Here are 100 books that Trompe L’oeil fans have personally recommended if you like
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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…
I have always wanted to be a writer. I love reading and am inspired by authors of character-driven novels—Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Berg, Colm Toibin, Anna Quindlen, and others—who take time to explore the inner thoughts and motivations of their protagonists. The novels I picked take the reader deep into the interior thoughts of their protagonists. As they explore the complexities of relationships amid the texture of ordinary life, they reveal the fragility and strength of the characters as we discover what simmers beneath the surface of their relationships. Long after reading them, I remember the characters and the time I spent with them.
Colm Toibin is one of my favorite writers. The drama in his novels is found in quiet moments with portraits of ordinary characters that we get to know and love. Nora Webster is a 44-year-old woman living in a small town in Ireland. We meet her soon after her husband dies, as she grieves amid navigating her new life with four children and little income.
Through Toibin’s exceptional character development, we become immersed in Nora’s journey: her realization of feeling confined by the well-meaning expectations of her neighbors; her relationship with her sons as she struggles to parent them through their grief; her growing self-reflection as she awakens to her hidden strength. We cheer her as she achieves her newfound independence.
* * * Shortlisted for the 2014 Costa Novel Awards and the 2015 Folio Prize * * *
Nora Webster is the heartbreaking new novel from one of the greatest novelists writing today.
It is the late 1960s in Ireland. Nora Webster is living in a small town, looking after her four children, trying to rebuild her life after the death of her husband. She is fiercely intelligent, at times difficult and impatient, at times kind, but she is trapped by her circumstances, and waiting for any chance which will lift her beyond them.
As a young working mom, I occasionally longed to follow the example of columnist Erma Bombeck and hide from my family in the car. Instead, I channeled the mayhem of family life into a humor column called “The Mother Load,” which detailed the day-to-day challenges of running a business while caring for two daughters, one husband, two guinea pigs, and a dancing rabbit. When I decided to pursue my life-long dream to write fiction, my debut novel was a humorous story about a mother-daughter-grandmother road trip/chase from Boston to Memphis. Although my writing doesn’t shy away from serious issues, I choose to see the world through a humorous and ultimately hopeful lens.
While on a beach vacation, the forty-year-old mother/protagonist of this book, Delia Grinstead, walks away from her distant husband and three surly children – seemingly on a whim – to try out a new life.
Anne Tyler’s characters are unfailingly quirky, and Delia can be both frustrating and charming, but the book engagingly details the mid-life crisis of a woman eager to learn who she is.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Breathing Lessons
"BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION."
The headlines are all the same: Beloved mother and wife Delia Grinstead was last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing only a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To the best of her family's knowledge, she has disappeared without a trace. But Delia didn't disappear. She ran.
Exhausted with her routine and everyone else's plans for her, Delia needed an out, a chance to make a new life for herself and to…
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 have always wanted to be a writer. I love reading and am inspired by authors of character-driven novels—Anne Tyler, Elizabeth Berg, Colm Toibin, Anna Quindlen, and others—who take time to explore the inner thoughts and motivations of their protagonists. The novels I picked take the reader deep into the interior thoughts of their protagonists. As they explore the complexities of relationships amid the texture of ordinary life, they reveal the fragility and strength of the characters as we discover what simmers beneath the surface of their relationships. Long after reading them, I remember the characters and the time I spent with them.
James Salter takes us deep into an exploration of the human condition and fragility of relationships with his narrative of the domestic life of an affluent American family with seemingly perfect lives on the surface. Through small details and observations of daily life, Salter brings us closely into their world—like voyeurs, we observe the fissures that simmer underneath their searches for happiness.
We move through years of their lives as their marriage crumbles with the passage of time and the coexistence of love and betrayal.
Nedra and Viri are a married couple whose favoured life is centred around dinners, ingenious games with their children, enviable friends and near-perfect days passed skating on a frozen river or sunning on the beach. But fine cracks are beginning to spread through the shimmering surface of their life - flaws that will eventually mar the lovely picture beyond repair. Seductive, witty, tender and resonant, Light Years is an exquisite novel of lost lives and the elusiveness of happiness.
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.
In the West, many of us shy away from discussing death. It’s an unknowable, frightening inevitability, the last taboo in our society, according to grief psychotherapist Julia Samuel.
At once rigorous and practical, Grief Works is a compassionate guide for those of us left behind, including family, friends and carers, helping us all to get through the hardest months and years, showing how to live and learn from great loss.
'Fascinating. A wise and compassionate book full of insight and understanding that would help anyone experiencing grief, or those surrounding them' Cathy Rentzenbrink
'A wonderfully important and transforming book - lucid, consoling and wise' William Boyd
Grief Works is a compassionate guide that will inform and engage anyone who is grieving, from the 'expected' death of a parent to the sudden unexpected death of a small child, and provide clear advice for those seeking to comfort the bereaved.
Julia Samuel guides you gently through her eight practical pillars of strength - that include the…
I’ve sat in many grief circles and listened to fellow grievers share their pain at being abandoned or misunderstood by their friends and families as they grieve. Often we suffer the secondary loss of community because our culture has not taught us how to grieve or how to be a friend to those in grief. My wife and I found some invaluable tools that helped us communicate our needs to our community, and keep them close on our grief journey. One of those tools is grief books. I’ve read dozens of them, and while everyone responds to grief books differently, I think these five books are the very best.
Devine does a wonderful job of validating our feelings and our needs as we grieve.
It is filled with many wonderful pieces of wisdom about grief. The most helpful insight she offered me was the distinction she drew between the healthy pain of grief versus the unnecessary and unhelpful suffering that so often accompanies grief.
