Here are 100 books that The Cure for Sorrow fans have personally recommended if you like
The Cure for Sorrow.
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I’m a physical therapist, certified yoga therapist, and Hakomi practitioner who has spent over twenty-five years helping people heal from physical and emotional pain through the integration of yoga, mindfulness and western medicine. My passion for this topic comes from my own transformation—moving through trauma and burnout into a life guided by mindfulness, movement, and compassion. I’ve seen again and again that presence is the medicine that changes everything. Writing and teaching about this path feels like offering others the same lifeline that once saved me.
This book met me in one of the darkest seasons of my life after my second divorce.
Pema Chödrön’s voice feels like a steady heartbeat—calm, wise, and utterly human. She doesn’t promise to remove pain; she invites us to stay present with it. Every page taught me that courage isn’t the absence of fear but the willingness to face it with open eyes and a soft heart.
I return to this book whenever I need to remember that groundlessness is not failure; it can be the greatest freedom.
Pema Choedroen reveals the vast potential for happiness, wisdom and courage even in the most painful circumstances.
Pema Choedroen teaches that there is a fundamental opportunity for happiness right within our reach, yet we usually miss it - ironically, while we are caught up in attempt to escape pain and suffering.
This accessible guide to compassionate living shows us how we can use painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion and courage, ways of communication that lead to openness and true intimacy with others, practices for reversing our negative habitual patterns, methods for working with chaotic situations and ways…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
As I formed my self-identity I considered myself a spiritual seeker, always straying beyond the boundaries of my more conservative Christian communities. As a minister’s wife, I had a wide experience of Christian-based faith and community. When my husband died instantly of a heart attack, my entire spiritual foundation seemed to crumble. This book is a memoir of my journey to rebuild a new spirituality, founded on the remnants of my original faith and expanding to meet my new and changing experience of who I am. I have a master’s degree in English so the study of literature, mythology, and poetry also strongly influenced my journey, my story, and this memoir.
Jerry’s book was recommended to me by a friend who had lost her husband three years earlier. I found that there were times in my grieving when I gained perspective by holding up the gravity of my loss against that of someone else’s. Jerry’s loss was so monumental and potentially devastating, I found myself drawn to his words again and again to encourage myself that if he could find his way through and still be grounded in faith, maybe I could too. His story shows the possibility of leaning into community and finding the internal strength to trust in healing.
With vulnerability and honesty, Jerry Sittser walks through his own grief and loss to show that new life is possible--one marked by spiritual depth, joy, compassion, and a deeper appreciation of simple and ordinary gifts. This 25th anniversary edition features a new introduction and two additional chapters, one which provides help for pastors and counselors.
Loss came suddenly for Jerry Sittser. In an instant, a tragic car accident claimed three generations of his family: his mother, his wife, and his young daughter. While most of us will not experience such a catastrophic loss in our lifetime, all of us will…
As I formed my self-identity I considered myself a spiritual seeker, always straying beyond the boundaries of my more conservative Christian communities. As a minister’s wife, I had a wide experience of Christian-based faith and community. When my husband died instantly of a heart attack, my entire spiritual foundation seemed to crumble. This book is a memoir of my journey to rebuild a new spirituality, founded on the remnants of my original faith and expanding to meet my new and changing experience of who I am. I have a master’s degree in English so the study of literature, mythology, and poetry also strongly influenced my journey, my story, and this memoir.
This was the first book I read about grief after my husband died. It was recommended by my therapist and I immediately purchased a copy for each of my adult children. It was the beginning of my search for finding meaning in my suffering. This book includes mindfulness practices which opened me to believing that I had the power to transform my experience of suffering into a deepening wisdom in my life. As I was challenged to lean into the faith of my past, I found solace in this new way of practicing spirituality in my life. It opened out a path for me to the healing which inspired my own book.
Many people who suffer the death of a loved one cling to the experience of grief long after the actual pain of loss goes away. This is because grief itself is a complex issue, fraught with misinformation and unrealistic expectations, often leading to interpersonal isolation at the times people need connection the most. Ironically, it is often by embracing the experience of grief that people become most fully mindful of life.
Grieving readers will find, in this book, a new understanding of their own grief process. They will learn about the spiral staircase, a metaphor used to describe the ebb…
Mia Lark is running out of options. There is only one way to change the score: the fantasy planet Revivium.
