One of the surest signs that I truly loved a book is if it made me cry and amongst bookish people, this is far from unusual. It’s not just about sadness, though. It’s about a story cutting so deeply. It’s books that take on heavy, complex themes, written with such care and depth that every character feels achingly real.

The books in this selection demand you feel every wound, every joy, every heartbreak their characters carry. They are powerfully raw, breathtakingly honest, and almost painful to read.

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The Reformatory by Tananarive Due

Twelve-year-old Robbie Stephens Jr. is sentenced to six months at the notorious Gracetown School for Boys after defending his sister, Gloria, from the son of the town’s most powerful landowner. What begins as punishment soon becomes a descent into the brutal realities of the Jim Crow South and the dark secrets of the reformatory.
I cried so much reading this and was certain I wouldn’t be able to continue because of how heavy it is. The storytelling is haunting and immersive, with its dual POV deepening the tension and heightening the sense of urgency surrounding our protagonists. The mystical elements of haints and ghost sightings enrich the plot, adding another layer to the storytelling. I will never not be enraged by the experiences of Black people in Jim Crow America.

 

The Mountains Sing by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

A multigenerational tale of the Trần family set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. This story is heart-rending not just because of its subject matter, but because of its deeply personal narration, moving between Huong’s perspective in the present and her grandmother’s in the past.

I went in knowing very little about Vietnamese history — the war, the Great Hunger, the Land Reforms — but this book was both a powerful story and an education. When I finished, I was compelled to learn more about the war, Agent Orange and its devastating impact on Vietnam, refugees, and the refugee crisis. The themes are heavy — family, loss, the impact of war on ordinary people, class divides, sacrifice, and resilience in the face of unimaginable suffering. Prepare yourself: you will cry.

 

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

Ailey Pearl grows up caught between worlds. Haunted by trauma and guided by the voices of her mother, Belle, her sister, Lydia, and generations of women before her, Ailey sets out to uncover her family’s tangled history. Her path is illuminated by W. E. B. Du Bois’s words on the problem of race in America and the double consciousness every African American must navigate.

As she unearths stories of Indigenous, Black, and white ancestors shaped by both cruelty and resilience, she learns to embrace her full inheritance. The scope of this novel, spanning generations, histories, and hard-won survival, makes it as unforgettable as it is devastating. It broke my heart in the most necessary way. It was a haunting experience to read, even to glimpse a sliver of what these people in history endured.

 

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

In 1840s London, Arthur, a boy born into poverty along the polluted Thames, discovers a book that will alter his fate — a fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, salvaged from the ruins of King Ashurbanipal’s great library in ancient Nineveh. 

Like water, this story flows across centuries and continents, binding lives that seem worlds apart. In 2014 Turkey, Narin, a Yazidi girl racing against deafness and war, seeks a sacred baptism as ISIS advances. And in 2018 London, Zaleekah, a heartbroken hydrologist adrift on a houseboat, finds an unexpected reason to live when the same story calls her back to her homeland.
This book left me deeply moved. Shafak raises urgent questions about the forces that plague humanity and our world today. Through its interwoven stories, she explores poverty, environmentalism, colonialism, trauma, memory, culture, grief with a tenderness and intensity that lingers long after the final page. I will think about it for a long time.

 

Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin

After American troops leave Vietnam, Anh and her two brothers, Minh and Thanh, prepare for their journey to a refugee camp in Hong Kong as part of their family’s escape plan after the fall of Saigon. But when tragedy strikes and they are left orphaned, sixteen-year-old Anh is forced to become the caretaker of her younger brothers overnight.

I’m stunned by how powerfully the author captures intergenerational trauma and the performance of grief. After finishing the book, I read about Operation Wandering Souls and listened to the ghost tapes, still wondering if a people can ever truly move on from something like this. This is a tender yet devastating story of displacement, loss, memory, and the invisible threads that bind the living and the dead.

 

The Book of Night Women by James Marlon

Lilith is born into slavery on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the end of the 18th century, her arrival marked by both sorrow and significance. The Night Women, a group of enslaved women plotting a revolt, soon recognise her emerging power and believe she could be the key to their plans.

But as Lilith begins to awaken to her own desires, identity, and defiance, she pushes against the boundaries of what is imaginable for an enslaved woman and risks becoming the rebellion’s weakest link. The graphic brutality and unrelenting violence, both physical and psychological, make this an incredibly difficult book to sit with, yet I couldn’t look away. It felt only fitting that I fell into a melancholy-induced slump after finishing it.

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