Bereavement Reading
We understand how important it is to have the right resources at hand when coping with loss. That’s why we’ve curated this diverse reading list to support you through grief. From children’s books and practical guides to memoirs and academic works, each title is personally recommended by our team to offer insight, comfort, and understanding; whether you’re coping with loss or supporting others.
MuchLoved partners with Bookshop.org to support independent bookshops and organisations that promote reading. When you buy through them, you help fund our work to make grief support more accessible through the MuchLoved Charitable Trust. Books are also available from other retailers, including Amazon and Waterstones.
Biographical books and stories about bereavement
We Are Each Other tells Jess’ story of becoming a mother while losing her own mother – the beloved Tessa Jowell MP – to a sudden terminal diagnosis.
It’s about loss, yes, but at its core it’s about how we love when we are living on the threshold of life and death with someone central to our being and place in the world.
C. S. Lewis
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Narnia author C.S. Lewis had been married to his wife for four blissful years. When she died of cancer, he found himself alone, inconsolable in his grief. In this intimate journal, he chronicles the aftermath of the bereavement and mourning with blazing honesty. He grapples with a crisis of religious faith, navigating hope, rage, despair, and love – but eventually regains his bearings, finding his way back to life.
Reverend Richard Coles
When his partner died suddenly, shortly before Christmas in 2019, what came next took Reverend Richard Coles by surprise. Despite his years of experience assisting his parishioners, Richard now found he needed guidance himself. This deeply personal account of life after grief will resonate, unforgettably, long after the final page has been turned.
Lindsay Nicholson
Lindsay Nicholson’s world was turned upside down when her husband John contracted leukaemia. His death at the age of 35 left her bereft with grief, now the single parent of two beautiful daughters. Then, in a tragic twist of fate, her elder daughter Ellie also contracted the same disease, dying shortly after.
In this courageous and heart-rending memoir, Lindsay Nicholson reflects on her grieving process and the battle she faced to survive it.
Rachel Clarke
This is the unforgettable story of how one family’s grief transformed into a lifesaving gift. With tremendous compassion and clarity, Dr Rachel Clarke relates the urgent journey of a young girl’s heart and explores a history of remarkable medical innovations, stretching back over a century and involving the knowledge and dedication not just of surgeons but of countless physicians, immunologists, nurses and scientists.
Gloria Hunniford
Gloria Hunniford’s daughter, TV presenter Caron Keating, was 34 when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
This is Gloria’s account of Caron’s life. It is about the difficult bond between mothers and daughters … and about what happens to a family when one of its members gets taken over by a disease.
Bereavement books for children
One day when Syd comes to call on his Grandad, he isn’t in any of the usual places. He’s in the attic, where he ushers Syd through a door, and the two of them journey to a wild, beautiful island awash in colour where Grandad decides he will remain.
Sure to provide comfort to young children struggling to understand loss, Benji Davies’s tale is a sensitive and beautiful reminder that our loved ones live on in our memories long after they’re gone.
Winston’s Wish, Kate Sheppard
This book offers a structure and an outlet for the many difficult feelings which inevitably follow when someone dies. It aims to help children make sense of their experience by reflecting on the different aspects of their grief, whilst finding a balance between remembering and having fun. This book is a useful companion in the present, and will become an invaluable keepsake in the years to come.
Susan Varley
Badger is so old that he knows he must soon die, so he does his best to prepare his friends. When he finally passes away, they are grief-stricken, but one by one they remember the special things he taught them during his life. By sharing their memories, they realise that although Badger is no longer with them physically, he lives on through his friends.
Nicholas Halliday
Universally praised and beautifully written and illustrated, ‘The Lonely Tree’ follows the first year in the life of a lone evergreen growing in the heart of the ancient oak woodland of the New Forest. The evergreen is befriended by the oldest oak who has lived for hundreds of years. When winter arrives all the oak trees must go to sleep, but of course evergreens never sleep. Finally, after a long, cold and lonely winter, spring brings both sadness and joy to the little tree.
Doris Stickney
Doris Stickney tells the story of a small colony of water bugs living below the surface of a pond. Whenever a bug leaves the pond, those left behind are faced with the mystery of their absence. Stickney invites children into the question of their absence and offers hope for the future.
Michael Rosen
The Sad Book chronicles Michael’s grief at the death of his son Eddie from meningitis at the age of 19. A moving combination of sincerity and simplicity, it acknowledges that sadness is not always avoidable or reasonable and perfects the art of making complicated feelings plain.
This award-winning picture book is a uniquely powerful way of starting conversations with children about loss, grief and overwhelming emotions.
Clare Shaw
Written for teenagers or young adults, this book is filled with practical and honest information to help them process loss, without overloading them.
Designed to open up conversations and allow young people to ask questions, it explains death in a direct and age appropriate way. For age 10+ years.
