16 Books About Grief, Sorted by the Job You Need Them to Do

In June 2020 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's father died in Nigeria while she was locked down in the United States, watching the funeral being arranged over video calls she could not fly home for. The book runs to about eighty pages and moves in short numbered fragments instead of chapters, which happens to be exactly how a mind works in the first weeks. She writes about the rage nobody warns you about, the well meant sentences from other people that land like insults, and the strange paperwork of death. None of it has been tidied up for your comfort.

Megan Devine was already a psychotherapist when her partner drowned in front of her, which put her on both sides of the desk at once. Her argument is that grief is not a disorder waiting for the right technique, it is a response to loss that has to be carried rather than cured, and that most of the pain around mourning is added by other people who cannot tolerate your sadness. Practical sections cover sleep, work, anniversaries and the friend who keeps sending articles about acceptance. One chapter is written to be handed to your family.

After his wife died of cancer, Lewis filled a few notebooks with whatever the day had done to him, and published the result under a pen name because it was too naked to sign. It is sixty odd pages of a mind arguing with itself: he notices that grief feels physically like fear, that his memory of her is already being replaced by his idea of her, that other people are embarrassed and cross the road. His faith takes a beating for most of the book. He does not arrive anywhere tidy, which is why it has outlived a hundred more organised books on the subject.

In December 2003 John Gregory Dunne had a fatal heart attack at their dinner table, weeks after their daughter had been admitted to intensive care. The magical thinking of the title is Didion's inability to give away his shoes, because he would need shoes when he came back. She reports on herself the way she reported on everything else, reading medical literature and etiquette manuals, checking her own behaviour against the research, catching herself in the act of madness and writing it down anyway.

Michelle Zauner was in her mid twenties when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The book moves between a difficult childhood as the half Korean kid in Oregon, the years of fighting with a mother whose love arrived as criticism and peeled fruit, and the caregiving months where a daughter learns to cook the dishes she never bothered to learn while there was time. The supermarket of the title is where the crying happens now, somewhere between the banchan and the frozen dumplings, because food is the last channel still open.

Helen Macdonald's father, a press photographer, died without warning, and instead of grieving in any recognisable way she bought a goshawk called Mabel and spent months alone teaching it to hunt. The book braids three threads: the hawk, her own slide into isolation, and the story of T. H. White, who wrote his own tortured falconry book in the 1930s. What makes it more than a nature memoir is her honesty about how good it felt to become something other than a person for a while, and how badly that ended.

Mary-Frances O'Connor studies grief in the laboratory, and her central idea is simple enough to change your week. Your brain has stored that person as a coordinate: here, now, close. Death does not delete the map, so the prediction machine keeps running, which is why you look up when the gate opens and why you dial a number that no longer works. She separates grief, the response, from grieving, the long process of updating that map, and she is careful about what the science does and does not know.

The family was on holiday in Yala, on the Sri Lankan coast, when the sea came in on Boxing Day 2004. In a few minutes Sonali Deraniyagala lost her two boys, her husband and both her parents, and survived. The book begins inside the water and then follows the years after, including behaviour she has no interest in making acceptable: drinking herself into blackouts, harassing the family who moved into her parents' house, arranging her life so she would not have to keep living it. There is no arc towards healing, only the slow return of the ability to remember them.

A Ted Hughes scholar loses his wife suddenly and is left alone with two young sons in a London flat. Then Crow arrives, a bird borrowed straight out of Hughes's poetry, rude and violent and oddly protective, and announces he will stay until he is not needed. The book is barely a hundred pages and switches between three voices, part prose, part poem, part fairy tale. It is also funny in places, in the way houses with small children in them stay funny even in the worst week of your life.

The first two parts are essays about nineteenth century balloonists and early aerial photography, people who put two things together that had never been joined before. The third part is about the death of Barnes's wife a few weeks after her diagnosis, and about the widower left behind: the friends who avoid saying her name, the ones who cross the street, the opera he goes to alone, the nights he thinks about not continuing. The balloon material stops being decoration once you reach it, because the whole argument is about what happens when the height you gained is taken away.

Half of this is the story of a mother's illness and death and the year that followed it, including the parts O'Rourke does not flatter herself about. The other half is reporting: what anthropologists and psychiatrists know about mourning, why the old customs existed, what happened when Western societies dropped them and left the bereaved with three days of leave and a stack of casseroles. She is good on the specific loneliness of being back at work in week two while your interior life is still on the floor.

Gawande goes through nursing homes, assisted living, hospice care and his own operating theatre to make one case: modern medicine treats death as a technical failure, so it keeps offering one more intervention rather than asking what a dying person actually wants from the time left. The chapters on his father's illness and the family's decisions are the ones that stay with you, and the book ends with the family taking his ashes to Varanasi. He gives you the questions to ask a doctor and a parent, which is rare in a book this humane.

Paul Kalanithi had almost finished a decade of neurosurgical training when the scans came back. The first half is a life spent asking what makes a life meaningful, through literature and then through brain surgery. The second half is that question arriving in person, with a wife, a new daughter, and a career he no longer has time to finish. He wrote it while dying and did not live to complete it, and his wife Lucy wrote the closing pages about the days at the end.

Conor's mother is in cancer treatment, his father lives abroad, his grandmother is unbearable, and school has decided to treat him as invisible. Then something ancient walks over from the churchyard and starts telling him three stories, none of which behave the way stories are supposed to, in exchange for a fourth story that Conor has to tell himself. The book came from an idea by Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could write it, and Ness took the premise and wrote his own version with Jim Kay's illustrations.

Ajay is eight when the family arrives in New York from Delhi, and his brilliant older brother Birju is the family's whole plan for the future. Then Birju hits his head in a swimming pool, and the household reorganises itself permanently around a boy who is alive, cared for at home, and never coming back in any way that counts. Sharma writes it flat and dry, with a child's cruel comedy running under it, and the ordinary domestic detail is what makes it hurt: the visiting relatives, the miracle cures, the father's drinking.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross built the five stages from her work with dying patients in the 1960s. This later book, written with David Kessler and finished shortly before her death, applies that framework to the people left behind. Set aside the stages and there is a lot of quiet practical help in here: what to do about the belongings, how to handle the first anniversary, what to tell children, why the second year is often worse than the first, how to survive other people's advice at a funeral.