Here are 86 books that Fragile Lives fans have personally recommended if you like
Fragile Lives.
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I’m not as old as some of the characters in the books I’ve mentioned, but I’m getting there. With age, one learns to hold grief in one hand and gratitude in the other. The importance of friendship and community can hardly be overstated. I love reading books that represent older characters, especially women, as complex, life-embracing individuals without resorting to condescension. I strove to write such a book with Toby’s Last Resort. I’m not always writing about older characters, but in all my work, I want to dive below the surface, discover meaning in the ordinary, and treat my characters with respect.
The narrator of this story is a writer whose friend is dying of cancer.
The friend asks the narrator to accompany her through her final days, including the contemplation of suicide. The writer reluctantly agrees.
One unusual thing about this novel is that none of the characters have names; they’re referred to as the daughter, the ex, or the friend. This jarred me at first, but I grew used to it.
The narrator takes mental excursions about many topics, musing as a writer. While this sounds like a depressing set-up, I found this story to be a thoughtful and tender statement about connection.
The two women become surprisingly close while sharing this intimate part of life.
'I was totally overwhelmed by this extraordinary novel. A total joy - and laugh-out-loud funny' DEBORAH MOGGACH
The New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning author of THE FRIEND brings her singular voice to a story about the meaning of life and death, and the value of companionship.
The woman at the heart of this extraordinary novel finds that everyone she meets has a common need: the urge to talk about themselves and to have an audience for their experiences. And so she tries to pay attention, to imagine and listen to what those around her are going through. But then…
I’m a teacher turned author. I’ve spent hours in middle and high schools watching students struggle because they couldn’t get the support they need. And hours listening to the experiences of child and adult victims my husband brought home from work. When we as a society begin to treat mental illness as simply illness, we’ll be on the right track to giving our society the support it needs.
This is a lesser-known book, and I wish more teens had it in their library. There is no shirking behind any kind of veil or safety as Vincent weaves his way through his suicidal ideations, finds friendships, and navigates his health back to safety. This is a quiet novel that’s brutally honest about how one continues on when they’re not sure why they should.
Bonus for animal lovers as Vincent spends a lot of time at the local animal shelter.
Vincent has spent his entire life being shuffled from one foster home to the next. His grades suck. Making friends? Out of the question thanks to his nervous breakdowns and unpredictable moods. Still, Vince thought when Maggie Atkins took him in, he might've finally found a place to get his life--and his issues--in order. When Maggie dies, it all falls apart. A year ago, Vince watched a girl leap to her death off a bridge. He's starting to think she had the right idea. Through a pro-suicide forum, Vince meets others with the same debate regarding death: cancer-ridden Casper would…
I’ve been an avid ready of fantasy for over twenty years, and I’ve spent nearly as long at least thinkingabout writing. In that time, I have definitely found some fantasy that wasn’t for me and some that really, really was. I like my fantasy fun and relatively light—I own nearly every Discworld book but could never get into George R. R. Martin. And my writing has naturally evolved around the same lines. I love a good joke or a well-timed pun almost as much as I love unexpected takes on fantasy tropes.
An absolutely favorite read, A Barrel of Laughs, a Vale of Tears is a perfect blend of humor and fantasy—exactly the sort of thing I strive for with my own writing. With characters that actively defy the author and the constricts of the plot, this book was meta before meta was cool. A classic tale of love told in a very not-classic way, this is the first book I can vividly remember making me laugh the whole time I read it. It’s a distinct feeling, and one I have been chasing ever since.
‘Prince Roger sets out eagerly on a quest and finds a few adventures, a lot of friends, a damsel or two in distress (not!) and himself, in the end. A ‘carrier of joy’ whose mere presence causes everyone to laugh uncontrollably, Roger finds cruelty and kindness equally amusing, and expects his quest to be a lark. It’s anything but: As Roger passes through the Forever Forest, nearly starves at the Dastardly Divide, sees people at their worst in the Valley of Vengeance, and temporarily despairs in the Mountains of Malice, he sobers up, learns to care for others, becomes an…
I am not the type of person who likes to say “you are wrong” in fact I am the type of person who likes to say “let us add this to the whole story”. When you picture Japan you do not picture: slavery, snake dancers, or even samurai removing their shoes outdoors in a gesture of politeness to a superior, you do not imagine Italian Jesuits, western traders, pirates, and Chinese samurai, but they are all a part of actual samurai life. It is my task to add those lost items to our understanding of Japan and the samurai, but of course, in addition to this, I have to correct the story of the ninja, simply because it is a false one. The shinobi as they should be known were disfigured in the 20th century and I want to reveal their true face.
