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Reading List · LonelinessThe Best Books About Loneliness
Loneliness is the gap between the connection people have and the connection they want, and it can be felt in a crowded city as much as in an empty house. Public health officials now treat it as a health risk, while novelists have written about it for as long as there have been novels. People read about loneliness to understand their own experience, to support someone else, or simply to feel less alone with it.
This list mixes fiction and non-fiction roughly half and half. The novels follow people living through isolation, from a Glasgow office worker to a robot companion. The non-fiction covers the research, the social causes and the personal side, from a psychologist’s studies to an essay on art and solitude in New York.
Thirteen books about Loneliness
The Lonely City
Olivia Laing · 2016
Subtitled Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, the book began when Laing was living alone in New York after a relationship ended. She combines that experience with chapters on artists whose work was shaped by loneliness, among them Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz and Henry Darger.
Laing also looks at the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York and at loneliness online. The result is part memoir, part art criticism, and it treats loneliness as something to look at closely rather than only something to escape.
Read it if you want a thoughtful essay that connects personal loneliness with art and city life.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman · 2017
Eleanor Oliphant is a 29-year-old finance clerk at a Glasgow design company. She has no friends, spends her weekends alone and insists she is fine. When she and a new colleague, Raymond, help an elderly man who collapses in the street, an unlikely friendship begins to open up her life and her past.
The novel describes everyday loneliness plainly, and Honeyman treats Eleanor with humour and sympathy rather than pity. It won the 2017 Costa Debut Novel Award and was named overall Book of the Year at the 2018 British Book Awards.
Read it if you want a warm, contemporary novel about loneliness and slowly finding connection.
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke · 1929
Ten letters Rilke wrote between 1902 and 1908 to Franz Xaver Kappus, a young military academy student who had sent him his poems for criticism. Kappus published them after Rilke’s death. Rilke says little about technique and a great deal about solitude, patience and looking inward.
Rilke does not treat solitude as a problem to be fixed but as something to accept and learn from, which makes the letters a gentle counterweight to the research books on this list. They are short enough to read in an evening.
Read it if you want a short, reflective book about learning to live with solitude.
Read my full recommendation →Together
Vivek H. Murthy · 2020
Published in April 2020 under the full title Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World, the book is by Vivek Murthy, a physician who served two terms as US Surgeon General. He argues that loneliness is a serious public health risk linked to conditions such as heart disease and poor mental health.
Murthy draws on his clinical experience and on examples of community groups that bring people together. In 2023, as Surgeon General, he went on to describe loneliness and isolation as a health risk comparable to smoking.
Read it if you want an accessible, practical book on why connection matters for health.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers · 1940
McCullers was 23 when this novel was published. In a 1930s Georgia mill town, John Singer, a deaf man, takes a room in the Kelly household after his closest friend is sent to an asylum. Several townspeople, including the music-loving teenager Mick Kelly and a Black physician, Dr Copeland, start confiding in him.
Each visitor projects their own hopes onto Singer, while he remains isolated himself. It ranked 17th on the Modern Library’s list of the best English-language novels of the 20th century and was filmed in 1968 with Alan Arkin.
Read it if you want a classic American novel about people longing to be understood.
The Anxious Generation
Jonathan Haidt · 2024
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the spread of smartphones and social media around 2010, combined with overprotective parenting, replaced a play-based childhood with a phone-based one and contributed to rising anxiety and depression among young people. He proposes phone-free schools, later access to social media and more unsupervised play.
Haidt points to a steep fall in the time teenagers spend with friends in person and names social deprivation as one of the main harms of social media. His conclusions are debated by other researchers, but the book is central to current discussions of youth isolation.
Read it if you want to understand the debate about smartphones and loneliness among young people.
Read my full recommendation →Convenience Store Woman
Sayaka Murata · 2016
Keiko Furukura is 36 and has worked part-time in the same Tokyo convenience store for 18 years. The store’s rules and scripts give her a way of fitting in, but family and friends keep pressing her to find a proper career or a husband. When an awkward new colleague, Shiraha, is fired, she proposes a marriage of convenience.
The novel looks at a different side of loneliness: the isolation of not fitting the life others expect. It won Japan’s Akutagawa Prize in 2016 and appeared in English in 2018, translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori.
Read it if you want a short, deadpan novel about being out of step with everyone around you.