Armed with the powerful magic in the helm and the friendly AI, Hex that goes with it, Mia throws caution out the window. It’s time to find the main guildhall…
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…
My graduating class in high school once designated me as “the most likely to start a feminist revolution.” That was a lot to live up to, but I’ve made a very small stab at it by writing about women who have changed our world. I love to bring awareness about the contributions great women have made in history, but I also want modern women to see themselves in these struggles. I always say that Historical Fiction is an exercise of empathy, and I hope my work encourages women today to get involved and make a difference in the world, too.
As the daughter of one of the last children to contract polio before the vaccines, I knew this was going to be an important book even before I opened it.
But it was also a page-turning chronicle of Dr. Dorothy Horstmann, a pioneer in the battle to eradicate polio. I was often infuriated by what she faced as a woman in science during the 1950s; it was a very good read that brought much-needed attention to this extraordinary woman’s gifts to medical science.
"Huge applause... women have always been in science—despite those who would pretend otherwise.” --Bonnie Garmus, New York Times bestselling author of Lessons in Chemistry
She gave up everything — and changed the world.
A riveting novel based on the true story of the woman who stopped a pandemic, from the bestselling author of Mrs. Poe.
In 1940s and ’50s America, polio is as dreaded as the atomic bomb. No one’s life is untouched by this disease that kills or paralyzes its victims, particularly children. Outbreaks of the virus across the country regularly put American cities in lockdown. Some…
I am a former police officer who couldn’t find any use for his English lit degree until he lived as hard as he could for decades and found something worth writing about. My years with K9 Brag—the greatest, smartest animal I have known—became the key that unlocked my writing. Now I write screenplays, comics, historical fiction, crime stories, and even horror shorts. I am currently working on a novel trilogy about one of the most famous outlaws in history.
My stories almost always have an animal that lies at the emotional heart of the tale.
This is a beautifully written book that immediately brought me into Helen’s world of grief and uncertainty.
Her decision to take on a stubborn goshawk named Mabel seems at first to unnecessarily complicate her struggle to cope with her father’s death.
As the author trains Mabel, the scenes become so compelling that I found myself flipping pages as if I were reading a thriller. Mabel’s stubbornness, beauty, and wild independence fly off the page.
One of the New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of the Year
ON MORE THAN 25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR LISTS: including TIME (#1 Nonfiction Book), NPR, O, The Oprah Magazine (10 Favorite Books), Vogue (Top 10), Vanity Fair, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Seattle Times, San Francisco Chronicle (Top 10), Miami Herald, St. Louis Post Dispatch, Minneapolis Star Tribune (Top 10), Library Journal (Top 10), Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Slate, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, Amazon (Top 20)
The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald's story of adopting and raising one of…
Winner of the 2024 New Mexico - Arizona Book Award.
In this deeply researched novel of America's most celebrated outlaw, Mark Warren sheds light on the human side of Billy the Kid and reveals the intimate stories of the lesser-known players in his legendary life of crime. Warren's fictional composer…
My first memory is of my father telling me about the cosmos, the Big Bang, and how the sun would burn out one day, expanding so big it would swallow the Earth. This memory haunted my dreams and waking hours, instilling a fascination with the life and death cycles of everything. Now I’m an artist, writer, educator and somatic coach devoted to helping people talk about and honor the things western culture doesn’t create space for–big emotions, messy love and the gifts of dying.
I was raised by a family and culture that taught me nothing about grief, mourning, or honoring the great heartbreaks of aliveness. This book raised me and taught me about the importance of ritual and community tending to our grief.
It taught me that naming the pain of the world is an act of love and that helping others do the same is a responsibility we all carry. I trained with Francis Weller years after reading this book and was so affirmed by sharing space with a person who embodies what he teaches in a deep and embodied way.
"It blew me away. I underlined things on nearly every page." —Anderson Cooper, All There Is
The Wild Edge of Sorrow offers hope and healing for a profoundly fractured world—and a pathway home to the brightness, pains, and gifts of being alive.
Introducing the 5 gates of grief, psychotherapist Francis Weller explores how we move through the waters of grief and loss in a culture so fundamentally detached from the needs of the soul.
