Here are 88 books that No Time to Say Goodbye fans have personally recommended if you like
No Time to Say Goodbye.
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I’m a British author who has always had a fascination with magical realism and novels that blend the serious with the strange. For that reason, though I write literary fiction for adults, I take so much of my inspiration from children’s literature. There’s something so simple about how kids’ books stitch the extraordinary into the every day without having to overexplain things. I now live not far from the forest that inspired A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, and my latest novel is set in and inspired by this part of rural England–with all the mystery and magic that a trip into the woods entails.
In this claustrophobic modern classic, a grieving father and Ted Hughes scholar finds himself haunted by an oily, unnerving, anthropomorphic crow.
I’m a fan of anything Porter writes, but his debut is deserving of the indelible mark it’s made upon the modern literary landscape. The crow is a character like no other, and Porter’s poetry brings this strange and beautiful bird to life.
A SUNDAY TIMES TOP 100 NOVEL OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Winner of the 2016 International Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times/Peter, Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year award and shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Goldsmiths Prize.
In a London flat, two young boys face the unbearable sadness of their mother's sudden death. Their father, a Ted Hughes scholar and scruffy romantic, imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness.
In this moment of despair they are visited by Crow - antagonist, trickster, healer, babysitter. This sentimental bird is drawn to the grieving family…
I’m a certified life coach—well-versed in all nature of human experiences and how to deal with them—but when my husband died unexpectedly, suddenly the challenges became extremely personal, requiring me to broaden my understanding and skills as well as figuring out how to incorporate them into my life, instead of my clients’ lives. I did what I always do: I turned to books to help me figure out how to “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” My list includes some of the books I found most helpful as I learned a new way to live within altered circumstances.
When I read Kessler’s book, a missing piece came into place for me. I had been working hard to absorb my loss, to be brave, to keep going...what I needed, in addition, was to find meaning in what had happened.
This book helped me ask the right questions to begin to do that. It drew me forward into a new stage of acceptance, helping me let go of underlying angst and despair.
'A brilliant, caring, practical guide to help us understand grief' Daniel J Siegel, M.D.
'Finding Meaning is Kessler's poignant response to society's insensitivity, [a] how-to in the very best sense' LA Times
David Kessler - the world's foremost expert on grief and the coauthor with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross of the iconic On Grief and Grieving - journeys beyond the classic five stages to discover a sixth stage: meaning.
David has spent decades teaching about end of life, trauma and grief. And yet his life was upended by the sudden death of his twenty-one-year-old son. How does the grief expert handle such…
I'm the author of the best-selling books How to Tell Depression to Piss Off: 40 Ways to Get Your Life Back, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off: 40 Ways to Get Your Life Back, The Recovery Letters, and What I Do to Get Through. My sixth book will be, How to Smash Stress: 40 Ways to Manage the Unmanageable.
He describes the death of his partner from alcoholism and the events leading up to it in an unflinchingly honest and moving way. It's raw and personal but that's what grief is. It's beautiful and respectful and shows how grief is both a shared experience and so completely individual at the same time.
'Immensely moving and disarmingly witty' Nigella Lawson 'Such a moving, tough, funny, raw, honest read' Matt Haig 'Beautifully written, moving and gut-wrenching, but also at times very funny' Ian Rankin 'Captures brilliantly, beautifully, bravely the comedy as well as the tragedy of bereavement' The Times 'Will strike a chord with anyone who has grieved' Independent
Whether it is pastoral care for the bereaved, discussions about the afterlife, or being called out to perform the last rites, death is part of the Reverend Richard Coles's life and work. But when his partner the Reverend David Coles died,…
Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?
By
Joy Loverde,
Everything you need to know to plan for your own safe, financially secure, healthy, and happy old age.
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to help…
I'm the author of the best-selling books How to Tell Depression to Piss Off: 40 Ways to Get Your Life Back, How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off: 40 Ways to Get Your Life Back, The Recovery Letters, and What I Do to Get Through. My sixth book will be, How to Smash Stress: 40 Ways to Manage the Unmanageable.
The useful thing about this book is that it breaks down the different types of losses we can experience and examines those. Sibling loss, parental loss, loss of a child, etc. You can connect to your type of grief and learn specifics about how to manage it. It is also filled with compassion and wisdom from one of the grief experts in the world.
'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 always been a horse-crazy girl (going on nearly 20 years now)! Horses are excellent teachers and even better friends. They never lie, and they always treat you fairly. I’ve been teaching lessons for the past five years as a PATH Intl. certified instructor, and it’s been such a joy to share my love of horses with others. Here’s to all the great real-life horses in the world that inspire such great books.
This book (and series) was amazing before it was a TV show. Do yourself a favor and read. The. Books! Heartland is a powerful story of how horses can help us make sense of loss; additionally, it highlights how horses can help us connect to a deeper part of ourselves. Plus, the herbal knowledge in the books is way better than the TV show, and you might actually learn something your four-legged friends might like rubbed on their noses.
