Books About Losing a Child

What to expect from The Memory Fare, and what not to

Stated plainly, because a page like this must:

Same as Reservoir 13 and The Deep End of the Ocean

A child missing for years, and a parent whose whole life has reorganised itself around the search.

Different

The child is alive throughout and the book says so. It is speculative, not realist, and it is not a grief resource. Nobody dies.

The cost

Every door aboard the train takes one true memory of June. Cora never learns which one she paid.

Tone

Quiet and devastating rather than harrowing. No violence, no assault, no twist about the child’s fate.

Content notes

A missing child; parental grief and guilt; memory loss as a price.

Formats

Kindle and paperback. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.

Start here: which of these are you?

The same search brings three very different people to this page. The books that serve one can harm another.

1. It happened to me.

   Then you want to be told the truth by someone who has stood where you are, and you want to know before you open the book what is inside it. Every entry below states the child’s age, the cause of death, and whether the death is described on the page, because the thing bereaved parents most often say about grief books is that one of them ambushed them. Start with the memoir shelf. Delaney if you can still laugh; Deraniyagala if you cannot and do not want to be asked to; McCracken if your baby was stillborn; Li if your child died by suicide; Didion if your child was an adult and you are years out. The novels can wait, and The Lovely Bones can wait a long time.

   A Heart That Works · Wave · An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination · Things in Nature Merely Grow · Blue Nights

2. It happened to someone I love, and I want to give them a book.

   Be careful. A book handed over in the first weeks can land as an instruction to feel better. If you give one, give A Heart That Works: it is short, it is funny, it does not tell the reader what to do, and it contains the single best piece of advice for you, the friend, about how to behave. Do not give Wave or Things in Nature Merely Grow unless you have read them and know the person; do not give The Lovely Bones at all. If the family is Christian and someone has already pressed The Shack on them, the entry below explains what it is and is not. Consider giving nothing and making a phone call instead.

   A Heart That Works · Once More We Saw Stars · The Shack

3. I have no personal stake. I want a novel about this, and I want it to be very good.

   Then the fiction shelf is yours, and the two great books are Lincoln in the Bardo, a Booker winner about one night in a cemetery, and Reservoir 13, which follows a village for thirteen years after a girl does not come back. The Light Between Oceans is the one to read if you want the loss to drive a plot. The Deep End of the Ocean and The Lovely Bones are the popular ones, and they are on the page with their limits marked. Read the memoirs too, if you can; the reason bereaved parents distrust grief fiction is that most of it was written by people who have only imagined it, and the memoirs will show you the difference.

   Lincoln in the Bardo · Reservoir 13 · The Light Between Oceans · The Deep End of the Ocean · The Lovely Bones

Every book on this page, at a glance

Read this before anything else if you are grieving. It is the table the other lists do not have.

“Seems written for” is this page’s judgement, not the authors’. Page counts are the first US editions as given by Kirkus, or the first edition where Kirkus does not list one.

The memoir shelf: six parents who wrote it down

Fiction about losing a child is mostly written by people who have imagined it. These six were written by people to whom it happened, and they are the books bereaved parents most often say felt true. They are ordered roughly by how early in grief they can be read.

1. 01

   A Heart That Works Rob Delaney

   2022 · 196 pages · the father, first person

   Closest match The one you can give

   Delaney’s third son, Henry, was found to have a tumour near his brain stem at eleven months. The surgery to remove it damaged the cranial nerves that let him swallow, so he lived with a tracheostomy, went through chemotherapy, came home to a house that had to be run like a field hospital, and died in January 2018, aged two. Delaney is a comedian, and the book is funny in a way that never once feels like deflection; the jokes are how he stays in the room with the worst thing, and they let you stay too.

   What you would only know from reading it: the book is framed by water. It opens with Delaney swimming in the Hampstead ponds and moves to the scuba lessons he and his wife took after Henry died, where he sat on the bottom of a pool in the dark and felt, for the first time in a while, no fear. It is also the book on this page with the most direct advice for friends of the bereaved, which is roughly: turn up, keep turning up, let them throw you out. If you are buying for someone, this is the one.

   How it ends

   It ends in the present, with a family that has stayed a family, and does not pretend the shape of it was not changed for good.

