Grief & Loss

Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us—as universal as it is painful—is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief is, whom we grieve,...

Experiencing grief at the death of a person we love or who matters to us — as universal as it is painful — is central to the human condition. Surprisingly, however, philosophers have rarely examined grief in any depth. In Grief, Michael Cholbi presents a groundbreaking philosophical exploration of this complex emotional event, offering valuable new insights about what grief...

Social media is full of dead people. Nobody knows precisely how many Facebook profiles belong to dead users, but in 2012, the figure was estimated at 30 million. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do they have a right to persist? Philosophers have been almost entirely silent on the topic, despite...

Traditional Western attitudes towards death deal with it as a painful inevitability, something that has to be navigated as a trauma and a taboo. They focus essentially on the ‘management’ of death, an anthropocentric practice prioritising the human life above every other type of existence. Patricia MacCormack explores how we can develop a ‘death activism’ – a variety of tactics...

A fascinating and moving history of the British and German war dead buried on enemy soil in the two world wars. Why do societies only remember their own national war dead? Today, the enemy dead might be largely hidden from view, but this wasn't always the case. During both world wars, Germans and Britons died in their thousands in enemy...

A philosophical exploration of aesthetic experience during bereavement. In Aesthetics in Grief and Mourning, philosopher Kathleen Marie Higgins reflects on the ways that aesthetics aids people experiencing loss. Some practices related to bereavement, such as funerals, are scripted, but many others are recursive, improvisational, mundane—telling stories, listening to music, and reflecting on art or literature. Higgins shows how these grounding,...

“He had a life-long love affair with devilled eggs, his homemade canned fig preserves, and buttermilk served in martini glasses garnished with cornbread.” —Obituary from Gulfport, Mississippi So-called "funeral food" is having a moment. Comforting casseroles, jugs of sweet tea, and creamy, cheesy potatoes—all these foods provide sympathy and sustenance for the bereaved. The Southern Sympathy Cookbook includes unexpectedly humorous...

A shocking true story of heartbreak and survival by Sarah Corbett Lynch, daughter of Jason Corbett - an Irish Times Number 1 bestseller and now the subject of NETFLIX documentary A DEADLY AMERICAN MARRIAGE. 'Honest and compelling' Sunday Independent 'Powerful, heartbreaking' Irish Times 'An enthralling read' Irish Daily Mail 'A powerful and poignant memoir that transforms loss into a legacy...

A moving middle grade story by Anica Mrose Rissi that will appeal to readers who loved The Thing about Jellyfish and Hello, Universe, about the enduring bond between twins: Anders, who has recently died, and Lily, who has to balance her grief and confusion with a brother who isn’t quite gone—and how to navigate a world that is moving forward...

From Molly Potter, best-selling author of How Are You Feeling Today? and What's Worrying You?, comes a picture book for starting conversations with children about death, bereavement, and what happens next. When someone dies, we can feel a whole host of different emotions, and explaining them to a child isn't so easy. This book uses clear, easy-to-understand language to answer...

Discover the Sunday Times bestselling collection from the TikTok sensation and author of On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. 'One of the most important poets of his generation' ANDREW MCMILLAN, author of Physical 'Powerful' DUA LIPA 'Redefines our idea of what an elegy can do, what it is for' ILYA KAMINSKY, author of Deaf Republic In this deeply intimate second poetry...

A beautifully guided journal that celebrates you and your life experiences, inspiring connection, nostalgia and love. Foreword by Petrea King, CEO of the Quest for Life Foundation. Celebrate your life experiences with this thoughtfully crafted guided journal. Via useful prompts, it will help you share with your loved ones the milestones, challenges, and everyday joys of your unique life journey....

The Girl on the Bathroom Floor is a raw and unflinching look at the moments most never share, the ones behind closed doors, on the bathroom floor, in your car, or hidden in the closet—where pain, fear, and grief seem to hit hardest. It's also a promise that, even there, you are still tenderly held by a God who grieves...

