The most recommended tragedy books

This book is all about second chances and restructuring the foundation of what was once a beautiful friendship into so much more.

The plotline and the characters tugged on my heartstrings like no other, and I loved the development from their childhood into adulthood. I’m also an absolute sucker for emotional scars, and this book delivered in every sense of the trope.

Offill’s book reads like a contemporary John Updike slathered in poetry.

The relationship at the center of the book is something we view through the honeyed distortion of language, but don’t all relationships have their own honeyed distortions? The beginnings of the relationship are beautiful, and so are the endings because every spring and every fall are natural inversions of one another.

As a result, Offill’s version of love is one I find deeply affecting. She whispers secrets to me, telling me that every tragedy contains within it the hope and beauty of some fresh-feathered beginning, a beginning, in fact, that is never very far removed from where we are.

Christian Schwarz deftly creates a rising tension between two sisters who are torn apart by secrets. Ruth gradually pieces together memories from her childhood, bringing the story to a climax when her secrets are revealed and the consequences come to pass. This story was one I read and studied multiple times during my journey to publication.

The Titanic novel my mum bought me for my eighth birthday, it was this one, which is why it can’t not be included (though mine is tattered and the back cover long lost. I can’t yet bring myself to buy a new one). Titanic: The Long Night is like a hot cup of chocolate on a cold winter’s night. It’s sinking into a bath and thinking, This is exactly what I need. It tells two stories: That of first-class passenger, Elizabeth Farr, who falls in love with handsome first-class passenger and artist, Max Whittaker, and third-class passenger Kathleen Hanrahan, who is travelling from Ireland to America to pursue her dreams. Kathleen falls for the youngest Keller brother, “Paddy” (I cannot tell you how many years I yearned for my very own “Paddy”, that was how much I loved his character). 

There’s something so joyful about this novel. It’s full of… show more.

Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize laureate from Nigeria, was steeped in both Yoruba traditions and Greek tragedy as well as Shakespeare.

This combination of influences shaped his adaptation of The Bacchae, by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides.

He brings this play into the modern world of slavery, using White and Black actors. At the same time, he captures the original’s blend of ritual and performance.

This explosive mixture is the most compelling study I know in what theater can do: mobilize bodies in front of an audience. It also shows how theater can bridge vast historical and cultural differences.

Also by Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925, is the slow-moving and heavy-handed but steadily engrossing and ultimately overwhelming account of a poor boy so bewitched by a beautiful rich girl that he commits literal murder and loses his own life in his struggle to have her.

This book is a luminously honest, unflinching, and brave memoir by the marvelous Dani Shapiro, whose most recent memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love, caused a sensation when it was published in 2019. 

When Slow Motion begins, Dani is in her early 20s, adrift, rebelling against her Jewish heritage, dabbling in acting and modeling, involved in a dead-end affair with a married man. 

Then one night, a phone call changes everything- her parents have been in a dreadful car accident. Her father dies a few weeks later, and her mother requires months of intensive rehab.

Dani's tragic loss of the father she idolized and adored prompts a reckoning with her choices and a reevaluation of her life. Slow Motion is beautifully written, wrenching, and unwaveringly candid.

This memoir touched on all the feelings and struggles young stroke survivors experience and how love made the journey endurable. I related to much of her story, but I was more thankful than her. She writes about the inaccessibility of structures, and the ignorance society has about the disabled. All of this is true, but I was so grateful to be alive and free from being locked in; inaccessibility issues had no place in my memoir.

I love books with creepy houses, complicated friendships, grown-ups returning to their hometowns, dual timelines, and mysterious books that characters must decode.

The Wonder State has all these things. And not just one creepy house, but many! From the outside it might seem like your standard wayward-teens-get-into-trouble story, but it is so much more. It’s magical. It’s heartfelt. It’s clever. It’s atmospheric.

The houses in this book are more than homes. They are works of art, they are portals to the past, they are hideouts, they are solace, and they are terrible dangers, all at once.

For my money, Shakespeare is the greatest writer who ever lived; anything he has to say will be interesting, profound, and stated as well as anyone can state it. His portrayal of the Macbeths rivals Homer’s portrayal of Achilles in the understanding of trauma. For Macbeth, this is the trauma of military violence. For Lady Macbeth, this is the trauma of the loss of a child.