Clare Shaw
Following the death of a loved one, it is vital that children have the opportunity to grieve. Using direct but child-friendly language, this book addresses the mixed emotions felt by a child during that process. It offers support and understanding alongside areas where the child can express themselves through writing and drawing.
It also houses a packet of tissues and an envelope to keep ‘special things’. For ages 3-11 years.
Self-help and practical advice about bereavement
George A. Bonanno
In The Other Side of Sadness, psychologist and emotions expert George Bonanno argues against the conventional view of grieving. Our inborn emotions – anger and denial but also relief and joy – help us deal effectively with loss. To expect or require only grief-stricken behaviour from the bereaved does them harm. In fact, grieving goes beyond mere sadness and it can actually deepen interpersonal connections and even lead to a new sense of meaning in life.
Colin Murray Parkes, Holly G. Prigerson
Bereavement provides guidance on preparing for the loss of a loved one, and coping after they’ve gone. It also discusses how to identify the minority in whom bereavement may lead to impairment of physical and/or mental health and how to ensure they get the help they need. This classic text will continue to be of value to the bereaved themselves, as well as the professionals and friends who seek to help and understand them.
Virginia Ironside
The death of a loved one is the most traumatic experience any of us face, and no two people cope with it in the same way.
Virginia Ironside deals with this complicated and sensitive issue with great frankness and insight, drawing on other’s people’s accounts as well as her own experiences.
Julia Samuel
Julia Samuel guides you gently through her eight practical pillars of strength – that include the power of saying ‘no’, to the structure and building of good new habits – to support you and help you to gradually rebuild your life in the face of grief.
Kate Boydell
Kate Boydell was widowed at the age of 33. She felt that her life had lost its purpose and she wanted it to end. But she got through it – and so can everyone. In this down-to-earth, practical, insightful and often humorous guide, Kate draws on her own experience of bereavement to offer frank advice on coping with every aspect of the grieving process.
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, David Kessler
In this remarkable book, Dr. Kubler-Ross first explores the now-famous stages of death: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Through sample interviews and conversations, she gives the reader a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, the professionals who serve that patient, and the patient’s family, bringing hope to all who are involved.
Dr Tony Lake
This self-help guide concentrates on grief after bereavement and describes five tasks to be worked through in order to come to terms with grief, and in wider terms value life more. Specific help is also included for those suffering from grief after sudden loss, suicide, or the death of a child or a parent. The book also offers help for those who know they are dying, both adults and children.
John Adams & Clare Shaw
Tackling the taboo around discussing death, funerals and our wishes for both, this book will guide you through the practical and emotional elements following the death of a loved one. Encouraging people to talk more openly about death and empowering our future generation by starting the conversations now.
John, a funeral director, and Clare, an author, have come together to encourage and support children, families and professionals when planning a funeral. Simple advice, such as who to call when someone dies, alongside guidance for all of the family following a bereavement.
Funeral Guides
Rachel R. Baum
This book is a collection of poetry and prose appropriate for reading at a funeral or memorial service. To assist the reader in finding a suitable passage, the book is divided into eleven chapters. There are tributes for mothers; fathers; children; spouses and soulmates; friends; siblings and other close relatives; soldiers and victims of war or violence; pets; and general readings appropriate for men, women, or any loved one.
Canon Mark Oakley
Readings for Funerals is a perceptive collection of Bible quotations, poems, hymns and prose, offering consolation and comfort to those bereaved.
It helps them to express their thoughts and feelings and make them more confident in planning a funeral service and dealing with clergy.
Neil Astley
This wide-ranging selection combines popular choices of traditional poems read at funerals with powerful poems by contemporary writers more tuned to our present age of doubt and disbelief.
There are poems here for churchgoers and believers, as well as poems for people of all faiths and religions, for agnostics and atheists, and most importantly for those who aren’t sure what they believe, whose grief over loss is the more intense for not knowing what happens to the soul after death.
Charles Cowling
The Good Funeral Guide is the first ever independent consumer guide to the funeral industry. It is for anyone who:
– needs to arrange a funeral for someone now
– has sick or elderly relatives or friends and knows that a funeral is imminent
– wants to find a good funeral director and have some say in the funeral itself
– wants to make future arrangements for their own funeral
– would like to learn about deaths and funerals.
Josefine Speyer, Stephanie Wienrich
More and more people today want to organise at least part of a funeral for themselves, without depending on funeral directors.
The Natural Death Handbook shows you how to do everything from ordering a coffin, to hiring a horse-drawn hearse, to finding a woodland burial ground.
Julia Watson
Poems and Readings for Funerals is a carefully curated collection of the very wisest words about death by some of the world’s greatest poets, thinkers, playwrights and novelists.
Featuring beautifully and thoughtfully written poems, prose extracts and prayers, these readings have been chosen to move and console, sympathize and relieve – to bring everyone attending a funeral or memorial closer together.