Loneliness

The Lonely City

Olivia Laing · 2016

Laing spent a solitary year in New York and turned it into one of the most beautiful books about urban loneliness ever written — part memoir, part art criticism, woven through the lives of Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, all of whom made art from aloneness. For any reader who has felt most alone in a crowd, Laing is extraordinary company.

Party of One

Anneli Rufus · 2003

Rufus writes specifically about loners — people who genuinely prefer solitude, who are not lonely but are misunderstood to be — and in doing so provides a generous reframe for anyone whose natural introversion has been treated as a problem. For readers who are lonely partly because the world keeps insisting they should want more connection than they do, this book is a permission slip.

How to Be Alone

Sara Maitland · 2014

Maitland, who has lived deliberately in solitude for years, makes a positive case for aloneness as a practice — something to learn, to inhabit well, to choose rather than merely endure. For readers whose loneliness has shifted into something more complex, or who want to make peace with necessary solitude, Maitland is thoughtful and practical in equal measure.

Wuthering Heights

Emily Brontë · 1847

Brontë’s only novel is, among everything else it is, a study in the loneliness that comes from loving too much and too ferociously for the world around you to contain. Heathcliff and Catherine are not simply romantic figures — they are people whose inner lives outstrip their circumstances, and whose loneliness is the measure of their depth. For readers who feel they simply belong somewhere else, Brontë understands.

Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro · 2005

Three friends grow up in a quietly sinister boarding school, and the novel follows what happens when they gradually understand what they are — and how few people in the world will ever really see them. Ishiguro writes a specific kind of loneliness here: the loneliness of people who have never quite been allowed to matter, who carry the knowledge of their own invisibility with heartbreaking calm.

The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

Gabrielle Zevin · 2014

A widowed bookseller on a small island has narrowed his life down to almost nothing, and then a parcel is left in his shop and everything slowly widens again. Zevin is gentle about how loneliness hardens into habit, and how it softens: not through some grand rescue, but through a handful of people who keep turning up.