Here are 100 books that The Carry Home fans have personally recommended if you like
The Carry Home.
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In all my travel books, I’ve followed my intuition to a destination or into a subject, pairing emotion with intellectual curiosity, travelling to try to know a people, place, idea, or time. So the pivot to navigating the ‘border' between life and death felt like an obvious extension. It’s a frontier that we'll all have to pass, and we’ll not have to worry about forgetting your passport. I began my search for my wife Katrin as a skeptic and ended it with faith in the existence of an afterlife. In sharing this journey, I hope others may be helped to prepare for and to accept the inevitable loss of those whom we love.
How do we make sense of death? How do we balance rational explanations with the ‘magical thinking’ of the heart?
In her honest and passionate memoir, Joan Didion—an iconic American journalist and author—attempted 'to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness…about marriage and children and memory…about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself’.
Her search for meaning leaned toward rational explanations, yet this remains a vital work in enabling us to accept the inevitable loss of those whom we love.
From one of America's iconic writers, a portrait of a marriage and a life - in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. A stunning book of electric honesty and passion.
Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill. At first they thought it was flu, then pneumonia, then complete sceptic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve -the Dunnes were…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
When I sold the manuscript that became The Way Back from Broken, my editor asked why I wrote it. I said, “I wrote a book about the two things I’m an expert in: grief and canoeing.” It took me ten years to find my own way back from being broken after the death of my daughter. Along that difficult and heartbreaking trail, I came to loathe people who said things like “Time heals all wounds” or “It was meant to be.” I craved those brave few who spoke and wrote with deep authenticity about how grief and loss force us to reconsider everything we’ve ever known about the world.
This award-winning, middle grade novel begins with Willa Jo and her little sister refusing to come down off their Aunt Patty’s roof. Drawn to get as close to the sky as possible, they stay up, wrestling with the recent death of their sibling. I read this book shortly after my baby died, and it gets everything right about the confusion, the magical thinking, the incomprehensible behavior of those who don’t know grief, and especially, the inability to understand a world that has, in an instant, been so dramatically altered.
A Southern charmer for fans of Newbery Honor book Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage
Audrey Couloumbis's masterful debut novel brings to mind Karen Hesse, Katherine Paterson, and Betsy Byars's The Summer of the Swans—it is a story you will never forget.
Willa Jo and Little Sister are up on the roof at Aunt Patty’s house. Willa Jo went up to watch the sunrise, and Little Sister followed, like she always does. But by mid-morning, they are still up on that roof, and soon it’s clear it wasn’t just the sunrise that brought them there.
When I sold the manuscript that became The Way Back from Broken, my editor asked why I wrote it. I said, “I wrote a book about the two things I’m an expert in: grief and canoeing.” It took me ten years to find my own way back from being broken after the death of my daughter. Along that difficult and heartbreaking trail, I came to loathe people who said things like “Time heals all wounds” or “It was meant to be.” I craved those brave few who spoke and wrote with deep authenticity about how grief and loss force us to reconsider everything we’ve ever known about the world.
After my daughter died, I wrote her hundreds and hundreds of letters. Sometimes it felt like she was the only one who could understand me. Other times, as I struggled to put one foot in front of the other, living up to what my dead daughter might have wanted for me was what kept me going. I was still deep in my grief when I first read Song for Sarah, a memoir composed of D’Arcy’s letters to her own lost child. A dear friend asked me how I could possibly read about another mother’s grief when I was so lost in my own. The answer, simply, was that D’Arcy made me feel seen.
More a diary than a manual on handling grief, D'Arcy's collection of letters written before and after the loss of her daughter reflects upon her search for strength and hope through years of anguish. With a combination of profound reflection and sincere stories, these letters express how the deepest sorrow can be transformed into a unique sense of comfort and peace. Filled with practical yet literary writing, this collection reveals the discovery of healing is available to anyone enduring the sorrow of a lost loved one. Written in a tender, personal tone and drawing from direct experience, it is an…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I was raised in a home where one parent was an acute alcoholic and the other parent was the child of an acute alcoholic, codependency and boundary issues flourished, and there was a touch of end-times religion to top it all off. This made me a kid who was highly tuned in to everything going on around me as a way to maintain a sense of control. Though that probably wasn’t the best thing for my emotional development, it’s turned me into a writer who strives to delve into the authentic human experience and a reader who wants that, too. The books on this list meet that bar!
