Books like A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
A Woman's Story
Written after her mother's death, Ernaux's portrait of her mother, a factory girl who became a shopkeeper and wanted her daughter to rise.
Blue Nights
In the aftermath of her daughter Quintana's death, Didion turns the pale light of late summer on her own motherhood, her own failing body, and what it means to be the last one left.
The Year of Magical Thinking
After her husband's sudden death and her daughter's hospitalisation, Didion keeps a forensic record of what magical thinking her grief conjures and what it refuses to.
A Man's Place
Ernaux writes about her father, a labourer who became the owner of a café-grocery in Normandy, and the distance her education put between them.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
Heavy
Kiese Laymon writes a memoir to his mother about growing up Black in Mississippi, about weight, gambling, abuse and love, and the lies they told to survive.
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
The World of Yesterday
Zweig's memoir of the lost cosmopolitan Europe of his youth, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher on the day he and his wife took their lives.
Stay True
Hua Hsu remembers his friendship with Ken at Berkeley in the 1990s, zines, mixtapes and arguments about what was cool, and the random act of violence that ended it.
H Is for Hawk
After her father's sudden death, a Cambridge historian buys a goshawk and withdraws into training it, alongside a reading of T. H. White's own failed attempt.
The Color of Water
A Black writer tells his own story alongside that of his white Jewish mother, who raised twelve children and refused to discuss her past.
Iza's Ballad
After her father's death, a well-meaning Budapest doctor brings her widowed mother to live in her modern flat and slowly dissolves the old woman's place in the world.