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Books Written by
Nick Cave has spent five decades as a musician first, but writing has run alongside the music from the start — violent, Gothic prose in the 1980s, a Southern gothic novel about a preacher’s son, a black comedy about a failed salesman, and, most recently, a book-length conversation that turned public grief into something readers could sit inside without flinching. In July 2015, his fifteen-year-old son Arthur died after an accidental fall near their home in Brighton. In May 2022, his eldest son Jethro died as well. Cave has written and spoken about both losses with unusual directness, most fully in Faith, Hope and Carnage, published later that year. He continues to write his newsletter The Red Hand Files, answering questions from fans directly, often about grief, faith, and what survives it.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Memoir & Fiction · Grief · Memoirs & Biographies · Spirituality · Non-Fiction · Updated July 2026
Lyrics & Prose
King Ink
A collection gathering Cave’s song lyrics, scripts, and prose pieces from his early career with The Birthday Party and the first years of the Bad Seeds, along with short fiction reflecting the same violent, Gothic, Old Testament-inflected imagery that defined his music at the time.
Useful mainly as a document of Cave’s earliest written voice, before And the Ass Saw the Angel gave that voice a sustained narrative to live inside.
NovelCore book
And the Ass Saw the Angel
A Southern Gothic novel set in a fictional, isolated religious community, following Euchrid Eucrow, a mute outcast convinced he has been chosen to bring divine judgment on the town that has always despised him. Written in a dense, biblical, densely allusive prose style, it took Cave several years to complete, reportedly while he was struggling with heroin addiction.
His first and most ambitious novel, and the clearest bridge between his music and his prose — the same violent, sermon-like intensity that runs through Birthday Party and early Bad Seeds records, sustained across an entire book.
Lyrics & Prose
King Ink II
An expanded follow-up to King Ink, collecting additional lyrics, scripts, and prose from the years following the first volume, covering the Bad Seeds’ more expansive, ballad-oriented period in the 1990s.
A companion to the first King Ink rather than a standalone read — useful primarily for readers already tracking his lyrical development across specific albums and eras.
Novel
The Death of Bunny Munro
A darkly comic novel following Bunny Munro, a compulsively philandering door-to-door cosmetics salesman, on a chaotic road trip along the English south coast with his young son after his wife’s suicide, spiraling toward his own collapse.
A sharp tonal departure from the biblical intensity of And the Ass Saw the Angel — funnier, more contemporary, and more interested in a specific kind of male self-destruction than in religious judgment.
Poem · Tour Diary
The Sick Bag Song
A book-length poem composed on airsickness bags during the Bad Seeds’ 2014 North American tour, mixing tour-diary observation with reflections on memory, mortality, and the strange repetitive rhythm of life on the road.
His most formally unusual book — written literally on the material it describes, and a useful bridge between his song lyrics and the longer, more reflective prose that would follow after 2015.
Art & Archive
Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Bible
A companion volume to the Stranger Than Kindness exhibition of Cave’s personal archive, gathering handwritten lyrics, notebooks, artwork, and personal ephemera spanning his entire career, with accompanying essays situating the material in the context of his life and work.
The closest thing to a visual and archival memoir in his bibliography — useful for readers who want to see the raw material his songs and books were built from, rather than a narrative account.
Memoir · ConversationsCore book
Faith, Hope and Carnage
Compiled from more than forty hours of conversation between Cave and journalist Seán O’Hagan, recorded during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, this book moves through Cave’s addiction, his creative process, his evolving relationship to faith, and above all his grief following the 2015 death of his son Arthur. His eldest son, Jethro, died as the book was going to print.
Cave has said the extended interview format let him avoid the usual rock-memoir patter and get to something more essential. It is unusually direct about grief without becoming either self-pitying or falsely redemptive — a rare document of someone thinking in real time about loss rather than after the fact.
Where to start with Nick Cave
If you have never read him
→ Start with Faith, Hope and Carnage. It’s his most recent, most accessible book, and the conversational format makes it an easy entry point even if you’ve never read his fiction.
If you want his fiction
→ And the Ass Saw the Angel is his most ambitious novel; The Death of Bunny Munro is shorter, funnier, and more contemporary.
If you’re specifically interested in how he writes about grief
→ Faith, Hope and Carnage is the fullest treatment, but The Sick Bag Song shows an earlier, more oblique version of the same reflective instinct.
If loss and grief are what brought you here
→ My books about grief list has more writers working through the same territory.
If it’s the faith and spirituality angle you want more of
→ My books on spirituality reading list has more in that register.
Looking for what else I recommend
→ Every book I’ve personally reviewed lives on my bookshelf.
Frequently asked questions about Nick Cave’s books
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