A short, thought-provoking book about what happens to our online identities after we die. These days, so much of our lives takes place online—but what about our afterlives? Thanks to the digital trails that we leave behind, our identities can now be reconstructed after our death. In fact, AI technology is already enabling us to "interact" with the departed. Sooner...

Konrad Michel, a leading psychiatrist and acclaimed expert, draws on decades of experience to offer necessary new ways of understanding—and preventing—suicide. After one of his first patients died by suicide, Michel devoted himself to researching self-harm. Writing vividly and personally, he recounts more than forty years of working with and learning from suicidal patients. Michel shows that suicide is not...

A compassionate and practical way to approach end-of-life planning for you and your loved ones “End of life” can be a daunting, intimidating, and even scary phrase. But it doesn't have to overwhelm you. You have the power to make decisions about your future that help secure the well-being of your loved ones and bring a sense of comfort. And...

At Peace is the authoritative, informative, and practical follow-up to Being Mortal, focusing on end-of-life care for patients over the age of 65. Most people express a desire to die quietly at home. However, overly aggressive medical advice, coupled with an unrealistic sense of invincibility, often results in elderly patients dying in institutions while undergoing painful procedures, instead of experiencing...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Everything All at Once comes a beautiful poetry collection exploring motherhood, grief, the unending road to healing, and the redeeming power of love. The word radicle is defined as the root of a plant embryo, the first organ to appear when a seed germinates. It grows downward into the soil, anchoring the...

An award-winning classicist turns to Greek tragedies for the wisdom to understand the damage caused by suicide and help those who are contemplating suicide themselves. "Remarkable, brave and compassionate." — Rowan Williams, New Statesman In Sophocles' tragedy Oedipus the Tyrant, a messenger arrives to report that Jocasta, queen of Thebes, has killed herself. To prepare listeners for this terrible news,...

As his mother was dying, Philip Kennicott began to listen to the music of Bach obsessively. It was the only music that didn't seem trivial or irrelevant, and it enabled him to both experience her death and remove himself from it. For him, Bach's music held the elements of both joy and despair, life and its inevitable end. He spent...

When the opossum feels threatened, she becomes paralysed. Her body temperature plummets, her breathing and heart rates drop to a minimum, and her glands simulate the smell of a putrefying corpse. Playing Possum explores what the opossum and other creatures can teach us about how we and other species understand mortality, and demonstrates that the concept of death, far from...

Long before the beginnings of civilisation, humans have been sacrificed and their flesh used to produce sacred foods and oils for use in religious rites. Originating with the sacred harvest of hallucinogenic mushrooms from the corpses of shamans and other holy men, these acts of ritual cannibalism and visionary intoxication are part of the history of all cultures, including Judeo-Christian...

Death is an inevitable fact of life. Throughout the centuries, humanity has sought to understand this sobering thought through art and ritual. The theme of memento mori informs medieval Danse Macabre, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Renaissance paintings of dissected corpses and "anatomical Eves," Gothic literature, funeral effigies, Halloween, and paintings of the Last Judgment. Deceased ancestors are celebrated...

When Richard Gosling's young daughter faced emergency surgery, a colleague carelessly asked what would happen if she died. In that moment, Richard was forced to picture his own daughter's funeral, and the people who are there to help families after the worst has happened. Aged 40, Richard left his job in the public service and started preparing coffins, driving hearses,...

In Sympathy

'I have no words.' This is so often our response to grief and loss, whether we are dealing with it ourselves or consoling others. Elizabeth's father took his own life in 2012. Unable to find words of her own to write about what had happened, Elizabeth took them instead from the 2006 Penguin Classics edition of Twelve Angry Men, a...

An unflinching and profoundly moving account of caring until death, from Booker-Prize-longlisted Sarah Perry. Please read this book. It may very well change how you live – Rachel Clarke I was spellbound – Kathryn Mannix Death of an Ordinary Man is an unforgettable account of this universal aspect of life. It is not a book about grief; it is a...