My loyalty as a reader and writer is to realism, and this is about as real as it gets. The narrator gets an older foster brother who comes with real complications and a backstory that’s more than a bit scary.
At the same time, the book is so full of familial love that I leaked tears from about chapter three until the end as I watched these characters try to give and receive it.
Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal. A heartbreaking story, narrated by twelve-year-old Jack, whose family is caring for fourteen-year-old Joseph. Joseph is misunderstood. He was incarcerated for trying to kill a teacher. Or so the rumours say. But Jack and his family see something others in town don't want to. What's more, Joseph has a daughter he's never seen. The two boys go on a journey through the bitter Maine winter to help Joseph find his baby - no matter the cost.
I have been to hell and back over the years. After experiencing childhood abuse, I lived through a succession of traumas with my family including fraud, painful experiences in church ministry, a death threat, and a catastrophic house fire accidentally started by my mother-in-law. While I was helped by counseling, prayer, and caring friends and mentors, something was still missing. I needed to process all that pain and loss but didn’t know how. I had to learn how to grieve. Over years of rebuilding, I’ve lived the lessons of lament and know the healing that is possible when pain is metabolized.
Like Opelt, I believed I was well equipped to grieve well before suffering found me. Like her, I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Her book was solace because it refused to shy away from the complexity and sometimes downright strangeness of grief. Her exploration of historical rituals for processing grief in community sparked my imagination for more ways of restoring lost practices and finding new ones for engaging loss, remembering well, and honoring life with those I love.
When Amanda Held Opelt suffered a season of loss-including three miscarriages and the unexpected death of her sister, New York Times bestselling writer Rachel Held Evans-she was confronted with sorrow she didn't know to how face. Opelt struggled to process her grief and accept the reality of the pain in the world. She also wrestled with some unexpectedly difficult questions: What does it mean to truly grieve and to grieve well? Why is it so hard to move on? Why didn't my faith prepare me for this kind of pain? And what am I supposed to do now?
After my dad died, I didn’t know where to turn. People felt uncomfortable talking to a seventeen-year-old girl about her dead dad. They felt even more uncomfortable talking to me about it one, two, ten years later. Still, I couldn’t, can’t, stop thinking about it. I turned, then, to books. These books made and make me feel seen. They aren’t about “moving on” or “letting go” but the ways in which leaning into grief’s deep well connects us to love’s true depths. These books are honest and pure, and if you don’t know what to say to a friend who’s mourning, let these authors speak for you.
This book is a cold-water plunge: shocking, disorienting yet grounding, a reminder of the body and its limits.
In recounting the death of her son, Naja Marie Aidt explicitly invokes Didion (as well as Anne Carson, C.S. Lewis, and Nick Cave), wrestling with the inability of language to hold grief. She returns to the death scene again and again, like a stitch through the book.
Each refrain adds more context and pushes us further into the moment before digressing, ruminating, and exploding the narrative. The book is a lyric essay, written in fragments, because Aidt understands this, in the end, is what we’re left with.
'Extraordinary. It is about death, but I can think of few books which have such life. It shows us what love is.' Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing With Feathers and Lanny
'There is no one quite like Naja Marie Aidt' Valeria Luiselli
'Devastating, angry, challenging, fragmented and filled with the beautiful hope that the love we have for people continues into the world even after they're gone.' Culturefly
'Fragmented, poetic, informative and truthful, Aidt faces the greatest loss we can ever know with all the force of great elegy writers like Anne Carson and Denise Riley. Essential.'…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
Allen Klein is a former hospice volunteer and the former director of The Life-Death Transitions Institute in San Francisco. He has also spoken at over 100 hospice events around the world. In addition, several of his books have dealt with death, dying, and grief. Among them are, The Healing Power of Humor, The Courage to Laugh, and Embracing Life after Loss. Klein’s interest in the connection between humor and death and dying came out of the death of his wife, who had a wonderful sense of humor. He saw how humor helped her, and those around her, cope with this challenging circumstance.
This meditation teacher shows those who have experienced a loss new ways to embrace the pain so that they can feel joy again. Written for all types of loss, Welshons shows readers how grief can provide a unique opportunity to live a fuller and richer life in spite of our losses.
In this remarkable book, Welshons weaves together his own personal awakening with those of others he's counseled to bestow a deeply felt and exquisitely expressed primer on dealing with grief. We learn new ways to embrace our pain so that our hearts can open to feel joy. We discover how grieving gives us the unique opportunity to develop deeper and fuller life experiences. Written for people who have experienced any type of loss—whether through death, divorce, or disappointment—this compelling and memorable guide will take its place among the insightful works of grief management.
