Isolation

Stoner

John Williams · 1965

Williams’s rediscovered masterpiece follows a man whose inner life is far richer than anyone around him ever notices. Stoner is profoundly isolated — in his marriage, his work, his institution — and yet Williams writes him with such quiet dignity that the novel becomes, paradoxically, one of the most companionable books ever written. For isolated readers, meeting Stoner is itself a kind of company.

The Old Man and the Sea

Ernest Hemingway · 1952

Santiago is eighty-four days without a catch, alone on the sea, in a battle with a fish no one will ever witness. Hemingway’s novella is a study in what a person can contain when there is no one left to share it with — and of the dignity available even in total aloneness. For readers whose isolation feels like a test, Santiago has passed harder ones.

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles · 2016

Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel and confined there for decades. What Towles makes of this enforced isolation is unexpectedly joyful — a meditation on how richly a life can be lived within constraints, and how connection finds its way through even the most unlikely circumstances. For readers who feel trapped by their isolation, Rostov is gently instructive.

The Plague

Albert Camus · 1947

Camus wrote his novel about a city quarantined by plague partly as an allegory for occupation, but it is also the most searching examination in literature of what isolation does to people over time — and of how solidarity can emerge within it, quietly, person by person, without announcement. For readers whose isolation has lasted long enough to feel normal, Camus maps the way back.

Robinson Crusoe

Daniel Defoe · 1719

Marooned alone on an island for twenty-eight years, Crusoe does the thing isolation eventually demands of everyone — he builds a life anyway, out of whatever is at hand. Defoe’s novel is the origin story of survival-through-isolation in Western fiction, and it remains oddly steadying: proof that a mind can furnish its own company, given time.

Life of Pi

Yann Martel · 2001

Adrift on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger for two hundred and twenty-seven days, Pi survives his isolation partly through story — the tales he tells himself about what is happening to him. Martel’s novel is a reminder that the mind an isolated person keeps them company with is not a small thing; it can be the difference between drowning and staying afloat.

Together

Vivek H. Murthy · 2020

The former US Surgeon General makes the case that isolation is a health crisis rather than a personal failing, with the physiological evidence to back it. Useful if part of what you are carrying is the sense that being alone this much says something shameful about you. It mostly says something about how we now live.

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Sebastian Junger · 2016

Junger asks why some veterans miss the war, and arrives somewhere unexpected: modern life has made us prosperous and profoundly separate. A short, argumentative book about what we lost when we stopped needing each other daily, and why isolation can feel wrong in the body even when nothing is wrong with your life.