She provides practical advice on how to be kind to ourselves as we grieve. We can’t “fix” our grief and loss, but we can be kind to ourselves on this difficult journey.
As seen in THE NEW YORK TIMES * READER'S DIGEST * SPIRITUALITY & HEALTH * HUFFPOST
Featured on NPR's RADIO TIMES and WISCONSIN PUBLIC RADIO
When a painful loss or life-shattering event upends your world, here is the first thing to know: there is nothing wrong with grief. "Grief is simply love in its most wild and painful form," says Megan Devine. "It is a natural and sane response to loss."
So, why does our culture treat grief like a disease to be cured as quickly as possible?
In It's OK That You're Not OK, Megan Devine offers a profound…
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.…
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.
I’ve admired Claire Bidwell Smith’s writing and work around grief for years, but only recently read Conscious Grieving, and I’m so glad I did.
Organized by Smith’s concept of “four orientations”—Entering, Engaging, Surrendering, and Transforming—this book gently walked me through ways in which we can consciously engage with our grief rather than experiencing it as something that’s happening to us.
Though my first experience with grief occurred nearly 60 years ago and the devastating loss of my son more than two decades ago, there’s no question that there are new losses ahead. Thanks to this resource, I feel far more prepared to walk through grief with intentionality and embrace a meaningful life as I do.
Smith’s summary of other grief models and list of tools make this book a must-have for me.
Conscious Grieving is a book for anyone seeking guidance and support after loss. Renowned grief therapist Claire Bidwell Smith combines her deeply personal experience of loss with her long career spent working with thousands of people to introduce a new approach to grief, one that promotes hope and even transformation.
What does it mean to grieve consciously? Most of the time, when we lose someone we love, it feels like grief is just happening to us. We feel out of control, and overwhelmed. Claire reminds us that while loss is something that inevitably happens to all of us, how we…
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.
Like many beautiful memoirs on grief and loss, Campbell tells the story of the catastrophic death of his two teenage children and the ways he and his wife lived through what seems unsurvivable.
But he doesn’t stop there, instead turning what he learned in his darkest times into a guide for grievers. Upending the common wisdom that “we all grieve differently,” he asserts that there are commonalities in grief that can serve as a guide for those walking through their most difficult days.
Finding the Words is organized into chapters addressing central issues in grief, including fear, pain, and guilt, but also community, ritual, and finally, meaning and purpose.
This is the book I wish I’d had when my grief was new. I’m grateful it's in the world.
A powerful account of one father’s journey through unimaginable grief, offering readers a new vision for how to more actively and fully mourn profound loss.
When Colin Campbell’s two teenage children were killed by a drunk driver, Campbell was thrown headlong into a grief so deep he felt he might lose his mind. He found much of the common wisdom about coping with loss—including the ideas that grieving is a private and mysterious process and that the pain is so great that “there are no words”—to be unhelpful. Drawing on what he learned from his own journey, Campbell offers an…
A poet for fifty years, I'm proud to say that nobody's ever said, "I didn't understand your poem." The rhythms, images, and words in these books are in plain English. They have feeling and authenticity in common. They make connections. After a reading once, a woman said, "I feel as if I know your whole family." I feel the same about the authors of these books. I'm also interested in my quirky kind of American Jewishness at a time when it's in the news but complicated and misunderstood. Some of the books I chose reflect that.
I loved this anthology of poems for its authenticity and depth of feeling.
It was written by and for widows—of all genders and ages, in all kinds of committed relationships. The anthology demonstrates that there are an infinite number of ways to grieve and survive.
I have given this book as a gift to a number of friends dealing with the loss of a spouse or partner (not necessarily right away!), and they have told me they got a lot of comfort from it.
I think the quality of the poems and how different from every other every voice and experience described is give the book as a whole enormous power. It says, "This is something we all go through, we can each find our own way to grieve, and we are not alone."
The Widows' Handbook is the first anthology of poems by contemporary widows, many of whom have written their way out of solitude and despair, distilling their strongest feelings into poetry or memoir. This stirring collection celebrates the strategies widows learn and the resources they muster to deal with people, living space, possessions, social life, and especially themselves, once shock has turned to the realization that nothing will ever be the same. As Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says in her foreword, losing one's partner is "a loss like no other.",
The Widows' Handbook is a collection of poetry from…
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…
My name is Jeannie Reed. I was an executive for many years and, for many years, an editor and a professional psychic in concurrent full-time careers. Eight years ago, a spirit started making itself known in my apartment in New York City. He's still here. This spirit's presence is not unusual. What is unusual is that he communicates by drawing. Drawings anybody can see. This man died in 1920. I had zero interest in him until now, though I had heard of him, a great artist, Amedeo Modigliani. I am not soft-minded. I doubted this whole thing for a year. Until finally, it was unavoidable.
Dr. Moody spent many years researching near-death experiences. This book is a classic on the subject. It discusses death, after-death, and attitudes about dying...all from the most positive point of view. If, in a near-death experience, people report seeing and talking to long-deceased loved ones, and all in the same way, how can life simply stop at the grave?
Dr. Moody's courageous research helped launch an entire movement. So much is known now that wasn't known before about death, no longer the ultimate experience. Just a quick stop on an enormous journey!
In this smash bestseller that has sold more than 14 million copies around the world, Dr Moody reveals his ground-breaking study of people who experienced 'clinical death' - and were revived. Their amazing testimonies and surprising descriptions of 'death' and 'beyond' are so strikingly similar, so vivid and so overwhelmingly positive they have changed the way we view life and death, and the spiritual hereafter. Introducing the revolutionary concepts of the NDE (Near Death Experience), the bright light and the tunnel, Life After Life has shaped countless reader's notions about the meaning of the death and offered essential reassurance to…