   Contains

   A toddler’s cancer treatment and tracheostomy care described in detail; The death itself is on the page; Strong language throughout

   Skip if

   You cannot bear a book that makes you laugh about this, or you need the illness kept off the page.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Irish Times review (Martina Evans)

2. 02

   Once More We Saw Stars Jayson Greene

   2019 · 256 pages · the father, first person, sometimes addressed to the child

   Strong match The one that consoles

   In May 2015 Greene’s daughter Greta, two, was sitting on a bench on the Upper West Side with her grandmother when a piece of windowsill fell from an eighth-floor building and struck her. She did not recover. The first third of the book is the hospital, told hour by hour, and it is as hard as anything on this page. Then it becomes a different book: grief workshops, a medium, a move out of the apartment where she “padded agreeably around every corner”, a ceremony in New Mexico, and a second pregnancy.

   That second half divides readers along a line that has nothing to do with quality. Parents a year or more out often say this is the book that let them breathe; parents in the first months, and readers who want the abyss and nothing else, find it too consoled and stop trusting it. Kirkus called it “poignantly uplifting”, which is accurate and is exactly the warning. Read it when you want to be told there is a way through, and not before.

   How it ends

   It ends with a son born and a daughter still present in the house, and it is honest that both are true at once.

   Contains

   A toddler’s fatal head injury and intensive care on the page; Organ donation; A medium and a shamanic ceremony, taken seriously

   Skip if

   You are in the first months, or the word uplifting makes you want to throw the book.

   Read first

   A Heart That Works

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Jayson Greene, with the 2015 NYT report

3. 03

   An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination Elizabeth McCracken

   2008 · 192 pages · the mother, first person, in vignettes

   Closest match Stillbirth

   McCracken and her husband were living in rural France when, days from her due date, a scan found no heartbeat. She delivered her son two days later. They had called him Pudding. They burned most of what they had bought for him and left the country. Her second son was born a year and five days after the first died, and the book is written from inside that second pregnancy, which gives it a doubled time: every page knows what the next year holds and refuses to let that soften the one before.

   It is short, dry, exact, and often funny, and it is the only book on this page about stillbirth, which most “child loss” lists quietly leave out. It is also unusually precise about other people: the friends who wrote, the friends who did not, the acquaintance who suggested she write “about the lighter side of losing a child”. McCracken’s position on closure is stated in two words and is not printable on a page like this, and the book earns it.

   How it ends

   It ends with the second birth, without ever saying that the second child replaces the first, because he does not.

   Contains

   A full-term stillbirth, and the delivery of the baby, on the page; A subsequent pregnancy throughout

   Skip if

   You are pregnant again and not ready to read about someone else being pregnant again.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Reception summary (NPR, Time, People, NYT)

4. 04

   Wave Sonali Deraniyagala

   2013 · 240 pages · the mother, first person

   Closest match The unconsolable

   On 26 December 2004 Deraniyagala was at a hotel in Yala, on the south coast of Sri Lanka, with her husband Steve, her sons Vikram, seven, and Nikhil, five, and her parents. The tsunami killed all six of them. She survived by holding on to a branch. The first chapter is the wave; the rest is the years after, and for a long stretch of them she wanted to die, drank, avoided every object and animal and colour that reminded her of the boys, and screamed at the friends who took turns sitting outside her bathroom door.

   This is the hardest book on the page and it offers nothing. Deraniyagala is an economist, and the prose is short, plain and unadorned; Kirkus said it is “all the more powerful for its lack of literary flourish”. What turns it, late, is not acceptance but a decision to remember on purpose: to go back into the house in London, to look at the boys’ things, to write down what Vik said about painted storks. If you have been told you should be further along by now, this is the book that will not say that.

   How it ends

   It does not end so much as arrive at a point where she can hold their whole lives in her head, and stays there.

   Contains

   The tsunami and the deaths of two young children, a husband and both parents; Suicidal thinking and heavy drinking described plainly; Bodies identified months later from a mass grave, mentioned not described

   Skip if

   You are in the first year, or you need a book to offer any way out at all.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Smriti Daniel interview with Deraniyagala (2013)

5. 05

   Blue Nights Joan Didion

   2011 · 208 pages · the mother, first person, recursive

   Strong match An adult child

   Didion’s daughter Quintana died in 2005, aged 39, after nearly two years in and out of intensive care; her father had died while she was in one of those wards, which is the subject of The Year of Magical Thinking. Blue Nights is the other book, and it is not about the illness or the death, which are barely on the page. It is about whether Didion was any good as a mother, turned over and over, and about her own body starting to fail while she asks the question.