Death in war matters. It matters to the individual, threatened with their own death, or the death of loved ones. It matters to groups and communities who have to find ways to manage death, to support the bereaved and to dispose of bodies amidst the confusion of conflict. It matters to the state, which has to find ways of coping...

The visual history of how we deal with death—grief, mourning, funerals, symbols, and ceremonies—is fascinatingly rich. Focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and travelling from Victorian England to the US, Beyond the Veil is a visual tour through this curious world, charting the often peculiar and at times macabre ways in which the living memorialise the dead. Humans...

History is dominated by the A-list deaths—Queens beheaded, Archdukes assassinated. But what about everyone else? How did ordinary people through history prepare for the end, depart this life, grieve their loved ones and imagine what came next? From the professional death-watchers of the Middle Ages to the fabulous Victorian funeral garments that kick-started fast fashion, historian and bereavement counsellor Molly...

An illuminating, witty and highly moving story of making and listening to music and its role and impact on grief. When her father dies, music historian and trombonist Dr Emily MacGregor finds that music has become too much. Listening, let alone playing, music is suddenly too difficult. This is problematic given that she's a broadcaster, writer and academic working with...

'These essays about love, loss, and memories of night voyages with her dad glow from within, like phosphorescence on the sea. Just what we need in times like these.' - Diana Wichtel 'Evocative, lyrical, surprising, Times Like These is built from a heart that bursts out of every page.' - Toby Manhire Childhood, family, and death; anxiety and release; grief...

In these essays, Toynton remembers her emigre relatives, some of whom left Germany as soon as Hitler came to power, others only escaped later. Evelyn Toynton's relatives, German-Jewish refugees all, had grown up thinking of themselves as Germans first and Jews second. Her portraits of them, subtly comic when depicting the Germanic traits they retained throughout their lives, take on...

The three protagonists in this memoir are dead: a mother, a father, and a sister. A bookish and artistic family living in a beautiful old house in a pleasant part of Toronto. Two girls growing up in the 60s and 70s. All seems well until one of them begins to manifest signs of distress, leading, eventually, to a diagnosis of...

A portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to The Azaylia Foundation. Strong is the moving and heartbreaking memoir from celebrity campaigner, endurance athlete, and father of an angel, Ashley Cain. Charting his daughter's birth and the fight for her life when she was diagnosed with leukaemia at 7 weeks old, Ashley reflects on...

Fifteen Australians tell their stories of surviving suicide and finding the way back to a better life. Every day, nine Australians take their own lives. Nineteen years ago, John Brogden came very close to adding his name to these statistics. But John survived and, since his recovery, he has become a passionate voice for mental health and suicide prevention. Now...

A Mail on Sunday Best Memoir 2024 ‘Truly compelling.’ Cathy Rentzenbrink ‘Breathtaking … I loved it.’ Fern Britton ‘Courageous. Inspiring. Hopeful.’ Alastair Campbell 'Gripping' Observer ‘Brave and raw’ Daily Mail 'An amazing story, powerfully told' Mail on Sunday An unforgettable memoir and manifesto for living, from the woman who redefined magazines for the 21st century Having suffered the unimaginable loss...

"Our marriage was, from any conventional point of view, wildly implausible; and you, my dear son, are the miraculous product of this beautiful, rather crazy, and all too brief love affair." When Dylan Riley received the devastating news that his wife, Emanuela, had cancer, he began writing blog posts describing the anguish and disarray brought by her worsening symptoms. Perdita...

When Stacey Heale's husband, Greg, was diagnosed with incurable cancer on their daughter's first birthday, it felt like her life as she knew it was drawn to a halt. Confronted with the end of her relationship and her family as she knew it, Stacey started contemplating the realities of life and death—and the fundamental differences between our expectation and reality....