Who does not know about Seppuku, or Hara-kiri (also incorrectly said as Hari-Kari)? Andrew in his book gives a great in-depth discussion about its history, its customs, and its position in Japanese society. I have no idea why this book is not a best seller. I know I have used it in my own books more than once. People think they know about ritual suicide in Japanese culture, but more often than not it is “movie knowledge” and Andrew’s book is a solid piece of research on the subject, it should be in every samurai fan’s book collection.
A collection of thrilling samurai tales tracing the history of seppuku from ancient times to the twentieth century. The history of seppuku -- Japanese ritual suicide by cutting the stomach, sometimes referred to as hara-kiri -- spans a millennium, and came to be favoured by samurai as an honourable form of death. Here, for the first time in English, is a book that charts the history of seppuku from ancient times to the twentieth century through a collection of swashbuckling tales from history and literature.
I’m a Canadian writer, and a mother of three. I think I do qualify as an ACOH (Adult Child of Hippies). My mom taught elementary school, and my dad was a university professor, but otherwise they fully embraced the hippy movement. It was a rich childhood in terms of nature, literature, art, and foreign cultures, but dysfunctional and confusing on the emotional front. Sadly, dropping a lot of acid leads to a lifetime of anxiety and depression. My father descended into mental illness and opiate addiction when I was an adult, eventually leading to his suicide. I came to terms with his death by writing Corridor Nine.
Gayle Brandeis’s intimate memoir of wrestling with her mother’s suicide following a long mental illness kept me company in the ways it mirrored my own experience. It is sometimes easier to mourn a stranger’s pain, as you edge towards your own grief. Brandeis’s reading through her mother’s letters, with their paranoid delusions and grandiose aspirations, “passionate and creatively punctuated,” rang true to my father’s crazy literary outpourings. Her experiences of entering her mother’s home to witness the evidence of her last activities, to the almost physical trauma of learning the stark details of her mother’s suicide method, comforted me in their familiarity. The suicide of a mentally ill parent leaves a lot of guilt and confusion in its wake. Anger and resentment aren’t what one “should” feel after a death of a parent, but Brandeis doesn’t sugarcoat the complex mess of emotions that needs to be untangled.
Award-winning novelist and poet Gayle Brandeis’s wrenching memoir of her complicated family history and her mother’s suicide
Gayle Brandeis’s mother disappeared just after Gayle gave birth to her youngest child. Several days later, her body was found: she had hanged herself in the utility closet of a Pasadena parking garage. In this searing, formally inventive memoir, Gayle describes the dissonance between being a new mother, a sweet-smelling infant at her chest, and a grieving daughter trying to piece together what happened, who her mother was, and all she had and hadn’t understood about her.
When my father died in 1998, bladder cancer, I was 41 years old and privileged to be his primary caregiver for five weeks. My first major loss and it was as though a mack truck had been driven through my chest. Ten years later, my mother died, after nine years of dementia, which is like losing someone twice. That was a more ravaging grief. Twelve years later, my nephew died, a month away from his 36th birthday. And in 2022, one close friend of mine took his own life and another died of cancer at age 57. Grief is the subject I gravitate toward in the books I read and the essays I write.
It is fair to say that this is my favorite memoir I’ve ever read. I’m shocked it didn’t make bestseller lists when it came out. Finneran is a poet, who through the language, attention to detail, and strategic pacing of key scenes, makes readers see and feel what she wants us to see and feel. This book offered me, as a teacher of college writing, numerous perfect examples of how scenes can be developed to drop readers into a moment, to transport them. Finneran focuses the memoir on how her brother’s suicide affected her whole, big, Catholic family. The Tender Land, a Family Love Story is a portrait of a family who has lost something huge. Devastating content aside, this is a memoir that you will delight in, sentence by sentence, for its language. Highly recommend this remarkable book.
An extraordinary memoir of a family haunted by tragedy: “I’ve read very few contemporary novels that can rival Finneran’s nonfiction.” —Jonathan Franzen
A superb portrait of family life, this “absorbing and thoughtful” memoir is a love story unlike any other (Library Journal). The Finnerans—Irish Catholic parents with five children in St. Louis—are a seemingly unexceptional family whose lives are upended by a catastrophic event: the suicide of the author’s fifteen-year-old younger brother after being publicly humiliated in junior high school.
A gentle, handsome boy, Sean Finneran was a straight-A student and gifted athlete, especially treasured by every member of his…
I’ve always been in love with the idea of love. I didn’t know what that feeling was like for a long time–not being in love myself–so I grew attached to fictionalised worlds that brought those ideas to life. I’ve always been the person who smiles at a meet-cute or feels that warm, fuzzy feeling inside when the couple you’ve been rooting for the last two hundred pages finally kisses. I want them to know how exciting it can be to feel loved and experience that through the creation of stories. This is why romance is, and likely always will be, a huge thematic influence on all forms of my work.