Grief has been a part of my life since I was very young. My parents died 10 months apart when I was 11, then 12; my only sibling died when I was 20. Years later, after living through the grief of watching my marriage crumble and my 3 children struggle, my eldest son died at 20 in a single-car crash. Now, 26 years later, I read—and write—about navigating grief and uncertainty. I’m passionate about supporting those who grieve all manner of losses, including those that are spoken about and those often shrouded in silence. I hope you enjoy this book list as much as I have creating it.
Because I’ve spent so many years grieving one loss or another, I value the ability to understand what’s happening in our brains when it feels as though our emotions have completely taken over, particularly when we’re new to grief.
The Grieving Brain provides a deeper dive into the science of grief than Can Anyone Tell Me? does, and for that reason it’s been helpful for me to read now, when my loss is no longer new and I’m more able to digest the informational passages.
I loved how O’Connor skillfully explains the neuroscience of grief, then helps us understand how to create a meaningful life as we navigate our losses.
As long as we’re alive, there will likely be losses ahead, so I’m especially grateful to have read this now.
Next Big Idea Club's "Top 21 Psychology Books of 2022"
Behavioral Scientist Notable Books of 2022
A renowned grief expert and neuroscientist shares groundbreaking discoveries about what happens in our brain when we grieve, providing a new paradigm for understanding love, loss, and learning.
In The Grieving Brain, neuroscientist and psychologist Mary-Frances O'Connor, PhD, gives us a fascinating new window into one of the hallmark experiences of being human. O'Connor has devoted decades to researching the effects of grief on the brain, and in this book, she makes cutting-edge neuroscience accessible through her contagious enthusiasm,…
The question “Who are you?” has been central to my practice over the last 30 years. This inquiry led me to live in a silent monastery for eight years. If we aren’t who we have been conditioned to see ourselves to be, then who are we? Who are we truly? This inquiry has led to happiness in my own life, it’s led to happiness in the lives of thousands of teens who have been served through the nonprofit I founded―Peace in Schools, and it’s led to happiness with the adults who have come to my workshops and retreats.
I was deeply touched by my next pick because it seamlessly blends mindfulness with racial justice and healing. I was moved by the way Johnson combines her personal narrative with practical guidance, making the exploration of social justice and self-care feel both profound and actionable.
The book's focus on inclusivity and compassion truly resonated with me, offering a meaningful approach to integrating mindfulness into advocacy for a more equitable world. This book has inspired me to approach my own activism with greater awareness and empathy, and I find it essential for anyone committed to both personal and social transformation.
Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world.
In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Many of us have been conditioned by the dominant culture to not name, focus on, or wade through the difficulties of our lives. But in order to heal, we must make space for grief and prioritize our wholeness, our humanity, and our inherent divinity.
In Finding Refuge, social justice activist, social worker, and yoga teacher…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
When I had multiple miscarriages in my late 20’s, I found I had no idea how to handle my grief. I didn’t even recognize I was grieving. A few years later when my husband died I was thrust into grief and a life I had never wanted. It took me months to learn how to survive, and a lot longer to find the resources I needed to live a happy life despite my loss. Finding resources that would help became important to me, and a handful of books have stayed with me long after I read them. I hope these books help you as much as they helped me.
This book is the first one I read after losing my husband. I was 31-years old, with a toddler and a newborn, and I had no idea how I was going to survive the rest of my life, better yet make it a life worth living. In The Sun Still Rises: Surviving and Thriving After Grief and Loss, author Shawn Doyle shares his story of loss, but more than that he shares hope with his reader. Hope that there is still light in the darkness of grief. At that point in my loss, hope was what I needed most. However, he didn't stop there, he also provided practical tips and suggestions about dealing with both the logistical matters that come with loss, as well as providing emotional support. This book helped me live my best life, in spite of my loss.
Coping with the loss of a loved one is perhaps the most difficult and devastating challenge any of us face in our lifetime.
The grief you feel hurts more than physical pain.
And yet, somehow, life is still going on around you.
Is it even possible to survive, let alone thrive, after such grief and loss?
In this book, Shawn Doyle shares his heart-wrenching personal story of bereavement to supply you with the tools, tips, and techniques for dealing with loss and grief on an hourly, daily, and weekly basis.
This is not a predictable five stages of grief book.…
