Books on Grief: A Clinician's Reading List

This is a clinician's reading list: ten books on grief, with what each one does, one honest limit, and who it may suit. It is for someone grieving a death, someone supporting a mourner, and anyone deciding which book to open first.

These books do different jobs. Memoirs keep company and give no instructions; guides propose a way of thinking about a loss; three of the ten are not bereavement books. Four set a death down in close detail — A Grief Observed, The Year of Magical Thinking, Bearing the Unbearable and Being Mortal — so leave those for later if a chapter is more than you want today.

Which Grief Books Are Memoirs Rather Than Guides?

A Grief Observed — C. S. Lewis (1961)

Memoir, faith-based. The notebooks Lewis kept after his wife, Joy Davidman, died in 1960, published in 1961 under the pen name N. W. Clerk — no exercises, no sequence, no advice. Limit: it can be hard reading early on for someone who does not share the theology, or who is angry at God and does not want that mirrored back. May suit a reader who wants company rather than guidance. Our guide to A Grief Observed has the detail and the caveats.

The Year of Magical Thinking — Joan Didion (2005)

Memoir. The year after her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly; Knopf, 2005, winner of that year's National Book Award for Nonfiction. Its subject is the disordered thinking of early bereavement. Limit: it describes and does not instruct, the world it is set in may read as far from your own, and it stays inside that thinking rather than offering a way out — hard reading early on. May suit a reader after a sudden death who wants their own strange thinking set down precisely.

Which Grief Books Are Written as Guides?

It's OK That You're Not OK — Megan Devine (2017)

Guide. Devine, a counsellor and grief writer in the United States, wrote it after her partner drowned in 2009. Her publisher, Sounds True, describes it as setting aside the goal of returning to a normal, happy life in favour of building a life alongside grief. Limit: it comes out of the sudden death of a partner, so a reader grieving a long illness or a stillbirth may not find their situation here; it offers a stance rather than steps, and the services it names are American. May suit a reader who has been told to move on.

Bearing the Unbearable — Joanne Cacciatore (2017)

Guide, in fifty-two short chapters. Wisdom Publications, June 2017. Arizona State University's library records Cacciatore as an associate professor of social work; the publisher names her a bereavement educator, researcher and Zen priest whose newborn daughter died in 1994. The chapters stand alone, so it works in small doses. Limit: it is weighted towards traumatic loss and the death of a child, so a reader grieving an expected death in old age may find the intensity mismatched, and it can be hard reading in the first weeks. Zen framing runs through it. May suit a bereaved parent, a reader after a sudden or violent death, and clinicians.

The Wild Edge of Sorrow — Francis Weller (2015)

Guide, from depth psychology and ritual. Weller, a psychotherapist, sets out five gates of grief: everything we love we will lose; the places that have not yet known love; the sorrows of the world; what we expected but did not receive; and ancestral grief. North Atlantic Books published the first edition in 2015; the current 256-page hardcover, dated 19 August 2025, adds new forewords, so check which edition you are ordering. Limit: it is a framework and a body of ritual rather than a treatment, and it does not present research evidence for itself; the fourth and fifth gates widen grief past bereavement. May suit a reader whose grief is not only about a death. TEO does not run ritual or ceremony work.

On Grief and Grieving — Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler (2005)

Guide. Scribner, 2005, finished shortly before Kübler-Ross died. It takes the five stages — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance — from her 1969 book On Death and Dying, which described people who were dying, and applies them to bereaved people in short sections. Limit: that transfer is the problem (see below). Read as a set of topics, it has something to offer; read as a sequence, it can leave a reader believing they are grieving wrongly. May suit a reader already handed the stages by someone else.

Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief — David Kessler (2019)

Guide. Scribner, 2019. Kessler, Kübler-Ross's co-author, adds a sixth stage — meaning — and wrote it after his own son died at twenty-one; he is explicit that the meaning is not in the loss itself. Limit: it extends a model the research disputes, and rests on accounts from his practice rather than trial data; calling meaning a stage can land as one more box to clear for a reader who has found none. May suit a reader asked what good could come of this.