A profoundly moving memoir on grief and resilience In January 2024, during a period of personal crisis, Gideon Haigh abruptly started writing the story of the night his seventeen-year-old brother Jasper was killed, finally facing how it had shaped the rest of his life. Seventy-two hours later he stopped. Dark, raw, and revealing, My Brother Jaz explores how it feels...

After I swim, I watch an osprey hanging in mid-air. If those who came before really do dissolve and dissipate, and if their cells really are all around us, then that bird is held there by Mum and Peter and billions of others of the long-dead. The osprey is kept aloft by absences. Perhaps I am too. When her husband...

Want to make sure you’re not just alive . . . but truly living? Start by contemplating your own death. Wondering what a life well-lived looks like? Eager to live a life that’s richer, bolder, and more unapologetically YOU? Then it’s time to stop running from the truth that your life is finite—and start facing your mortality head-on. Because nothing...

Seeking Your Loved One on the Other Side by Matthew McKay offers guidance on how to connect with those who have passed and how to learn to love in the face of pain. This book shares a proven process that has worked for the author, as well as thousands of others, to communicate with deceased loved ones. It explores the...

In March 2020, Ben Masters' father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was never happier than when outdoors and spent his free time chasing butterflies. Despite his attempts to share this passion with his son, Ben was resistant. But as his father spent his final months confined to the house, unable for the first summer of his life to follow...

In the cost of living crisis, this huge-hearted, generous, empathetic book has never been more timely. Ten-year-old Solo—embarrassingly, that isn't short for anything—just wants to be normal. He wants a name that doesn't stand out. He wishes he had a proper school uniform that fitted him. He dreams about a mum who doesn't get The Big Bad Reds, like his...

This is the story of how and why a talented writer came to take his own life. When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, an Egyptian in exile, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi moved into her flat, they shared housework and holidays, and a life of easy intimacy seemed to...

A guide to start living again for those who have lost a loved one, written by a mother and widow What Must Be Carried: Living a Beautiful Life Beyond Loss is an empathetic guidebook that walks readers through the grieving process, giving them the tools they need to carry the pain of their loss and start truly living again. With...

After the research psychologist Barbara Blatchley lost her husband and partner of thirty-six years, her life changed utterly. Seeking to understand the pain and confusion she felt, Blatchley began exploring the psychology and neuroscience of bereavement. Why does grief last so long and hurt so much? How do we come to terms with loss? In Sorrow’s Long Road, Blatchley interweaves...

Scripting Death offers a comprehensive account of post-compulsory education and training policy in the UK since 1944. It challenges the reader and policymakers to think differently about how to design and implement more successful skills policies in the future.

A journey through the rich histories of textiles that explores their significant cultural roles, from memorialising lost loved ones to resisting oppression. From ancient Egyptian shrouds to medieval relics, textiles have played both functional and symbolic roles in rituals of death across time and place. Featuring funeral hangings, mourning samplers, garments, and many other textiles and fragments, along with works...

A testament to the depth of familial love and our ability to endure in the face of childhood terminal illness Keep Your Head Up is the incredible tale of one family's path to perseverance in the face of devastating odds. When author Tasha Faruqui gave birth to her second daughter, Soraya, she knew immediately that something was wrong. Yet as...

Full of simmering tensions, Katherine Allum's award-winning debut novel, The Skeleton House, pulls back the layers on a seemingly perfect family, exposing the complexities of marriage and motherhood when you are fighting to keep your own identity, no matter the cost. Meg's life is woven into the fabric of St Stephens. It's a tapestry made of two precious children, a...

‘An incredibly useful take on facing grief as a young person’ CARIAD LLOYD ‘Brilliantly, brilliantly written … Packed with clarity, curiosity and courage’ FELIX WHITE ‘It turned on so many lights for me … What a profoundly helpful book’ KATHRYN MANNIX Grief does something particular when it hits you young. This book is a moving exploration of that transformative pain,...

