Themes
Books About Mental Health
Novels and memoirs that take the inner life of the mind — its crises and recoveries — seriously.
20 books · ranked
-
1
The Body Keeps the Score
How trauma lives in the body and how people heal; a landmark that reached far beyond therapists.
-
2
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou's memoir of her childhood and adolescence in the American South and in California — the racism, the trauma and the gradual emergence of her voice through literature. One of the most widely assigned and most challenged memoirs in American education, it announces one of the great literary voices of the 20th century.
-
3
The Year of Magical Thinking
A clear-eyed account of grief after the sudden loss of a husband; precise and unsparing.
-
4
System Collapse
Murderbot and its allies must prevent a corporate hostile takeover of a newly contacted human colony — while Murderbot deals with the psychological aftermath of trauma from the previous book, in ways its companions notice before it's willing to admit. Wells's Locus Award-winning novel continues the series' blend of action, humour and one of science fiction's most quietly moving explorations of mental health and recovery.
-
5
Hamnet
In 1580s Stratford-upon-Avon, Agnes — wife of a young Latin tutor who will become William Shakespeare — struggles to save their son Hamnet from an illness moving through the household. O'Farrell's novel imagines the loss of a child that may have given rise to the greatest play ever written, exploring grief, love and the way a mother's devotion can outlast death. Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction 2020.
-
6
Ceremony
Tayo, a Laguna Pueblo veteran traumatised by the Second World War, returns to New Mexico and seeks healing through ceremony — the traditional Pueblo healing ritual — while navigating the destruction that the modern world has visited on his community. Silko's novel interweaves myth, poetry and prose to show the relationship between individual healing and communal survival.
-
7
The Four Winds
Elsa Wolcott, a Texas Panhandle farmer's wife during the Great Depression and Dust Bowl, must choose between staying on the land that is killing her and her family, or heading to California with the tide of migrants seeking a better life. Hannah's novel is both a love letter to The Grapes of Wrath and a portrait of women's wartime and Depression-era resilience.
-
8
The Yellow Wallpaper
A woman recovering from a 'nervous condition' in a summer rental house is prescribed rest and forbidden from writing — and begins to fixate on the yellow wallpaper of her room, eventually believing a woman is trapped behind it. Gilman's semi-autobiographical short story is the foundational text of feminist literary criticism and one of the most-assigned texts in women's literature courses.
-
9
Sing Unburied Sing
Thirteen-year-old Jojo, his toddler sister and their mother Leonie make a journey across Mississippi to collect Leonie's partner from prison, accompanied by the ghost of a boy who died in Parchman Farm decades earlier. Ward's National Book Award-winning novel weaves together the living and the dead in a meditation on race, grief and the specific inheritance of the American South.
-
10
Alias Grace
In 1843, Grace Marks — a sixteen-year-old Irish immigrant servant — was convicted of the murder of her employer and his housekeeper in Upper Canada. A young psychiatrist, assigned to assess her, tries to reconstruct what actually happened. Atwood's novel examines how stories about women — their bodies, their madness, their guilt — are constructed and what they conceal.
-
11
Lincoln in the Bardo
Abraham Lincoln visits the Washington cemetery where his son Willie has just been buried, and the novel unfolds through the voices of the ghosts inhabiting the bardo — the intermediate state between death and whatever comes next — as they witness Lincoln's grief and try to help Willie move on. Saunders's Man Booker-winning debut novel is formally unlike anything else.
-
12
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Harold Fry, a retired man, sets out to post a letter to a dying old friend and decides instead to walk the 500 miles to visit her, convinced that his walking will keep her alive. Joyce's debut novel is about grief, guilt, the marriages we construct and the pilgrimages we take — alone — to find something we lost long before we started walking.
-
13
Breath Eyes Memory
Sophie Caco grows up with her aunt in Haiti before being sent to New York to join the mother she barely knows — a woman whose trauma is transmitted to her daughter in ways Sophie spends the novel trying to understand and survive. Danticat's debut is about the specific legacy of sexual violence, the bond between mothers and daughters, and what it means to carry your country in your body.
-
14
Austerlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an architectural historian, begins to recover the buried memory of his own identity — he was brought to England as a child on the Kindertransport and never knew his origins. Sebald's narrator encounters him across forty years of chance meetings. The novel weaves together architecture, memory and the slow emergence of a traumatic history in prose saturated with photographs.
-
15
Blindness
A sudden epidemic of blindness strikes an unnamed city, and the infected are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum where social order rapidly collapses. Saramago's novel follows one woman — the only person who can see — through the catastrophe. It is both a philosophical fable about what civilisation actually requires and a viscerally disturbing account of what people do when structure disappears.
-
16
Night Watch
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, a mother and daughter arrive at a West Virginia asylum, and the novel moves between their story and the war years that brought them there. Phillips's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is about trauma, memory and the institutions that both housed and concealed the war's psychological wounds.
-
17
The Book of Form and Emptiness
After his father's death, thirteen-year-old Benny begins hearing voices from objects around him — and finds refuge in the public library, where a mysterious book seems to be narrating his own life. Ozeki's Women's Prize-winning novel is about grief, mental health, consumerism and the objects that accumulate around loss.
-
18
The Only Good Indians
Ten years after four young Blackfeet men do something they shouldn't have during an elk hunt, something is coming for them — and for the families and communities around them. Jones's Bram Stoker Award-winning novel is a horror story rooted in Indigenous experience, generational trauma and the specific landscape of the Blackfeet reservation.
-
19
When You Trap a Tiger
Lily moves with her family to live with her dying grandmother, and discovers that the magical tiger from her grandmother's Korean folktales may be real — and that returning what it stole could heal her family. Keller's Newbery Medal-winning novel blends Korean folklore with a contemporary story about grief, identity and the stories families pass down.
-
20
The Long Take
Walker, a D-Day veteran from Nova Scotia, drifts through Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York in the years after the Second World War, unable to return home, haunted by what he saw and did in Normandy. Robertson's Walter Scott Prize-winning work — part novel, part book-length poem — captures postwar American cities being demolished for freeways while a generation of traumatised veterans disappear into them.