Three Books Read in Grief That Are Not About Bereavement

Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl (1946)

Camp memoir and a theory of meaning, not a grief book. First published in German in 1946, with English editions from Beacon Press from 1959. Limit: meaning does not replace treatment for depression, and measuring your own loss against camp survival can add shame rather than lift it. Logotherapy, the approach it outlines, is not offered at TEO. May suit a reader asking what to do with a life a death has rearranged. Our guide to Man's Search for Meaning sets out the criticisms.

Being Mortal — Atul Gawande (2014)

A book about dying and medical care, not about bereavement. Gawande, a surgeon, writes about ageing, what hospitals and nursing homes are built to optimize, what hospice does differently, and his father's dying. Metropolitan Books, 282 pages. Limit: it is a before-or-during book rather than an after one, and its institutions, financing and law are American. Reviewing it in The New York Review of Books, Marcia Angell faulted Gawande for paying little attention to the economic system his account sits inside, and called the section on assisted dying the weakest in it. May suit someone caring for a dying parent, or a mourner wondering whether the right calls were made.

Should You Read a Five-Stages Book?

They are not a sequence anyone has to complete, and no clock runs on them. Two studies are worth knowing if a stage book is on your shelf.

• →One study set out to test the sequence directly. Researchers followed 233 bereaved adults in one US state after natural-cause deaths, out to twenty-four months. Each indicator did reach its highest point in the order the model predicts — disbelief, yearning, anger, depression, acceptance — which the authors read as support. In the same data, disbelief was not the dominant early response, acceptance was the highest-scoring item throughout, and yearning rather than depression was the highest-scoring negative indicator (Maciejewski and colleagues, JAMA, 2007). So it describes where peaks fall, not states a mourner enters and leaves behind. The authors flagged their own sample as almost entirely white, weighted to bereaved spouses and less depressed than other bereaved groups, and wrote that a sample with more men or more distress might show a different pattern. Holland and Neimeyer revisited the same five indicators in 2010. A group finding does not predict your own course.
• →Researchers have argued for dropping it. Stroebe, Schut and Boerner, writing in Omega — Journal of Death and Dying in 2017, argued that stage theory lacks empirical evidence, conceptual clarity and practical use, that expecting bereaved people to go through stages can be harmful to those who do not, and that it should be discarded.

Our page on grief counselling explains prolonged grief disorder as a diagnosis, and why TEO clinicians do not diagnose.

Is There Such a Thing as a Grief Recovery Book?

Books are sold under that label, and the word does damage: it implies a finish line, and someone who has failed to reach it. It's OK That You're Not OK argues against that framing, and Bearing the Unbearable is built to be read in pieces rather than worked through. Nothing here is a recovery program, and nothing sets a date.

What a Book Cannot Do

A book cannot hear which death this was, or that a name has stopped being said at home. It cannot notice a change in how you are sleeping or drinking, and it cannot change course when a chapter lands badly. What a trained clinician adds is response — to your loss, your family, your faith, and what you have not said out loud. If a book is helping, keep reading it. TEO's Grief Toolkit is free and works from waves rather than stages. If grief is crowding out sleep, work or the people around you, or you are drinking or using more to get through the days (see addictions and recovery), a grief counsellor or your doctor can help.

Grief Support at TEO

Rola Shbib, Registered Social Worker, RSW (Ontario) #866715, leads grief work at TEO and holds an honours degree in thanatology, the study of dying, death and bereavement. She works online in English with clients in British Columbia, Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Newfoundland and Labrador. TEO clinicians do not diagnose and do not give advice about medication.

Grief after a non-death loss, and grief taken up years later, are on the grief counselling page linked above; on Vancouver Island, see grief counselling on Vancouver Island. For questions about God, doubt or meaning, see spiritually integrated therapy, or Christian counselling (BC only) with Alison Shaji, MA, RCC #22608 (BCACC). More TEO book guides, including Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, are indexed on our books on mental health reading list and at our resources hub.

Individual sessions are $150 per 60 minutes, and no referral is needed. The first step is a free 15-minute consultation by video or a scheduled phone call, booked online. Book a free consultation, or text (519) 760-5211 with a question first. This text line is not a crisis service.