   It is a cold book on first reading, and readers who come to it from Delaney or Greene sometimes feel shut out. The coldness is the point: this is what grief sounds like when a very controlled writer refuses every consolation, including the consolation of being warm about herself. It is the book on this page for the parent whose child was grown, and for anyone years out who has stopped wanting to be soothed and started wanting to be accurate.

   How it ends

   It ends with Didion alone and frail, having refused to draw any lesson, which is its own kind of honesty.

   Contains

   A daughter’s long hospitalisation, referred to obliquely; A mother’s self-blame, sustained; The author’s own ageing and falls

   Skip if

   You want to feel accompanied rather than observed, or your loss is recent.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Blue Nights, background and reception

6. 06

   Things in Nature Merely Grow Yiyun Li

   2025 · 192 pages · the mother, first person

   Closest match Suicide

   Li’s elder son, Vincent, died by suicide in 2017 at sixteen. Her younger son, James, died the same way in 2024 at nineteen. Her earlier book Where Reasons End was an invented conversation with Vincent; this one is for James, and she says at the start that if it were fiction nobody would believe it. It is not a narrative of the deaths. It is an account of what she calls radical acceptance: of the facts, of the abyss she says she simply is in, and of the fact that she is still a mother with no living children.

   It is the most thinking book on this page. Li reaches for Wittgenstein, Camus and Euripides the way Delaney reaches for a joke, and she is exact about how people behaved, including the Chinese press that treated her sons’ deaths as her punishment for leaving. Kirkus called it “as bleak as winter fog at dusk” and said it offers little comfort, which is true and is also why parents bereaved by suicide say it is the one that did not lie to them. It won the 2026 Pulitzer Prize for memoir.

   How it ends

   It ends without resolution and says so; the title is the thesis, that things grow on regardless, and she means it as fact, not comfort.

   Contains

   Two teenage suicides, stated plainly, not narrated; The author’s own history of depression and a suicide attempt; Childhood abuse by her mother, recounted

   Skip if

   You need warmth on the page, or you would rather be told a story than shown a mind at work.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, 2026 Pulitzer Prize citation, Lonesome Reader review

The fiction shelf: six novels, marked

Two of these are among the best novels of the century. Two are the ones everybody searches for. One is oblique. One is the counterweight. In every case the entry says what happens to the child and whether you will see it.

7. 07

   Lincoln in the Bardo George Saunders

   2017 · 342 pages · a chorus of 166 voices, mostly the dead

   Closest match A father in a cemetery

   Willie Lincoln died of typhoid in February 1862, aged eleven, in the White House, with the war going badly. The newspapers of the day reported that his father went to the crypt at Oak Hill Cemetery on several occasions to hold the body, and that is the whole novel: one night, the president in the graveyard, watched by the ghosts who do not know they are dead and have their own opinions about the boy who has just joined them. The historical record is collaged in alongside, some of it real and some of it invented, and the contradictions between the sources are the joke and the grief at once.

   The form puts some people off within ten pages, and if you are one of them the audiobook, with a cast of dozens, is the easier door. What the form does, once it takes, is let a father’s grief be seen from outside by a hundred strangers who find it unbearable to watch. Saunders is careful with the boy. He is less careful with the father, whose loss hardens into a decision about how the war must be fought, and the book does not pretend that is a consolation.

   How it ends

   The night ends, the father leaves, and what happens to Willie is handled with more gentleness than anything else in the book.

   Contains

   An eleven-year-old’s death from typhoid, reported through collaged accounts; A father holding his son’s body; Some of the ghosts have crude and violent stories

   Skip if

   You want a conventional narrative voice, or you are a bereaved parent who does not want the death seen from the outside.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Background, sources and the audiobook cast

8. 08

   Reservoir 13 Jon McGregor

   2017 · 240 pages · omniscient, the whole village

   Closest match The long wait

   A thirteen-year-old girl, Rebecca Shaw, is visiting a village in the English Peak District with her parents over New Year. She goes for a walk and does not come back. That is the first chapter, and it reads like the opening of a crime novel. Then the second chapter begins “At midnight when the year turned”, and so does every chapter after it, one a year for thirteen years, and you understand that the book is not going to find her. It follows the village: the sheep, the well-dressing, the affairs, the reservoirs, the fieldfares, the parents seen occasionally at a distance, still there.