Amy's mother founded Heartland, a place for healing traumatized horses, but Amy, who inherited her mother's skills with horses, must continue her work after an accident on a stormy night kills her mother.
I had depression when I was young, but I didn’t know what that meant or what to do about it. So much of mental health is invisible and nobody knew. I didn’t have the language to explain how I felt, or to ask for help, and I didn’t know how to find out. Any book that could have helped me jump those hurdles would have been incredibly valuable. Children relate to stories, characters, metaphors and pictures more than words. Giving children the tools to explore how they feel in ways they can relate to is really important. I wouldn’t want anyone else to feel as alone as I did.
Luna’s Red Hat does a fantastic job of explaining suicide to its readers in a way that is blameless and sensitive, delicate but not sugar-coated. It’s a hard topic to talk about, especially with children or people who haven’t ever felt suicidal themselves. You can tell in the way that Luna and her father talk to each other and about Luna’s mother that this was and is a very close and loving family, and that nobody is to blame for Luna’s mother taking her own life. This book has been a big inspiration for me. I hope I am able to write about mental health and other difficult topics with as much grace as Emmi does in this book.
It is a beautiful spring day, and Luna is having a picnic in the park with her family, wearing her Mum's red hat. Luna's Mum died one year ago and she still finds it difficult to understand why. She feels that it may have been her fault and worries that her Dad might leave her in the same way. Her Dad talks to her to explain what happened and together they think about all the happy memories they have of Mum.
This beautifully-illustrated storybook is designed as a tool to be read with children aged 6+ who have experienced the…
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places…
I’m a lover of YA fiction, and writing YA books! Growing up in small-town Eastern Canada, I had a difficult time connecting to the popular YA novels of the time. There were few that really reflected my experience, or even felt relatable. Now, as a writer, I seek to write novels that others who may feel underrepresented for any number of reasons can build a connection to. And as a reader, I’m constantly on the lookout for works that speak to me.
This book broke me open and sewed me back together. It’s a must-read if you’ve ever loved someone who was struggling with their mental health. Absolutely gut-wrenching, but still bursting with hope, this story stayed with me for weeks. One aspect I especially loved was seeing the friendship between the main character Caitlin and her deceased friend Ingrid through the lens of the past, while at the same time seeing her build new connections with the people around her in the present. The way her memories of Ingrid and the things she leaves behind informs some of her decisions in the present was expertly done.
A beautiful new edition of the stunning debut novel by Nina LaCour, award-winning author of We Are Okay
"Hold Still may be the truest depiction of the aching, gaping hole left in the wake of a suicide that I've ever read. A haunting and hopeful book about loss, love, and redemption." - Gayle Forman, #1 bestselling author of If I Stay and I Have Lost My Way
That night Ingrid told Caitlin, I'll go wherever you go. But by dawn Ingrid, and her promise, were gone.
Ingrid's suicide immobilizes Caitlin, leaving her unsure of her place in a new life…
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’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…
In May 1941, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, hums with talk of spring flowers, fishing derbies, and the growing war in Europe. And for the residents of a quiet neighborhood boarding house, the winds of change are blowing.
Self-proclaimed spinster, Bessie Blackwell, is the reluctant owner of a new pair of glasses. The…
As someone who has experienced a lot of loss in my life, I’ve done a good amount of research and exploration into the soulful nature in all of us (the living and the dead) through reading nonfiction (Laura Lynn Jackson, Brian Weiss, Edgar Cayce, Jane Roberts, John Edward and Suzane Northrop among them) and fiction that deals with strong soulful connections. Through my own work as an author, I seek to provide the message love, in any form, transcends life and death. We only have to be open to the possibility to know it and experience it. Nothing is a coincidence and we are all connected. I hope these selections open you to the possibility.
Fabiaschi’s story is told from two very different perspectives.
One is from earth and told from the perspectives of a grieving daughter and husband as they grapple with their loss. The other is from purgatory or a stasis from the perspective of the mother/wife who seems to have committed suicide. But everything is not as it seems. From the afterlife, Maddy tries to help her grieving family find answers and closure.
I was fascinated by the way Maddy attempts to affect the lives of her loved ones.
Maddy was a loving, devoted stay-at-home mother... until she committed suicide, which left her husband Brady and her teenage daughter Eve heartbroken and reeling, wondering how they can possibly continue without her. Maddy, however, isn't quite done with them. In an attempt to fulfil her family's needs, Maddy watches and meddles from beyond the grave, determined to find the perfect wife and mother to replace herself and heal her family. That's when she finds Rory: a free-spirited schoolteacher, who Maddy manoeuvres into Eve's confidences, but who turns out to be harbouring a tragedy of her own.
