All the feelings: Great books that will make you cry

There’s something deeply cathartic about reading a truly moving book – whether it’s the slow release of repressed emotion that culminates in a flood of tears by the book’s end, or the sharp stab of a single beautiful line that suddenly has you welling up out of nowhere.

For those looking to be buried in an avalanche of feelings (and watching Game of Thrones or Avengers: Endgame wasn’t enough for you), here are a few books to get you started. But be warned: read with a box of tissues.


Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

This World War II young adult novel about best friends Julie (a spy, code name: Verity, captured by the Gestapo while on a mission in occupied France) and Maddie (a pilot and determined to save her friend) is an underrated gem: the narrative Wein plots is ingenious and unpredictable, and fiendish in how precisely charted it is, while the beauty of the supportive relationship between the two best friends soars. Of course, being a World War II story, there’s tragedy and heartbreak along the way.

Wein, who has a pilot’s license, is also particularly great on the details of life as a young woman during wartime England, bringing these two characters and the cast that surrounds them to vivid life. This is truly one of those young adult novels that could be appreciated and loved by readers of any age.


Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman

Call Me By Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blooms between seventeen-year-old Elio and his father’s house guest Oliver during a restless summer on the Italian Riviera. Luminous like the shimmering play of light on water, this is an indelible depiction of the transcendent nature of first love, and the pain of heartache. There’s a reason the film adaptation had the characters practically recite some of the book’s passages word for word – Aciman’s ability to shape the deafening roar of heartbreak into something meaningful and wise will strike at your heart. For readers who want more, Aciman has announced a sequel focused on Elio’s adult life (Find Me) to be released in October.


Insomniac City: New York, Oliver Sacks, and Me by Bill Hayes

A moving celebration of what Bill Hayes calls the evanescent, the eavesdropped, the unexpected of life in New York City, and an intimate glimpse of his relationship with the late neurologist Oliver Sacks. Romantic, heartfelt and quietly funny, Hayes here recounts his experience of falling in love for the first time at age seventy-five and of facing illness and death (Sacks died of cancer in August 2015), all against the backdrop of the incessant rhythms and small daily surprises of New York City life. Our managing director Mark Rubbo said of this book 2017: ‘I’m not easily moved to tears but one simple line in the book’s final pages caught me up short, gasping, fighting back tears.’


Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

If you search on the internet for lists of books that make you cry, children’s classics feature heavily – perhaps because we remember those first books that moved us to tears more keenly than any others (Charlotte’s Web, Anne of Green Gables, and so on).

Louisa May Alcott’s story of the four March sisters is enduring because of how believable they still feel and the realism that grounds their behaviour: the love and pettiness of sibling relationships, the infectious fun of childhood imagination and the bittersweet ache of growing up. Like so many classics with distinctive casts, readers tend to map themselves onto each of the sisters: practical Meg, ambitious Jo, bratty Amy. But it’s sweet Beth who really tugs at the heartstrings – and her story has driven so many to tears, from Friends’ Joey Tribbiani to The Simpsons’ Moe Szyslak.


Too Much Lip by Melissa Lucashenko

Melissa Lucashenko’s Stella Prize-shortlisted novel has been praised for so many things: for its dark ribald humour, for its sharp dialogue, its deft and sensitive handling of complex issues and power dynamics. What doesn’t get as much focus is the book’s ability to sneak up on you as a moving portrait of healing/facing inter-generational trauma. Throughout this book, you come to realise all the characters are carrying different kinds of traumatic pasts – some buried and hidden and some inherited from the 200 years of colonial violence inherent in Australian history. The cathartic flood that eventuates is a stunning narrative moment to experience and Lucashenko imbues it with clear-eyed compassion.


The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Madleine Miller’s retelling of the Iliad from Patroclus’ point of view won the 2012 Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for fiction). Miller is incredibly talented at weaving mythic stories into something that feels relevant to the contemporary reader. In The Song of Achilles, we follow Patroclus and Achilles as they grow from boys into men into key figures in the Greeks’ campaign against Troy. We experience their difficulty navigating a complex landscape of Gods, duty, heroic glory, prophecy and, ultimately, love, and become invested in the tender strength of their connection. Part of the tragedy here is that we know how it will end for the two characters (badly) but Miller never ventures anywhere maudlin with her story. Instead, the book’s vivid emotional resonance brings these classic figures to life.


Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis

Connie Willis’ two-volume science-fiction/historical epic is a tribute to the everyday bravery of British civilians during World War II. Set in the same world as her other novels, Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog, where the university Oxford has access to time-travel technology that lets its students careen throughout history, this stunning two-parter marries the intricate mechanics of time paradoxes to the gritty – and dangerous – realities of human history. Focused on three students who become stuck in the war when their portals back to Oxford close, it is a moving, exquisitely detailed portrait of a world under siege and dominated by chaos.


A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life details the lives of four college graduates in New York for over thirty years: kind, handsome Willem; quick-witted and sometimes cruel painter JB; Malcolm, a frustrated architect; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their centre of gravity. Jude is the focus of this novel: by midlife, he is a terrifyingly talented litigator but also an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood. Yanagihara’s acclaimed novel has been divisive for its depiction of suffering, but readers who love it, love it utterly and are deeply enthralled by these characters for the entire duration of this 800-page epic. As our bookseller Annie Condon notes, ‘by the conclusion I felt that I’d befriended, and lived every moment with these exceptional men.’


The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui

Drawing on the stories of her family, who fled war-torn Vietnam for refuge in the United States, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do is an evocative memoir about the search for a better future and a longing for the past. Weaving together the oral testimony of family members and her own extensive research, Bui’s book excavates the hidden histories of immigrant families and what unspoken things – both real and intangible – get left behind. No matter what your background is, this critically acclaimed and beautifully illustrated emotional story serves as a reminder of the sacrifices generations in the past have made and the need to better understand our parents to fully understand ourselves.


Dying: A Memoir by Cory Taylor

Queensland author Cory Taylor wrote this remarkable book in the space of a few weeks before her death from cancer in July 2016. In a tremendous creative surge, as her body weakened, she described the experience of knowing she would soon die. Taylor’s words as she reflects on her family, her memories and her body are powerful in how clear-sighted they are – you can feel the urgency and immediacy of her writing: ‘while my body is careering towards catastrophe, my mind is elsewhere, concentrated on this other, vital task, which is to tell you something meaningful before I go.’ This is a deeply affecting meditation on dying and a lyrical insight into the mind of and insightful and wonderful writer.


For more recommended tearjerkers, look to our annual round-ups of books that made Readings staff members cry here, here and here.