   It won the Costa Novel Award and it is, in its way, the truest book on this page about how time behaves after a child is gone: the ordinary continues, obscenely, and then that continuing becomes the only thing holding anyone up. It is also the book a parent waiting for news may find impossible, precisely because it is accurate. For the reader with no stake, it is extraordinary. For the reader with one, look at the table first.

   How it ends

   It does not resolve, deliberately; thirteen years pass and the last chapter is as unanswered as the first.

   Contains

   A missing child throughout, never found; No violence on the page; no death confirmed

   Skip if

   You need to know what happened, or your own child is missing.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Costa Novel Award 2017

9. 09

   The Light Between Oceans M.L. Stedman

   2012 · 362 pages · close third, alternating, mostly the lighthouse couple

   Looser match Two mothers, one child

   On an island lighthouse off Western Australia in the 1920s, Isabel Sherbourne loses two pregnancies and then delivers a stillborn baby. Two weeks later a dinghy washes up with a dead man and a living infant girl in it. Her husband wants to report it. She does not, and they raise the child as Lucy. On the mainland a woman called Hannah has spent years believing her daughter Grace is alive somewhere. The novel is what happens when those two facts meet.

   It is a plot novel, well-made and, as Kirkus said, “precisely calculated”; you can feel the mechanism. What earns it a place here is that it is fair to everyone, including the woman who did the wrong thing, and it understands that grief can curdle into a decision that looks like love from inside. It is the only book on this page where the loss drives a story rather than being the story, and for a reader who is not ready for the memoirs, that distance is the point.

   How it ends

   Nobody gets what they wanted; the ending is quiet, decades on, and closer to peace than to happiness.

   Contains

   Miscarriages and a stillbirth, briefly; A child taken from her mother, and later returned to her against her will; Post-war trauma; a mob attack recalled

   Skip if

   You want literary prose rather than a well-built plot, or you cannot read about a child being kept from her mother.

   Checked against: Plot, awards and starred reviews, Publishers Weekly review

10. 10

    The Deep End of the Ocean Jacquelyn Mitchard

    1996 · 448 pages · close third, mostly the mother, later the brothers

    Looser match The child comes back

    Beth Cappadora is checking into a Chicago hotel for her school reunion. Her three-year-old, Ben, is holding his seven-year-old brother’s hand. Then he is not. The first half of the novel is nine years of nothing: Beth sleeping through her days, a marriage held together by routine, and the older boy, Vincent, curdling under a guilt nobody will name. Then a boy called Sam knocks on the door and asks if she wants the lawn mowed.

    The prose is plain and the emotion is loud; Kirkus called it “lush melodrama” and was not wrong. But it was the first Oprah pick for a reason, and what it gets right is rarer than good prose: that getting the child back is not the end of anything. Ben has a father he loves two streets away and no memory of these people, and the book’s last third is about a family discovering that the miracle they prayed for is a second loss for the boy. If your child is missing, this is not a comfort; it is something more useful, which is honest.

    How it ends

    The child chooses to come home, and the book is clear that most of what was broken in the nine years stays broken.

    Contains

    A toddler abducted in the first chapter; A mother’s long depression; a surviving sibling’s guilt and delinquency; A returned child expressing suicidal feelings

    Skip if

    You want literary fiction, or the idea that the child comes back is the part you cannot bear.

    Checked against: Kirkus review, Plot summary

11. 11

    The Lovely Bones Alice Sebold

    2002 · 288 pages · the murdered girl, first person, from heaven

    Looser match The one to be warned about

    This is the fiction title most people searching this page are looking for, so it is here, and it is flagged as hard as a page can flag anything. Susie Salmon is fourteen. On 6 December 1973 a neighbour lures her into an underground den in a cornfield and rapes and murders her, and she tells you so in the first sentence and describes it in the first chapter. She then narrates the next decade from a heaven of her own, watching her father break, her mother leave, her sister grow up, and the killer move on.

    What the book does well, for the first half, is the family: the exact ways a father’s certainty and a mother’s flight can both be grief. Kirkus said it “works beautifully for so long as Susie simply tells the truth, then falters”, and the falter is the last third, which pushes toward a closure the book has not earned, including a scene in which Susie borrows a living girl’s body that many readers never forgive. It is loved by millions. It is also the book that, handed to a bereaved parent as a comfort, has done the most harm on this list.

