Suggest me a book to gift to a friend. They are an active reader, so something not super well known! They also prefer dark, depressing or devastating books. Some they have recommended to me include: The School for Good Mothers, In Memoriam, and To Paradise. Also recently recommended Flashlight which I haven’t read yet. Would like to surprise her with a new favorite! Thanks!
by Free_Newspaper_7435
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A year of magical thinking by Joan Didion was heart wrenching true account of her husband passing away.
The Vanishing half is a good one!
The Berry Pickers
A Little Life?
Deadkidsongs by Toby Litt.
The winter king by Bernard cornwell first book in the warlord chronicles trilogy. It’s historical fiction, it follows an elderly monk retelling the story of Arthur and his part in the tale.
“ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land that was called Britain, these things happened. Bishop Sansum, whom God must bless above all the saints living and dead, says these memories should be cast into the bottomless pit with all the other filth of fallen mankind, for these are the tales of the last days before the great darkness descended on the light of our Lord Jesus Christ. These are the tales of the land we call Lloegyr, which means the Lost Lands, the country that was once ours but which our enemies now call England. These are the tales of Arthur, the Warlord, the King that Never Was, the Enemy of God and, may the living Christ and Bishop Sansum forgive me, the best man I ever knew. How I have wept for Arthur.”
“But fate, as Merlin always taught us, is inexorable. Life is a jest of the Gods, Merlin liked to claim, and there is no justice. You must learn to laugh, he once told me, or else you’ll just weep yourself to death.”
“IGRAINE IS UNHAPPY. She wants tales of Arthur’s childhood.
She has heard of a sword in the stone and wants me to write of it. She tells me he was sired by a spirit on a queen and that the skies were filled with thunder on the night of his birth and maybe she is right and the skies were noisy that night, but everyone I ever talked to slept through it, and as for the sword in the stone, well, there was a sword and there was a stone, but their place in the tale is still far ahead.”