• The first gate recognizes—and invites us to accept—the painful truth that everything we love, we will lose. With this acceptance comes beauty and responsibility—and an…
I have, unfortunately, been invited into a club I never signed up for–the Griever’s Club. It’s not that my losses are exceptional, but I have been desperate to find meaning and hope in them in order to survive them. I lost my best friend of over 25 years to cancer and lost my dad on the same day–two years later–from an unexpected heart attack. I have known grief in other ways, too: unexpected job loss, disease, my children’s health struggles. As a pastor and a follower of Christ, it has been important to me to wrestle honestly for my own faith, and on behalf of other hurting readers.
I had the advantage of reading an early copy of this book because Catherine is one of my closest friends. She and Jason have put their fingers on the pulse of what happens to your faith when you hit a crisis point or a trauma–and how that doesn’t have to lead to the untangling or shattering of all you believed.
Rather, there is a refining and freedom that comes from facing a mid-faith crisis and it can move you to a place of maturity, seasoning, and unburdened faith.
Navigating the Storm: Understanding the Crisis of Faith
Many of us embarked on our spiritual journeys filled with hope and certainty, only to find ourselves questioning the very foundation of our beliefs as life unfolded. The faith that once seemed unshakeable may falter in the face of broken trust, unanswered prayers, and the harsh realities of worldly suffering. But you're not alone―mid-faith crises are a shared human experience that can feel isolating yet are a crucial part of our spiritual journey.
In Mid Faith Crisis, authors Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague provide a compassionate exploration of this challenging phase. With…
These books have defined my life, giving me focus, direction, and purpose through a career that embraced 25 years at the United States Senate at senior staff levels and then served as the inspiration to co-found four national charities, including the Heart of America Foundation (HOA). The resulting activities have touched the lives of millions of adults and children and blessed my life beyond belief. I am a voracious reader with an extensive backlist of favorite books I have read and, in some cases, re-read. They are interesting, informative, and entertaining, but these books are a step beyond. This is where I go when I need hope and inspiration.
I met Jane Goodall in Washington on her birthday 25 years ago. At that time, all I knew of her came from her beginnings as a chimpanzee researcher. It was hard to believe this slight, elderly woman had found the courage to strike out alone into the deepest part of the African forest and even harder to believe her discovery there had changed the world.
This draws on her decades of work since that time by the world’s most famous living ethologist and environmentalist. It’s an uplifting journey around the globe that highlights the good work that will inspire people to make a difference in the world around them. As one of the UN’s Ambassadors of Peace, she offers four pillars of hope drawn from her unique experience: the amazing human intellect, the resilience of nature, the power and dedication of young people, and the indomitable human spirit.
Those who know Jane Goodall through her many books, speeches, and National Geographic television specials, know she is obviously no ordinary scientist. She is a genuinely spiritual woman who cares passionately about the preservation and enhancement of life in all its forms.Based upon the many spiritual experiences that have graced and shaped her outlook on life, Dr. Goodall is convinced there is a higher purpose to life, and that this purpose can best be served by a sense of reverence for creation- a commitment to opening our hearts and minds to the spiritual ties that bind us to the Earth.In…
Ramon Ramirez’s Dog is a collection of essays written over the years about the adventures and misadventures, mostly outside but occasionally inside the diplomatic career of a U.S. ambassador. Common threads weaving the stories together are a desire for a life well-lived, balancing career with family and friends, keeping physically…
I am all about support, and support is a big part of Black Girl Magic. I believe that every woman should have a support system and community that values each and every person in it. Many of these authors have been featured on my podcast Support is Sexy, an interview-based podcast that introduces dynamic women professionals and the stories of their journeys to my audiences around the world. I recommended the books of these women because I love their message of self-care, self-love, support, and nurturing a healthy community.
Peace Is a Practice is the latest book from one of my favorite authors, Morgan Harper Nichols. I first met her last year when I interviewed her on my podcast, Support is Sexy, about her inspirational poetry and quotes going viral on social media. Her writing contextualizes the idea of letting go of regret and not fearing the future. Her writing is lovely and it teaches her audience to believe in themselves and the power of the Universe.
When you breathe in all the grace available to you and release everything that is outside of your control, you'll discover peace that surpasses your circumstances. All it takes is practice.
If you feel overwhelmed with anxiety about the future, you're far from alone. For many of us, when we're not worrying about what is to come, we find ourselves wrestling with things from the past. Where does that leave us today?
Morgan Harper Nichols has learned the answer to this question. She has examined stories from her own life and the lives of people around the world and noticed…