    “I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” second sentence, ch. 1

    How it ends

    It reaches for consolation and mostly finds it; the family heals, the killer gets what he deserves, and the tidiness is the problem.

    Contains

    The rape and murder of a fourteen-year-old, described directly in chapter one; Dismemberment, mentioned; A serial killer’s other victims; A sexual scene involving the dead narrator in a borrowed body

    Skip if

    You are a bereaved parent, full stop; and if you are a reader, if violence against children is something you cannot read on the page.

    Checked against: Kirkus review, Plot summary

12. 12

    The Shack William P. Young

    2007 · 256 pages · close third, the father

    The counterweight The Christian counterweight

    Mack Phillips takes three of his children camping in Oregon. While he is pulling his son out of a capsized canoe, his youngest daughter, Missy, six, is taken from the campsite by a serial killer; her bloodied dress is found in a shack in the woods, and her body is not. Four years later a note arrives, signed Papa, the name his wife uses for God, inviting him back to the shack. He goes, and spends a weekend with the Trinity: God the Father as a Black woman called Papa, Jesus as a Middle Eastern carpenter, the Holy Spirit as an Asian woman called Sarayu.

    It is here because it has sold more than ten million copies, because it is on the Compassionate Friends UK reading list, and because if you are a Christian parent someone has probably already given it to you. Be told what it is: after the first few chapters it stops being a novel and becomes a conversation, in which every objection a grieving father could raise is answered by God in person. For a parent who needs to hear, in so many words, that God did not do this and does not require it, that is exactly what it supplies, and the copies sold are the evidence that it works. For anyone else it reads as a sermon with the plot removed, and several prominent evangelical critics called its theology heresy, so it does not even have the whole church behind it. Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament for a Son is the book grieving Christian readers most often name as the honest alternative.

    How it ends

    God shows Mack where the body is, he leads the police to it, and the killer is caught; everything is answered, which is either the point or the problem.

    Contains

    The abduction of a six-year-old and her inferred murder; bloodied clothing found; Mack’s abusive father, recalled; Extended theological dialogue that presumes Christian belief

    Skip if

    You are not a believer, or you are a believer who wants your questions left open.

    Checked against: Plot, sales and the theological objections, The Compassionate Friends UK reading list, fiction section

Why most lists on this subject are useless to the person searching

Search the phrase and you get two kinds of page. The first is a charity or hospice list of practical guides: workbooks, hundred-ideas books, faith-based reflections. Useful, and not what most people mean when they search for a book. The second is a blog list of twenty titles with a paragraph each, rarely saying how old the child was, how they died, or whether you will have to read the death. Not one of the pages that rank for this query, on the day this was written, names a helpline.

The reason that matters is that the person searching is usually a parent, usually in the early months, and usually alone at the time. The worst thing a page can do to them is hand over The Lovely Bones without a word, or hand over Wave to someone in week two, or hand over Once More We Saw Stars to someone who is not ready to be told there is a way through. So the table above exists, and the memoirs come first, and the novels, which are mostly written by people who imagined this, come second with their limits stated.

One more thing the other lists miss. The Compassionate Friends UK keeps a postal library and a reading list chosen by their librarian, and it is the only such list compiled by bereaved parents for bereaved parents. It includes none of the literary memoirs above, and its fiction section runs to Anne Tyler, Ann Hood, Margaret Forster and The Shack. That is not a criticism of either list. It is a reminder that the books critics rate and the books parents reach for are not the same shelf, and that this page is one opinion.

Where this page’s facts come from

• The Compassionate Friends UK: suggested reading list — the one list on this subject compiled by bereaved parents; borrowable by post
• The Compassionate Friends UK helpline — 0345 123 2304, answered by bereaved parents
• Sands: how we offer support — freephone 0808 164 3332 for stillbirth and neonatal death
• Child Bereavement UK helpline — 0800 02 888 40, including support for bereaved siblings
• The Compassionate Friends (US) — 877-969-0010; chapter locator for all fifty states
• Kirkus Reviews — page counts and publication dates for every book above
• Irish Times on A Heart That Works — the medical detail of Henry’s illness
• Smriti Daniel interviews Sonali Deraniyagala — the boys’ ages and the four-month identification
• 2026 Pulitzer Prize: Yiyun Li — the citation for Things in Nature Merely Grow