loved ones. I coach my End-of-Life Matters clients to do just that.
Rogers has an unexpected message to share. It’s possible to be grateful amidst a loved one’s death. In her case, it was the loss of her husband, and the story is told through blog posts he composed during his final year of life along with her own journal entries. By seeing her way through her own depths of grief, Rogers points the way for readers to seek and find their own gifts embedded in the grief of loss.
Is it really possible to be grateful for your husband’s death? This is the message that ultimately comes over in Jane Duncan Rogers’ book Gifted By Grief: A True Story of Cancer, Loss and Rebirth. Told through the medium of blog posts by her husband in his last year, her own journal entries, and a heartfelt, poignant and riveting narrative, Jane invites the reader into her grief-stricken world. Where this might be harrowing, it is found to be ironic; where there might be pointlessness and despair, gifts are found, inspiring the reader find the gifts in their own life situation.
Nature writer Sharman Apt Russell tells stories of her experiences tracking wildlife—mostly mammals, from mountain lions to pocket mice—near her home in New Mexico, with lessons that hold true across North America. She guides readers through the basics of identifying tracks and signs, revealing a landscape filled with the marks…
I’m a romance novelist who writes about otherwise smart people who deal badly with their feelings. Love, sorrow, jealousy, anger, hopelessness, and grief make appearances in my books because I write in a genre that centers the emotional lives of its characters. When I’m not wreaking havoc on fictional people, I take long walks and eavesdrop on conversations. I’m a recent transplant to Toronto, Canada, after having lived in New York City for more than 20 years.
James finds out that he has terminal brain cancer and starts to wind up his affairs, including looking for Andy, his lost love. This book takes place in the reality of James’s diagnosis with family and friends sometimes painful reactions to his illness and in the alternate universe of James’ increasingly real hallucinations of a life that could have been with Andy. This book both devastated and buoyed me with its intense and very real portrayal of someone grieving his own life, but who nonetheless seizes the chance to make give himself a happy resolution.
With one diagnosis, editor James Daniels learns that he's literally running out of time. Looking at his life, he sees one regret: Andy, the one that got away. Andy was the first man that James ever loved, but Andy has been gone for years, and might not want to be found.
But as his cancer progresses and James starts to lose his grip on time and memory, it might just be that time and memory are losing their grip on James, too.
It's the biggest and most important re-write of his life. Restoring love from nothing but memory might be…
As a licensed therapist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology, I’ve helped individuals traverse grief and loss for over thirty years. But when my father passed away last year, I found myself feeling untethered, adrift in a barrage of emotions. In grief, I became more affected by even the smallest glimpse of beauty. The poem that perfectly voiced my heart. The spotted fawn appearing on the edge of the lawn. The purple of the eggplant flowering. Grief slowed me down, opening my eyes to the wonder of this achingly beautiful world we live in. It has become part of my story to endeavor to help others do the same.
This collection of essays took me outside of my grief and reminded me that we live in a world filled with wonder.
Brain Doyle is a masterful storyteller, and the way he sees the world, with such curiosity and attention to detail, prompted me to walk outside, to study the smallest of wildflowers, to listen to the song of the wood thrush, to let my sadness and loss be part of something so much bigger than myself.
When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he left behind a cult-like following of devoted readers who regard his writing as one of the best-kept secrets of the twenty- first century. Doyle writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the sanctity of everyday things, and about love and connection in all their forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon.
At a moment when the world can sometimes feel darker than ever, Doyle's writing, which constantly evokes the humor and even bliss that…
When I think of what it means to come of age, I think of the sacrifices one makes to be the best at what he/she enjoys doing against the challenges of life to experience the joy of living. When I failed not being successful as an actor after studying it for ten years in New York City, I came back home and finished college to become a writer. Now, I write the thrill of young characters with a talent to confront society to fulfill a dream, and if they fail, how to overcome it with the help of others, prayer, and hard work.
One book that I really recommend reading is the novel The Midnights by Sarah Nicole Smetana. The main character, Susannah, is a seventeen-year-old girl who plays a mean guitar like her former rock star father whose attention she craves very much. She is driven with passion to pursue her dream even after her father suddenly dies unexpectedly, and must uproot to a new city where she eagerly takes on the challenge. The story is an emotionally charged coming-of-age novel involving loss, creativity, and feeling confident in your voice, while feeling confident in your choices to define who you are.
This voice-driven coming-of-age YA novel is perfect for fans of Katie Cotugno and Playlist for the Dead.
Susannah Hayes has never been in the spotlight, but she dreams of following her father, a former rock star, onto the stage. As senior year begins, she's more interested in composing impressive chord progressions than college essays, certain that if she writes the perfect song, her father might finally look up from the past long enough to see her. But when he dies unexpectedly, her dreams--and her reality--shatter.
While Susannah struggles with grief, her mother uproots them to a new city. There, Susannah…
The Bridge provides a compassionate and well researched window into the worlds of linear and circular thinking. A core pattern to the inner workings of these two thinking styles is revealed, and most importantly, insight into how to cross the distance between them. Some fascinating features emerged such as, circular…
As a licensed therapist with a master’s degree in clinical psychology, I’ve helped individuals traverse grief and loss for over thirty years. But when my father passed away last year, I found myself feeling untethered, adrift in a barrage of emotions. In grief, I became more affected by even the smallest glimpse of beauty. The poem that perfectly voiced my heart. The spotted fawn appearing on the edge of the lawn. The purple of the eggplant flowering. Grief slowed me down, opening my eyes to the wonder of this achingly beautiful world we live in. It has become part of my story to endeavor to help others do the same.
I found this book of poems on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death. The author wrote this collection following the deaths of her son and her father. She writes with such aching precision of the pain of losing someone you love.
I read many of these poems through tears, but they were cleansing tears—sorrow accompanied by a feeling of being seen, of not being alone. It is a gorgeous collection.
In All the Honey, Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer holds both fine, honest sensuality and slow explorations of soul. What is shared here is a way forward in life, a fierce openness that refuses nothing—that knows damage and healing, darkness and radiance, sorrow and winged resurgence, reflection and laughter and learning.
