The 33 Best Sad Books to Read When You Need a Good Ugly Cry

Shortly after her husband Levi’s untimely death, Kyoko decides to raise their young son, Alex, in San Francisco, rather than return to Japan. Her overbearing-slash-loving Jewish mother-in-law, Bubbe, encourages her to find new love, even as her own mother wants Kyoko to celebrate her now husbandless life. Four sections of vignettes reflect Kyoko’s fluctuating emotional states: Kyoko and Bubbe take a road trip to a psychic; on visits back to Japan, Kyoko and her mother clash over how best to connect Alex with his Japanese heritage; etc. This novel, full of heart, and it’s about the choices and relationships that sustain us—a testament to how grief is anything but a linear process.

Anything but your typical dystopian sci-fi, this remarkably subtle novel imagines what life would be like if you were a clone, born to have your organs harvested in early adulthood. It’s haunting and weirdly subtle.

Abe and Jane have been going to Central Park for 50 years, as young lovers, as exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love…until now. Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going. Told from various points of view, some even in conversation with Central Park, these stories will paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself. This tender novel from the author of Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is an homage to New York City, romance and even loss; about love that endures despite what life throws at us (or maybe because of it).

This 2005 novel follows a young girl in Nazi Germany who, following the death of her brother, is sent to live with foster parents who open her eyes to both the power of words and the chaos and loss surrounding her. Her solution? To steal banned books before they can be burned.

In 1970s Ohio, a Chinese-American family is rocked by the disappearance of its favorite daughter. When her body is found in the local lake, the Lees’ carefully crafted façade is destroyed. What follows is a moving and sensitive family portrait about the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle to understand one another.

The stories in Irish novelist Louise Kennedy’s (Trespasses) collection center on women in contemporary Ireland and the decisions that make—or break—their lives. In one story, an expectant mother’s worst fears about her husband’s entanglement with a teenage girl are confirmed; in another, a woman struggles to forgive herself after an abortion threatens to destroy her marriage. For fans of Annie Proulx, The End of the World Is a Cul de Sac is equal parts gritty, intense and beautiful. 

You thought the movie was heart-wrenching? Sheff’s harrowing account of his son Nic’s descent into crystal meth addiction charts a father’s (and a family’s) realization that the happy son he thought he knew has become someone who’s hurting himself and others. Full of moments both tragic and beautiful, Sheff’s book is best consumed with a box of tissues nearby. (For what it’s worth, Nic’s companion book, Tweak, is also worth a read.)

Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winner tells the story of a French girl and a German boy on opposite sides of World War II. Doerr examines the horrors of war, treating both characters with equal empathy.

This is a devastating account of the author’s life before and after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which claimed the lives of her entire family, including her husband and two young sons. Despite the bleak subject matter, Deraniyagala injects the slightest amount of hope into her story—but don’t expect to get through it without bawling.

Set in modern-day Nigeria, Adebayo’s unforgettable debut novel is the story of Yejide and Akin, a young couple who, together, rejects their community’s long-held tradition of polygamy. But four years into marriage, things start to unravel; Yejide is not getting pregnant and the possibility of a second wife is literally knocking on their door. Stay with Me takes a no-holds-barred look at the fragility of married love, the nature of grief and the all-consuming bonds of motherhood.

Kauffman’s (The Gunners) latest chronicles intersecting lives over the course of one year—1995. These overlapping narratives involve a couple struggling to get pregnant, a woman whose husband of 40 years has left her for reasons he's unwilling to share, a couple in denial about a looming health crisis and their son who is fumbling toward middle age and can't stop lying. Full of heart and wit, I'll Come to You investigates themes of intimacy, memory, loss, grief and reconciliation.

Over five years, acclaimed writer Ward lost five men in her life to drugs, accidents and suicide. Dealing with these losses, she confronted the reality of living through all the dying.

Nine-year-old Oskar Schell is wise beyond his years and mourning the loss of his father when he finds a mysterious key in his closet. His subsequent journey around New York City to find answers is riddled with humor, sweetness and intense grief.

This 2003 novel about a wealthy merchant and his servant is set against the backdrop of the final days of the Afghan monarchy—and will make you seriously cry as you watch an unlikely relationship torn asunder.

In Behold the Dreamers, Cameroonian immigrant Jende moves to Harlem in search of a better life for himself, his wife Neni and their 6-year-old son Liomi (who both eventually join him stateside). It’s fall of 2007 and Jende can hardly believe his luck when he lands a job as a chauffeur for a senior executive at Lehman Brothers—the executive’s wife even offers Neni temporary work at the family’s summer home in the Hamptons. Jende and Neni can finally imagine a brighter future, but soon enough, Lehman Brothers collapses, and Jende and Neni are desperate to keep Jende’s job as they struggle with immigration issues, marital troubles and more. The plot touches on immigration, the class divide, the false promise of the American Dream and the bonds that hold families together—and it’s truly unforgettable.

This refreshingly non-saccharine book, told from the alternating perspectives of a ten-year-old with jarring facial anomalies and his various family members and friends, gets our Golden Tissue Box award for most quality tear-jerker in recent history.

In one of the preeminent books about the Holocaust, Romanian-born Wiesel, in just over 100 pages, writes about his experience with his father in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in mid-1940s.

