The Books My Clients Keep Coming Back To

Books can be enjoyable, pleasurable even or they can make you want to shout the title out from the rooftops and tell everyone you know about them. However more often than not - these are not the books that my clients find themselves returning to. These are never the books stayed with them. The ones that you pick up again in the dark at 2am, or reach for on the anniversary of something difficult, or re-read precisely because they remember it so well.

These answers have taught me more about bibliotherapy than any clinical training ever could. Over the last seven years that I have been running my bibliotherapy practice, I have noticed remarkable patterns. Certain books appear again and again on the physical (or mental) shelves of my clients’ inner lives because they do something extraordinary: they create a space for self-exploration, holding a mirror or a window or even a door into something insightful. That is, they hold. They hold grief, anxiety, loneliness. And then, they return something - something essential to the person who reads them: the sense of being recognised.

This article is essentially a reflection on why certain books keep calling people back, and what that tells us about the healing power of literature.

Grief is something every one of us will encounter. We grieve the end of relationships, the loss of work that once defined us, children growing older, homes we have left behind, versions of ourselves we can no longer return to. It is no surprise, then, that grief is one of the most common reasons people seek bibliotherapy.

The books I often suggest explore the experiences that grief plunges us in - the way time collapses and stretches simultaneously; the surreal experience of standing in a supermarket while the world carries on as though nothing monumental has happened; the absurdity of making tea or answering emails when your entire internal landscape has been altered. They acknowledge that grief can make us feel completely numb. Literature allows these contradictions to exist side by side without trying to resolve them.

That specificity is often what brings relief. When a reader encounters an experience they have never been able to articulate rendered precisely on the page, something shifts. The isolation that grief brings starts to lift. The book enables us to pay self-witness to this.

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking is perhaps the book I recommend most often after bereavement. It captures not simply sadness but the bewildering logic of grief. The irrational belief that a loved one might somehow return, the impossible negotiations we conduct with ourselves, the way memory contradicts, oscillating between refuge and torment. Likewise C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed remains another powerful choice for readers with its exploration of all the emotions that grief triggers in us: anger, confusion, doubt and contradictions.

For readers who prefer fiction, Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea gently explores grief alongside uncertainty and change, while Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (for readers briefed and prepared for its emotional intensity) demonstrates the enduring impact of cumulative loss. For those wanting something quieter, Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy shows us how to hold grief in our every day lives, finding a way to live alongside it.

What strikes me just as much is when clients return to these books. Rarely is it in the immediate aftermath of loss. Often months or years have passed before they feel able to read them. A memoir when first suggested to a client might feel unbearable, triggering but may later become comforting, and then a key book on a client’s bookshelf, and sometimes it is simply the proximity to it that is comforting in itself.

Perhaps surprisingly, anxious clients most often return to literary fiction and memoir rather than self-help. They are drawn to books that capture the texture of anxious experience from the inside: the relentless inner monologue, the hypervigilance, the way anxiety disguises itself as logic or problem-solving. Character-driven fiction allows readers to inhabit another mind while recognising their own, creating a profound sense of emotional regulation through recognition rather than reassurance.

These books tend to be deeply regulating from an emotional perspective. The resonance we feel with the character, the self-reflection it brings up and the connection with our own emotions of anxiety is relieving. And literary fiction and memoir are brilliant at creating this experience for the reader.