I’ve always loved stories that explore the themes of love and loss and how they entwine as one. All The Bright Places is no exception to this. Be warned; you may shed some tears!
The emotional connection you create with this book is something I tried to tap into with my own writing, and I hope that the authenticity of All The Bright Places is something that can be found in my own work. I love this book with my whole heart. I often write characters with past trauma, which becomes apparent as they begin working on themselves through the plot's unravelling.
I see so many similarities between my own characters to that of Violet Markey, a main character in All The Bright Places.She is what I consider to be an inspiration to my own writing from the very beginning. It’s truly an emotional tale filled with important topics…
PoppyHarp has at its heart the mystery of a forgotten children’s TV show from the 70s, so I wanted to share books that explore a similar idea–the fiction in fiction–be it an invented book, movie, or TV show that drives the narrative in some way. These five books all feature the enigmatic quality of something lost or some kind of age-old mystery waiting to be unraveled by its protagonists. They are also five books that I absolutely adore.
I absolutely fell for and into this seductive and sublimely entertaining book about a journalist investigating the enigma of Stanislas Cordova, an infamous and reclusive horror movie director. Nobody knows where he is or even if he’s still alive.
The invention of Cordova’s legend in the book is inspired; I love how Pessl builds layers of fake pop culture references and internet rabbit holes that feel so real you can almost hear the flicker of celluloid of one of Cordova’s movies playing out in your head. Even years after reading this book, I still recall it vividly in my mind’s eye.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • Cosmopolitan • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage
A page-turning thriller for readers of Stephen King, Gillian Flynn, and Stieg Larsson, Night Film tells the haunting story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with the mysterious death of a troubled prodigy—the daughter of an iconic, reclusive filmmaker.
On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances…
I grew up in North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and have since lived in Arkansas and Virginia. My two novels are historical, set in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Virginia and North Carolina, and are heavily influenced by the great Southern writers. My books feature family dramas, how the land interacts with characters, questions of fate and personal action, and the decisions that change people’s lives. I love Faulkner, but you’ll find him on every list. He influenced every writer who came later, but there are plenty of other heavy hitters to choose from. Here are a few favorites.
I’ve read it twice, and I can only stand back in wonder at how a person could create such a magnificent work of art (his first novel) at age 26. For richness of character development, philosophical weight, and power of language, this is one for the ages. Though the subject matter is heavy, it’s not a difficult read. Yet there are passages where you’ll want to slow down and take in the music of the words.
In this novel, the South looms dark and ominous in the background with its Biblical rhetoric, its conflict between a tradition of religious fundamentalism and modern scepticism, racial contrasts and the industrialisation of a rural society. But more than a novel of time and place, it is the story of a tormented family submerged in infidelity and driven by a vengeful love that is blocked, hurt and perverted. Peyton Loftis, who frantically needs a husband precisely because she loves her father; the decadent Milton, whose infidelity has made his marriage no more than a stage drama; and Helen, his wife,…
I’m a physician and a writer. Together, they create a matrix of practice, research, and writing. I care for patients at the Penn Memory Center and am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach and study topics at the intersections of bioethics, aging, and the neurosciences. I wrote The Problem of Alzheimer’s: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It and the novel Open Wound: The Tragic Obsession of Dr. William Beaumont and essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Forbes, The Hill, STAT, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. I raise whippets, and I’m a passionate reader of the physician and poet John Keats.
Novelist and journalist Lionel Shriver’s novel is the story of Kay and Cyril, a comfortably settled, middle-aged, middle-class British couple who make plans for their future. The experiences of a decade of caring for Kay’s father with dementia were so unsettling and disturbing that the couple agree to end their lives at 80. They carry on with their lives convinced that 80 is enough. Or maybe not. Or perhaps it depends. This book is required reading for all those planners, those self-controllers, who seize the future and bind their families with the tight contractual grip of a well-composed, gravely worded “dementia advance directive,” such as “In the event I cannot recognize family, I ask that I be euthanized” or “Should I reach a stage when I am unable to feed myself, I ask that all feeding cease.”
When her father dies, Kay Wilkinson can’t cry. Over ten years, Alzheimer’s had steadily eroded this erudite man into a paranoid lunatic. Surely one’s own father passing should never come as such a relief.
Both medical professionals, Kay and her husband Cyril have seen too many elderly patients in similar states of decay. Although healthy and vital in their early fifties, the couple fears what may lie ahead. Determined to die with dignity, Cyril makes a modest proposal. To spare themselves and their loved ones such a humiliating and protracted decline, they should agree to commit suicide together once they’ve…