Jojo Moyes is well-known for writing tearjerkers like Me Before You, and The Giver of Stars is no different. In it, Alice marries the handsome Bennett, hoping to escape her life in England. But small-town Kentucky is equally claustrophobic, so when she gets the chance to join a team of women delivering books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, she signs on enthusiastically. What happens to her group of five women becomes an unforgettable drama of loyalty, justice, humanity and passion. Though these heroic women face all kinds of dangers, they’re committed to their job: bringing books to people who have never had any. Based on a true story, The Giver of Stars is a funny, heartbreaking and fascinating story about women’s friendship and love.

After the death of her husband and serious illness of her daughter, Didion attempted to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness."

When she was 29 and working on her first novel, Samina Ali nearly died giving birth to her son. And though she miraculously survived unchecked eclampsia, she sustained a major brain injury and fell into a coma as she gave birth. When she woke up, only her deepest memories were intact, and she was told she would never recover, much less write. In Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, Ali recounts the long, difficult journey of learning to walk and speak, reckoning with her past identity as a writer and a wife, and her new identity as a mother. This harrowing memoir is a poignant reflection on resilience, faith and identity.

If you love Me Before You, you’ve probably already read this smash-hit 2012 novel about a 16-year-old girl with cancer who falls for a 17-year-old amputee. If you haven’t, get on that—you’ll love it.

While recovering from surgery, an unnamed, 28-year-old woman who has a chronic illness meets Frida, a young woman in a similar health situation, in a hydrotherapy pool. Frida sees her illness as something to overcome and pushes the narrator toward an active life. Around the same time, the narrator meets Sylvia, another young, chronically ill woman. But unlike Frida, Sylvia encourages the narrator to rest. Over the next few weeks, she bounces between these two extremes as Frida and Sylvia mirror, contradict and complicate one another, raising questions about chronic illness and the circular nature of recovery.

It’s 1969 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and the four Gold siblings—Varya, Daniel, Klara and Simon—hear about a psychic in their neighborhood who professes to know how long they have to live. Told in sections from each sibling’s perspective, it raises the question: Does knowing when you’ll die encourage you to live life to the fullest, or does it cause more harm than good?

Like experimental storytelling? Remember You Will Die is made up entirely of obituaries that ricochet through time. Told through the eyes of Peregrine, an AI mother grappling with the unexpected death of her human daughter, this genre-bending novel is about the messy tapestry of human history and the threads that connect us. Spanning continents, centuries and planets, it’s a fascinating examination of generations entwined through blood and art and the consequences of their actions, betrayals and redemptions.

Journalist and feminist icon Susan Faludi always had a strained relationship with her abusive, estranged father. And it only got more complicated when he called out of the blue to tell her that he had transitioned, and was now a woman. Faludi travels to Budapest to visit her father post-surgery, keeping a riveting travelogue of the very strange trip.

After the death of their family’s patriarch, Rudy, the women of the Cohen family are in crisis in this gripping novel from Jami Attenberg (All Grown Up). Shelly, the younger of two sisters, flees to the West Coast to immerse herself in the tech world, 21-year-old Nancy gets married to a traveling salesman with a shadowy lifestyle and their mother, Frieda, hurls herself into a boozy, troubled existence in Miami. Despite their varied styles of coping, each learns, in different ways, that running from the past can’t save you. Spanning from the ‘70s to the 2010s, A Reason to See You Again is a meditation on motherhood, the American workforce, the tech industry, the self-help movement, inherited trauma and the many unexpected forms that love can take.

As beautifully written as it is devastating, this young neurosurgeon’s memoir of dying of cancer reflects on the nature of a meaningful life—and will have you reexamining your own relationships and attention to gratitude.

Sixteen-year-old Tessa has just months to live, so she decides to make a list of things she wants to do (hence the title). Number one on the list is sex, and the story that ensues is dynamic, brave and heartbreaking.

Set in a dystopian near future, Celeste Ng’s (Little Fires Everywhere) 2022 novel centers on 12-year-old Bird, who lives with his father. His mother, a Chinese American poet, vanished without a trace three years earlier. Out of the blue, Bird receives a mysterious letter that he knows is from his mother, and sets off to find her. It’s a dangerous mission, but Bird’s resolve is unflappable. Traveling to New York City, he connects with an underground network of librarians dedicated to rescuing disappeared books that went against the xenophobic act. Bird is wise beyond his years, holding little to no resentment toward his mother for leaving and maintaining a modicum of hope that they’ll be a regular family again someday. Cue the waterworks.

Set in North Carolina in the late 1950s, Sparks’s novel about two teens in love will make you cry as much as (if not more than) the film of the same name—and the author’s other delightfully sappy masterpiece, The Notebook.

The death of Judd’s father marks the first time that his whole family has been together in years. Mourning the loss of his father and his marriage (having recently uncovered his wife’s affair), Judd, his mother and his siblings reluctantly sit shiva and spend seven days and nights under the same roof.

Finch thinks about suicide and Violet lives for the future. What they learn from each other makes for a heartfelt, clever and thought-provoking YA novel.

Clare and Henry meet at the ages of 6 and 36. But thanks to a genetic disorder that causes Henry to time travel at random increments, they’re able to marry when Clare is 23 and Henry is 31. The unpredictability of their encounters will make you weep and hope for true love to win out.