Loneliness
John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick · 2008
The full title is Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection. University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo, writing with William Patrick, sets out his research on what chronic loneliness does to people, linking it to poorer health, depression and anger.
The book also describes how loneliness affects the way people read social situations, making it harder to trust others. It is one of the most frequently cited books on the subject and a good foundation before more recent titles.
Read it if you want to understand what research says about loneliness and the body and mind.
Stoner
John Williams · 1965
William Stoner, born on a Missouri farm in 1891, goes to the University of Missouri to study agriculture, discovers literature and becomes an English professor. His marriage to Edith is cold, a feud with a colleague damages his career, and a late love affair ends under pressure.
The novel follows a largely solitary life with great restraint. It sold poorly at first, was reissued by New York Review Books Classics in 2006 and became a bestseller across Europe, winning Waterstones Book of the Year in 2013.
Read it if you want a quiet, unhurried novel about an inward and often isolated life.
Strange Weather in Tokyo
Hiromi Kawakami · 2001
Tsukiko, an office worker in her thirties, runs into her former high school teacher, whom she still calls Sensei, at a neighbourhood izakaya in Tokyo. Their chance meetings over food and drink slowly turn into a companionship and then a tentative romance.
The Japanese original won the Tanizaki Prize in 2001. Allison Markin Powell’s translation was first published in English as The Briefcase in 2012, shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and reissued under its current title in 2017.
Read it if you want a gentle, understated novel about two solitary people finding company.
Bowling Alone
Robert D. Putnam · 2000
Expanded from a 1995 essay in the Journal of Democracy, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community argues that Americans’ in-person ties and civic involvement declined from the 1950s onwards. The title refers to bowling: more people bowled, but fewer did so in leagues.
Putnam weighs causes such as suburban sprawl, time pressure, television and generational change. The book popularised the idea of social capital and remains a standard reference on the social roots of loneliness.
Read it if you want the bigger social picture behind why people feel less connected.
Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro · 2021
Klara is a solar-powered Artificial Friend who watches the world from a shop window until she is chosen by Josie, a sickly 14-year-old living with her mother in a remote house. Klara believes the Sun can heal living things and sets out to help Josie recover.
The novel imagines a future in which children are schooled at home and companionship can be bought, and asks what love and loyalty mean in that world. It was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, and a film adaptation directed by Taika Waititi has been announced.
Read it if you want a quiet speculative novel about companionship and what it means to care for someone.
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman · 2012
Ove is a 59-year-old widower in Sweden who has been pushed out of his job and is grieving his wife, Sonja. His plans to end his life keep being interrupted by his new neighbours, especially Parvaneh and her family. Flashbacks fill in his past and his marriage. Henning Koch translated it into English.
The novel shows how isolation after loss can be eased by persistent, everyday kindness. It was filmed in Sweden in 2015, earning two Academy Award nominations, and remade in English as A Man Called Otto (2022) with Tom Hanks.
Read it if you want a funny and moving novel about grief, loneliness and unexpected friendship.
Which book should you read first?
The best starting point depends on what you want from a book.
- For a warm novel to start with — Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman (2017)
- For the science of loneliness — Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick (2008)
- For loneliness in the big city — The Lonely City by Olivia Laing (2016)
- For young people and smartphones — The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt (2024)
- For grief and unexpected friendship — A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman (2012)
- For a short, reflective read on solitude — Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (1929)
Where to go next
Frequently asked questions
What is the best book about loneliness?
It depends on what you are looking for. The Lonely City by Olivia Laing is a widely read personal essay on the subject, while Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is one of the best-known recent novels about it.
What are good novels about loneliness?
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Stoner, A Man Called Ove and Strange Weather in Tokyo all follow characters living with isolation, in very different settings and tones.
Which non-fiction books explain loneliness?
Loneliness by John Cacioppo and William Patrick covers the psychology research, Together by Vivek Murthy frames it as a public health issue, and Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam looks at the decline of community life.
Is there a book about loneliness and social media?
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt argues that smartphones and social media have reduced the time young people spend with friends in person. Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City also has a section on loneliness online.
Are there uplifting books about loneliness?
A Man Called Ove and Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine both deal with isolation but move towards connection and friendship, and both mix humour with sadness.
What is a short book about solitude?
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is a set of ten letters that can be read in an evening and treats solitude as something to accept rather than fear. Convenience Store Woman is also a short novel.
Pick the book that answers the question you are asking right now. The rest of the list will still be here when you are ready for the next one.
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