Can anyone recommend me extremely sad/depressing books?

Hey guys, does anyone have any books that they would recommend that are extremely emotional/sad/depressing/etc, y'know along the lines of the game Brothers:ATOTS or the anime CLANNAD? That kind of emotional reaction that stays with you long after you've finished it? I've never really read a book that's given me that kind of feeling.

Ive found a few 'lists' online but I'd rather know if you guys have anything worth shouting about?

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is pretty damn upsetting. Its kind of hard to describe the plot, basically an ensemble of characters from lower classes in 1970s India attempt to better their lives and endure various hardships. I read it well over ten years ago and it has stuck with me quite strongly.

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It's a long read but I certainly felt pretty shitty by the end. For something a bit shorter Where the Red Ferns Grow or Of Mice and Men ought to give you what you're after.

Freak the Mighty?

Cormac McCarthy - The Road, Nevil Shute - On the Beach, Mordecai Roshwald - Level 7, Annie Proulx - Brokeback Mountain, Leslie Feinberg - Stone Butch Blues, Toni Morrison - Beloved

Clannad is happy :( Miracles do happen.

Try reading some of Cormac McCarthy's works.

The road

The book Blindsight is, philosophically, an extremely depressing and cynical book in my eyes. It's a sci-fi book that questions a lot of things we as humans take for granted about our selves, and goes some dark places. It's also very interesting and thrilling. Though it's not a book for everyone, it's on the hard scale of hard sci-fi. But it has stuck with me several months after reading it and is probably the piece of media that has touched me the most directly.

Probably not what you were looking for, but I thought I'd throw it out there in case anyone was interested.

1984?

@viper: I love Blindsight, and all of his work that I've read so far. What an amazingly creative writer.

The Idiot is one of my time favourite books. Crime and Punishment is also pretty devastating if you haven't read it.

Ps: God that red line under favourite is making me freak out

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

@pan_satiros: Yeah, I really enjoy his writing style and how serious he is with his science, even going so far as to cite the research papers he used in Echopraxia! I haven't found another author that scratches that itch yet.

I found Flowers for Algernon pretty dang depressing. Also Where the Red Fern Grows.

The Road has a happy ending by Cormac McCarthy standards.

I agree with the Blindsight recommendation. Also, The Kite Runner is one that first came to mind when I saw your question. I had to take a break from reading it a few times because some parts were too much. It's grounded in reality so that makes it even more depressing.

Thanks everyone, been looking into each one of these and trying to decide where to start because they all seem like damn fine suggestions (although I HAVE read 1984 :p). Constructing a reading list as we speak.

Wish I could give individual responses but my phone is being a terrible person!

You should read Elie Wiesel's book, Night. It is about the author's experience with his father in the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald during the Holocaust. The book is a required reading.

@zleunamme: read that in highschool, was pretty good and not long.

The second book in the Malazan Book of the Fallen is called Deadhouse Gates and the ending is the most visceral heart wrenching experience I have ever had reading a book.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I'll admit there are a lot of really high points when some plan succeeds or a character figures something out, but for every one of those there are multiple gut punches, and some of those were enough to actually stop me in my tracks when I was running and listening to it.

I have to concur on The Road.

Filth?

I think many of Cormac McCarthy's books are very dark/depressing and sad to me, but I don't know if they are quite in the way you are going for. They don't kind of pull out the rug so much as never have a rug at all.

Depressing? One of the most depressing books I have ever read was The Fixer by Bernard Malamud. One of my English professors in college did a semester where we pretty much read Malamud and Hemingway. Both can be depressing in their own ways, but my god The Fixer was just another level. The book was pretty much based on what happened to Menahem Mendel Beilis, who was a Jewish man accused of ritual murder in Russia in 1911, although names and details were changed since it was a novel. It is a very good book, but it isn't at all what I would consider easy or happy in any way.

The Bible. Or John Le Carre's 'Our Kind of Traitor'. Not depressing on the whole but the context of the last sentence buries me.

120 days of Sodom by Marquis de Sade

That book put me off reading for good long while.

I very much agree with the suggestions to read The Idiot.

As for other recommendations:

The Sorrows of Young Werther, by Goethe (one of the most depressing things I've ever read)

Naked Lunch, by Burroughs (more of a surrealist story, but still very depressing in a multitude of ways)

Hangover Square, by Hamilton (the ending is beyond bleak)

That made me laugh more than it probably should have.

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky is similarly depressing and has the added benefit of being rather short. A fictional account of a paranoid and cynical shut-in who rejects determinism out of hand and lashes out at his friends, strangers and society around him.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti. Check out the passage Alex reads during the GOTY Day 1 Recap for a taste.

The Temptation to Exist by Emil Cioran. Cioran is possibly history's greatest pessimist, fortunate we are that he was also a very talented writer. This book is at once cosmically depressing and humorous, funny even. A series of philosophical one-liners and essays that aim to skewer our notions of earthly virtue and content. On the Heights of Despair is another of my favourites.

