Hi there. I'm in the mood for sad books and sad characters a la "the bell jar". Can you tell me any books like that? Not too particular about whether the endings are happy or not. Surreal or hyper realistic, anything really :-) thank you.
How do we pick?? We polled our staff for the saddest book they could think of, here are the (sure to be an existential bummer) results:
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Sterile Cuckoo, John Nichols
A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, Eimear McBride
The Love Song of Johnny Valentine, Teddy Wayne
The Casual Vacancy, J.K. Rowling
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee
It Never Happened Again, Sam Alden
Last Words from Montmartre, Qiu Miaojin
The Farming of Bones, Edwidge Danticat