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The ReadDown

Sad Books That Will Emotionally Wreck You

by Editorial Staff

Sometimes you just need a good cry. So grab a tissue and settle in because each book in this list is guaranteed to break your heart into a million pieces.

  1. 1
    Hamnet (Movie Tie-in Edition) Book Cover Picture
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    Hamnet (Movie Tie-in Edition)

    by Maggie O'Farrell

    From the critically acclaimed, bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, a deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, and the years leading up to the production of his great play. Soon to be a major motion picture from Chloé Zhao, Oscar award-winning director of Nomadland, and starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley.
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    Paperback
    $19.00

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  2. 2
    Hello Beautiful (Oprah's Book Club) Book Cover Picture
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    Hello Beautiful

    by Ann Napolitano

    From the author of Dear Edward comes a “powerfully affecting” (People) family story that asks: Can love make a broken person whole? An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.
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    Paperback
    $18.99

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  3. 3
    The End of Loneliness Book Cover Picture
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    The End of Loneliness

    by Benedict Wells

    A kaleidoscopic family saga told through the fractured lives of three siblings, alongside a faltering, recovering love story, The End of Loneliness is a stunning meditation on the power of our memories, of what can be lost and what can never be let go. With inimitable compassion and luminous, affecting prose, Benedict Wells contends with what it means to find a way through life, while never giving up hope you will find someone to go with you.
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    $17.00

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  4. 4
    My Friends Book Cover Picture
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    My Friends

    by Hisham Matar

    A “masterly” (The New York Times, Editors’ Choice), “riveting” (The Atlantic) novel of friendship, family, and the unthinkable realities of exile, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Return. A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests — and frays — those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author at the peak of his powers.
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    $18.00

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  5. 5
    Giovanni's Room (Deluxe Edition) Book Cover Picture
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    Giovanni’s Room (Deluxe Edition)

    by James Baldwin

    From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love — “a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction” (The Atlantic).
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    $17.00

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  6. 6
    The God of Small Things Book Cover Picture
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    The God of Small Things

    by Arundhati Roy

    An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Compared favorably to the works of Faulkner and Dickens, Arundhati Roy’s modern classic is equal parts powerful family saga, forbidden love story, and piercing political drama.
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    $19.00

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  7. 7
    Martyr! Book Cover Picture
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    Martyr!

    by Kaveh Akbar

    A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.
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    $18.00

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  8. 8
    Stay True Book Cover Picture
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    Stay True

    by Hua Hsu

    A gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art, by the New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.
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    $17.00

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  9. 9
    We Do Not Part Book Cover Picture
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    We Do Not Part

    by Han Kang

    Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian — and her first published in English since winning the Nobel Prize — We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history. Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully brings to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable pain — and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.
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    $28.00

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  10. 10
    Only Love Can Hurt Like This Book Cover Picture
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    Only Love Can Hurt Like This

    by Paige Toon

    In the spirit of Colleen Hoover and Jojo Moyes’s Me Before You, an unforgettable and heartbreaking love story with an earth-shattering secret at its core that asks the question: Is love worth risking everything for?
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    $17.00

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  11. 11
    A Thousand Splendid Suns Illustrated Edition Book Cover Picture
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    A Thousand Splendid Suns

    by Khaled Hosseini

    Propelled by the same superb instinct for storytelling that made The Kite Runner a beloved classic, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love.
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    $18.00

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  12. 12
    Ethan Frome Book Cover Picture
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    Ethan Frome

    by Edith Wharton

    Edith Wharton’s most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a demanding and controlling wife, Zeena. When Zeena’s young cousin Mattie enters their household she opens a window of hope in Ethan’s bleak life, but his wife’s reaction prompts a desperate attempt to escape fate that goes horribly wrong. Ethan Frome is an unforgettable story with the force of myth, featuring realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured.
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    $10.00

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  13. 13
    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Book Cover Picture
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    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

    by Lorrie Moore

    Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs — a daring, meditative exploration of love and death, passion and grief, and what it means to be haunted by the past, both by history and the human heart.
    I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Book Cover Picture
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    $18.00

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  14. 14
    A Pale View of Hills Book Cover Picture
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    A Pale View of Hills

    by Kazuo Ishiguro

    From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day, here is the story of Etsuko, a Japanese woman now living alone in England, dwelling on the recent suicide of her daughter. In a novel where past and present confuse, she relives scenes of Japan’s devastation in the wake of World War II.
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    $17.00

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  15. 15
    The Lowland Book Cover Picture
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    The Lowland

    by Jhumpa Lahiri

    From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Namesake comes an extraordinary novel, set in India and America, that tells the story of two brothers bound by tragedy, a fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past, a country torn by revolution, and a love that lasts long past death. Masterly suspenseful, sweeping, piercingly intimate, The Lowland is a work of great beauty and complex emotion; an engrossing family saga and a story steeped in history that spans generations and geographies with seamless authenticity.
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    $18.00

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  16. 16
    All My Rage Book Cover Picture
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    All My Rage

    by Sabaa Tahir

    From bestselling author Sabaa Tahir comes a brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.
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    $13.99

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  17. 17
    Villette Book Cover Picture
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    Villette

    by Charlotte Bronte

    Having fled a harrowing past in England, Lucy Snowe begins a new life teaching at a boarding school in the great capital of a foreign country. There, as she tries to achieve independence from both outer necessity and inward grief, she finds that her feelings for a worldly doctor and a dictatorial professor threaten her hard-won self-possession. Charlotte Brontë’s final masterpiece powerfully portrays a woman struggling to reconcile love, jealousy, and a fierce desire for independence.
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    $17.00

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  18. 18
    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow Book Cover Picture
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    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    by Gabrielle Zevin

    Sam and Sadie — two college friends, often in love, but never lovers — become creative partners in a dazzling and intricately imagined world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and, ultimately, a kind of immortality. It is a love story, but not one you have read before.
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    $19.00

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  19. 19
    On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous Book Cover Picture
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    On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

    by Ocean Vuong

    This gorgeous debut novel is written as a letter from a son to his mother, who cannot read. It is a coming-of-age story about growing up as an immigrant in America and about finding and holding on to one’s identity. Written with beautiful and poetic language, this book will leave a lasting impression.
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    $18.00

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  20. 20
    When Breath Becomes Air Book Cover Picture
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    When Breath Becomes Air

    by Paul Kalanithi

    This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth living?
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    Hardcover
    $27.00

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  21. 21
    A Little Life Book Cover Picture
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    A Little Life

    by Hanya Yanagihara

    A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century.
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    Paperback
    $18.00

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