If you're more into Sci-fi read I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. A sci-fi horror story set in the far future where a rogue machine, driven by jealousy, tortures the last of humankind by transforming them into hideous monstrosities

I'll second all the recommendations for Cormac McCarthy (particularly Suttree, The Road, and Blood Meridian). If you like science fiction (particularly "hard sci-fi"), all of Alistair Reynolds's books are very interesting and deeply depressing (because they depict a future where humanity is probably doomed to annihilation by forces beyond its ken). Bonus: his books are obviously the inspiration for much of Mass Effect. I'd start with Revelation Space, but Chasm City's also a pretty good place to start.

A Density of Souls by Christopher Rice fucked me up pretty good. It's definitely not for everyone and it doesn't make any sense for a good 150 pages but it's worth it imo.

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti.

Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto.

When I was younger The Stranger got me good.

Any advanced particle physics book makes me feel sad & depressed.

The local news is basically a depressing book that new ends. Does that count?

I can second a mention that George Orwell's 1984 is a good book, and it definitely made an impression which I enjoyed.

There was a lot of thought to the story, memorable characters and predictions of how society would change, some of which

have been happening for a while.

I haven't looked it up so I don't know if a A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick film) is available as a book, but the film is

dark. Also the film THX-1138 is worth a look if film is an option, it's all about oppressive control and was a film George Lucas

made long before Star Wars. I suspect that's out there in book format.

I'll also say The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates was depressing as fuck.

The Book Thief.

You could try reading the Wheel of Time series and get to the point the original author dies and the replacement guy butchers everything left caring about in it with his awful, awful writing.

Cormac MacCarthy was the first name that popped to my mind as well. The Road is one of the most depressing, harrowing books I've read. Even WITH the ending.

The manga Elfen Lied is bittersweet, dunno about the anime version.

The Road

For fiction, I'd second the nods to Dostoyevsky (I think it was Austin who said on the Beastcast that Notes From The Underground is a great place to start with Dostoyevsky), as well as @southexpected's mention of The Stranger/The Outsider by Albert Camus.

For non-fiction, if you really want to feel like hell, I'd recommend a book written in the late '60s by a British historian, Robert Conquest called The Great Terror. It's about the various purges in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a lot of it covers the well known show trials of people like Kamenev & Zinoviev & Bukharin, but there's also about what happened to less well known people, a lot of normal people. Make sure you get a newer copy, as he has revised it a couple of times since the fall of the USSR & the archives were opened. But current totals suggest that at least 15 million died. It's harrowing, & it only barely touches upon the Holodomor, a man-made famine in the incredibly fertile Ukraine which lead to a lot of deaths. He later wrote a book on that topic but I'm not sure I can face it. So yeah, if you have any interest in history, I'd recommend it, but I'd also note that I was reading it on a train journey once and did start crying in public.

Jeanette Winterson's Written On The Body is pretty wrenching at times; also beautifully written.

This is one of those things where probably it isn't as bad as I remember, but back in school we had to read 'I'm the King of the Castle' by Susan Hill and man... my memory says that was totally messed up.

A story of brutal bullying between young boys under the noses of oblivious and useless parents... and the end builds up a serious twist into gut punch too if I remember rightly. Of course I only remember it as a string of terribleness, so I've no idea about the quality overall.

Naoko by Keigo Higashino. It's a story about a man whose daughter wakes up with his dead wife's conscious. The depressing part comes from the methodical approach of the inevitable, uncomfortable truths as she grows up and how that affects the two of them. This may have been a time and place sort of thing for me, but seeing a relationship violently decompose as the world forces new realities on them left me melancholy for about a week after reading it. As I have said to other people I've recommended it to, you won't feel good, but you'll certainly feel something.

Came to make sure The Stranger by Camus was mentioned, I was not disappointed. I have a friend who proclaimed the other day that he thinks it's impossible for him to not enjoy a book. I recommended The Stranger. My first and likely only foray into existentialism.

Whoever described McCarthey's The Road as harrowing is pretty spot on. It is very intense at parts, but I don't think anyone who is used to all of the post-apocalyptic media of late would find any of the content very surprising or depressing because we've been so desensitized to it.

I don't recall Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky being particularly depressing so to say. The book was required summer reading for my last year of high school, and like any other high schooler I waited until the last week of summer to get started. The only thing I can recall about the book is that it's about a guy in a depressed guilt-ridden fever dream, and that I felt like I was inducing my own fever dream by forcing myself to read it in less than a week. But hey, maybe that's where the genius lies? I'm not an avid novel reader myself, and I haven't read any other Dostoyevsky. Maybe someone with more literary expertise could further deconstruct this, I study science for a living so I'm a bit out of my league here.

The first few books that pop into my head as leaving me with some lingering sad/depressing feelings are The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. Maybe also Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco?

Oh, also I just bought a book called Nagasaki by Susan Southard, and I suppose you can see from the title that the book is likely to be depressing as fuck.

@viper: I was not expecting to see someone recommend Blindsight in this particular book recommendation thread but I'm someone who has mentioned Blindsight in most of the book recommendation threads I've responded to over the years since I read it so seeing it pop up pleases me. Though I don't think it really fits what this person was asking for, I can see where you're coming from with your explanation for why you brought it up.

Killing Hope by William Blum.

Slaughterhouse 5 is hilarious! Also very depressing and sad.