A ground-breaking new framework for embracing middle age and beyond. Middle-age is cross-roadsy—having arrived, you're looking back in wonder about how you got here, and also looking ahead, thinking: where to next? The realisation that neither time nor choices are limitless is both daunting and exciting. This is the moment to take stock and figure out how to make the...

Compelling evidence for afterlife messages backed by scientific research • Presents detailed accounts of experiments conducted to obtain evidence for the survival of consciousness after death, including the author’s own test involving a secret message left behind by his late sister. • Shares interviews with mediums to understand how they receive information from the spirit world and explains how to...

Spirit Speaker is a compassionate and straightforward guide to the spiritual process of death and spirit communication. This book answers the most common questions asked by the author’s clients over her decades of work as a spirit speaker and psychic medium. It presents simple techniques for helping loved ones cross over and shares practices to honour our beloved dead and...

Psychedelic Medicine at the End of Life offers a cutting-edge exploration of the role of psychedelics in the end-of-life experience. This book outlines 10 steps for dying gracefully with the help of psychedelics, including how to navigate the complex legal landscape and find the right guide and therapy. It looks at clinical studies of psychedelics from UCLA, Johns Hopkins, and...

Lessons from the Afterlife by Matthew McKay is a guided journey to discover your soul’s answers to life’s great questions. This book offers a step-by-step process to unleash the unconscious and intuitive wisdom held in the awareness of your soul: Deep Knowledge Meditation. It includes guided journal prompts to help you listen to your heart and shine a light on...

A practical guide to becoming a good Ancestor 2025 Nautilus Silver Award Explains the importance of creating a direct personal connection with Nature and how it is key to becoming an elder who will go on to become a wise Ancestor. Presents exercises and rituals to awaken and deepen your animistic connection to the world and help you intentionally craft...

Coma and Near-Death Experience explores the extraordinary states of expanded consciousness that arise during comas, both positive and negative. Every day around the world, thousands of people are placed in medically-induced comas. For some coma survivors, the experience is an utter blank. Others lay paralysed, aware of everything around them but unable to move, speak, or even blink. Many experience...

Discover how the bonds of life and love transcend death Apparitions at the Moment of Death explains the phenomenon of crisis apparitions: visions of loved ones that are experienced simultaneously with their deaths, even at great distances. It examines a wide range of sources, including history, literature, folklore, theology, and contemporary culture, that demonstrate the timelessness and ubiquity of these...

Stars of the hit television series The Casketeers, as seen on Netflix Francis and Kaiora Tipene aren't your typical funeral directors. With their famous humour and big-hearted personalities, the TVNZ and Netflix reality TV stars are changing the way we think about death and grief. Life as a Casketeer reveals how Francis and Kaiora grew up in families that had...

After his father—the hero and strength of the family—is diagnosed with kidney failure, actor Steve Guttenberg dedicates himself to becoming a caregiver and reflects on their life together, from childhood through his Hollywood career, in his father’s final years. Since moving to Hollywood at age seventeen, Steve Guttenberg has delighted and moved audiences with his film and television work. But...

In this #3 New York Times bestselling memoir, TikTok star and hospice nurse Hadley Vlahos demystifies death with inspiring patient stories. What can people at the end of their lives teach us about living well today? In this heart-warming memoir of wisdom, redemption, and even joy, Hadley Vlahos shares stories from being a palliative care nurse and how patients informed...

A powerful, breathtaking memoir about a young man's descent into madness, and how running saved his life. “Voluntary or involuntary” asked the nurse who admitted J. M. Thompson to a San Francisco psychiatric hospital in January 2005. Following years of depression, ineffective medication, and therapy that went nowhere, Thompson feared he was falling into an inescapable darkness. He decided that...

A major and profound, new original work by the author of The Argonauts and Bluets. It's not the dream that matters, it's the telling of the dream - the words you choose, the risks you take in externalising your mind. This is a dreamlike portrait of a body in struggle to connect with itself and others. As the narrator contends...

