Grief Biography

When Melissa Gould’s husband, Joel, was unexpectedly hospitalized, she could not imagine how her life was about to change. Overwhelmed with uncertainty as Joel’s condition tragically worsened, she offered him the only thing she could: her love and devotion. Her dedication didn’t end with his death. Melissa soon realized that her and Joel’s love lived on. Melissa found she didn’t fit the typical mold of widowhood or meet the expectations of mourning. She didn’t look like a widow or act like a widow, but she felt like one. Melissa was widowish.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today As a young mother facing a terminal diagnosis, Julie Yip-Williams began to write her story, a story like no other. What began as the chronicle of an imminent and early death became something much more—a...

"A singular, bewitching work about cycles of life and loss, the patterns of behavior that seem to lock us into who we are, and the quest for a faith that might break us free." —Hua Hsu, author of Stay True Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by Vulture and LitHub A genre-bending story about...

Best-selling author Georgia Bragg delights young people with her quirky characters and unique subject matter. How They Croaked provides all the gory details of the awful ends of 19 awfully famous people. It details Ludwig Van Beethoven’s expansive finale, Henry VII’s explosive end, Albert Einstein’s great brain escape, and Marie Curie’s glowing demise.

From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at...

When Laraine Herring receives an unexpected colon cancer diagnosis, her father, thirty years dead, returns to her as a raven, setting off a magical journey into complicated grief, inherited trauma, and ancestral healing. As she struggles with redefining her expectations for her life, she slips farther and farther underground into the ancestral realm, where she finds herself writing a play directed by her father-as-raven.

A candid and moving memoir from the critically acclaimed singer and songwriterFor thirty years as a musician, Rosanne Cash has enjoyed both critical and commercial success, releasing a series of albums that are as notable for their lyrical intelligence as for their musical excellence.Now, in her...

A searingly powerful memoir about the impact of addiction on a family. In the summer of 2012 a woman named Eva was found dead in the London townhouse she shared with her husband, Hans K. Rausing. The couple had struggled with drug addiction for years, often under the glare of tabloid headlines...

Kelsey Parker's world was turned upside down in the summer of 2020 when her husband Tom, singer in boyband The Wanted, was cruelly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Heavily pregnant with their second child and coping with her own heartache at losing her partner of 13 years, Kelsey remained a tower of strength and positivity for Tom during his darkest days. When traditional treatments stopped working, she spent hours researching alternative therapies to give her husband extra time with his young children Aurelia and Bodhi.

A resonant memoir of the ways untimely good-byes echo through the years by a writer who has considered every nuance of grief. At age fourteen, Claire Bidwell Smith-an only child- learned that both of her parents had cancer. The fear of becoming a family of one before she came of age compels...

"Wise and compassionate . . . a profound game-changer of a book." --Caroline Leavitt, author of Pictures of You Though approximately one in four pregnancies ends in miscarriage, it remains a rarely talked about, under-researched, and largely misunderstood area of women's health. This profoundly...

Because Ella Risbridger has learnt to focus on the little things that bring her joy, feeding as many people as she can squeeze round her tiny table and sharing recipes that are good for the soul. Miracle Pie is her journal and storybook of cooking, where the food is so good you want to lick the bowl, with recipes like fancy fish pie, cardamom-cinnamon chicken rice, chimichurri courgettes, triple carb soup, blackberry miso birthday cake, fried jam sandwiches and sticky toffee Guinness brownies.

Decorated FDNY firefighter, 9/11 survivor, and expert emergency manager Tim Brown shares the lessons he’s learned about grief, resilience, sacrificial love, and transforming pain into purpose. How do you keep getting up after the worst day of your life? Tim Brown was on the ground at the World...

Sifting gingerly through memories of her late mother, brilliant newcomer Sarah McColl has penned an indelible tribute to the joy and pain of loving well. Even as her own marriage splinters, McColl drops everything when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, returning to the family farmhouse and laboring over elaborate meals in the hopes of nourishing her back to health. In a series of vibrant vignettes - lipstick applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked - McColl reveals a woman of endless charm and infinite love for her unruly brood of children.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - "On Friday night you stole the life of an exceptional person, the love of my life, the mother of my son, but you will not have my hate." On November 13, 2015, Antoine Leiris’s wife, Hélène Muyal-Leiris, was killed by terrorists while attending a rock concert at...

Over six short weeks in 2022, Betsy Thibaut Stephenson lost her son to suicide, mother-in-law to dementia, and family dog to cancer. Rather than succumb to grief’s darkness, Betsy chose to face her losses head-on, accepting grief as an uninvited yet permanent companion in her revised life. Blackbird is a memoir composed in real time, a concise and brutally honest look at the emotional, physical, and spiritual impact of deep despair.

INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER Lessons for all of us in how to approach life—from someone in the process of dying. "Simon Boas was a gifted storyteller with a rare ability to find humor and humanity in life’s most profound moments. A Beginner’s Guide to Dying showcases his wit, warmth...

'"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them,' Isak Dinesen once said. Sorrows are all pain otherwise, pain without sense or meaning. But joys, too, it seems to me, need their context. And sometimes their coexistence needs to be borne. The coexistence or...

From Finnish saunas and soppy otters to grief, grandparents and Kellogg's anti-masturbation pants, Slug is a book which holds a mirror lovingly up to the world, past and present, through Hollie's driving, funny, hopeful poetry and prose. Slug is about the human condition: of birth and death and how we manage the possibilities in between.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARD After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking...