Books for when you need a cathartic cry
If you're in need of a real tear-jerker, then look no further than these emotional titles.
A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle
The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, and another girl. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be made: to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?
Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire.
Foster by Claire Keegan
It is a hot summer in rural Ireland. A girl is sent to live with foster parents on a farm, not knowing when she will return home. In the strangers’ house, she finds a warmth and affection she has not known before and slowly begins to blossom in their care.
But in a house where there are meant to be no secrets, she discovers how fragile her idyll is.
Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave
The mid-seventies: at an all-boys Catholic school in Melbourne, Timothy Conigrave falls wildly and sweetly in love with the captain of the football team. So begins a relationship that weathers disapproval, separation and, ultimately, death.
With honesty and insight, Holding the Man explores the highs and lows of any partnership, and the strength of heart both men have to find when they test positive to HIV. This is a book as refreshing and uplifting as it is moving; a funny and sad and celebratory account of growing up gay.
Heaven by Mieko Kawakami The Song of Achilles
Set in present-day Japan, Heaven documents the uneasy and occasionally brutal lives of two teenagers who are torturously bullied by their peers. The two become friends and meet in secret in the hopes of avoiding any further attention and take solace in each other’s company.
Kawakami’s simple yet profound new work stands as a dazzling testament to her literary talent. Here, she asks us to question the fate of the meek in a society that favours the strong, and the lengths that even children will go in their learned cruelty.
Marshmallow by Victoria Hannan
Some moments change everything. For five friends, what should have been a birthday to remember will instead cleave a line between before and after. From then on, the shockwaves of guilt, sorrow and disbelief will colour every day, every interaction, every possibility. Each will struggle. Each will ask why. Secrets will be kept. Lies will be told. Relationships reassessed. Each friend will be forever changed. And the question all of them will be forced to ask is: can they ever find a way to live without what was lost?
Anyone's Ghost by August Thompson
The lonely life of fifteen-year-old Theron David Alden is transformed when he meets Jake. Older, cooler, more confident and startlingly beautiful, Jake likes the same bands, the same drugs, and has the same drive to oblivion. Over the course of two decades, Theron and Jake get high, drift apart, and are brought hurtling back together, until a final collision tears them apart forever. Theron wants Jake, and he wants to be Jake. But is Jake brave enough to want him back?
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
In one of the most acclaimed and original novels of recent years, Kazuo Ishiguro imagines the lives of a group of students growing up in a darkly skewed version of contemporary England.
Narrated by Kathy, now 31, Never Let Me Go hauntingly dramatises her attempts to come to terms with her childhood at the seemingly idyllic Hailsham School, and with the fate that has always awaited her and her closest friends in the wider world. A story of love, friendship and memory, Never Let Me Go is charged throughout with a sense of the fragility of life.
Tianamen Square by Lai Wen
Following Lai as she grows up in Beijing, through to her passionate university days where she joins a movement of student protesters, this is a truly remarkable novel about coming to see the world as it is. Tiananmen Square is the story of one girl's life growing up in the China of the 1970s and 80s, as well as the story of the events in 1989 that give the novel its name: the hope and idealism of a generation of young students, their heroism and courage, and the price that some of them paid.
Private Rites by Julia Armfield
It’s been raining for a long time now, for so long that the lands have reshaped themselves. Old places have been lost. Arcane rituals and religions have crept back into practice.
Sisters Isla, Irene and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their estranged father dies. A famous architect revered for making the new world navigable, he had long cut himself off from public life. They find themselves uncertain of how to grieve his passing when everything around them seems to be ending anyway.
Beloved by Toni Morrison
It is the mid-1800s and as slavery looks to be coming to an end, Sethe is haunted by the violent trauma it wrought on her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky. Her dead baby daughter, whose tombstone bears the single word, Beloved, returns as a spectre to punish her mother, but also to elicit her love.
A tale of brutality, horror and, above all, love at any cost, Beloved is Toni Morrison's enduring masterpiece and best-known work.
A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
When four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York, they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. At the centre of their circle is withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity.
Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realise, is Jude himself – an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome, but that will define his life forever.