A sassy, heart-breaking and jaw-dropping memoir of life behind the scenes in a funeral home and strip club, written with all the panache, honesty and sensitivity of Rosie Waterland's The Anti-Cool Girl and Sarah Krasnostein's The Trauma Cleaner. Emma Jane Holmes had her dream job, working in the funeral industry, caring for those who could no longer care for themselves....

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLEN From the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives. ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’ How does one survive the death of a loved one, the...

After tragedy, how do we find hope? A memoir about what it takes to get through the very worst of times from Rosie Batty - a woman who has experienced tragedy, who had lost all hope, yet now is intent on finding it again. On a warm summer's evening in February 2014, eleven-year-old Luke Batty was killed by his father...

A handy poetry companion to keep around in times of difficulty. This supportive anthology of 100 specially chosen poems is here to help. Whatever the shape of your struggle, there's a poem here to guide you through it, providing a shoulder to cry on or a helping hand. There are meditations on the nature of life, grief, and memory, and...

Yogi, mystic, and bestselling author Sadhguru provides a deeper understanding of death so that we can live more fulfilling lives. Death is an inevitable part of our lives, yet most societies have struggled to come to terms with it. Today, we continue to grapple with enduring questions: What is Death? Why do we fear it? What happens after death? Is...

An eloquent, moving, witty and above all useful demonstration of philosophy's power to help us weather the storms of being human — Oliver Burkeman A NEW YORKER AND THE ECONOMIST BEST BOOK OF 2022 I adore this book . . . Setiya is a deeply astute and generous guide . . . a clear and consoling modern voice, for which...

From the chief medical correspondent of ABC News, an eloquent, heartbreaking, yet hopeful memoir of surviving the suicide of a loved one, examining this dangerous epidemic and offering first-hand knowledge and advice to help family and friends find peace. Jennifer Ashton, M.D., has witnessed firsthand the impact of a loved one’s suicide. When her ex-husband killed himself soon after their...

The bestselling psychotherapist explores what we inherit and how we can create the families we wish for. In her bestselling follow-up to Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass, much-loved psychotherapist Julia Samuel invites us into her sessions as she explores the relationships that have the power to touch us and hurt us most—those with our family. Through eight beautifully...

America’s preeminent fiction writer — New YorkerA raw, propulsive tale of love and grief — Mail on Sunday A novel of love and loss from the bestselling and prizewinning author of Blonde. Michaela and her husband have moved to the starkly beautiful but uncanny landscape of New Mexico to take up an academic residency. But when Gerard is struck by...

The disturbing true story of the notorious Cecil Hotel in downtown LA, by its general manager for a decade and star of the controversial Netflix documentary series Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel. When Amy Price took a temporary design job at an Art Deco hotel in Los Angeles to help a friend, she had no idea the...

Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death—a calamity that claimed her favourite person—she returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling with his memory and understanding...

It isn't quite 'Don't buy any green bananas'. But it's close to 'Don't start any long books'. In his mid-40s, Simon Boas was diagnosed with incurable cancer - it had been caught too late, and spread around his body. But he was determined to die as he had learned to live - optimistically, thinking the best of people, and prioritising...

Nina Sankovitch has crafted a dazzling memoir that reminds us of the most primal function of literature—to heal, to nurture, and to connect us to our truest selves. -Thrity Umrigar, author of The Space Between Us Catalyzed by the loss of her sister, a mother of four spends one year savoring a great book every day, from Thomas Pynchon to...

Named A Most Anticipated Book by: LitHub, Vulture, Time, and a PW 2022 Holiday Gift Pick One of: Time's "100 Must-Read Books of 2022," NPR's 2022 "Books We Love," and Vulture's "10 Best Books of 2022" A Goodreads Readers Choice Award Semifinalist From acclaimed poet Franny Choi comes a poetry collection for the ends of worlds—past, present, and future. Choi’s...