What do you think are the saddest scenes/passages in literature? *General spoiler alert*

[QuimReaper]

For me, it's either:

• Lyra leafing Pantalaimon on the shore in The Amber Spyglass
• Will leaving to go back to his awful mother in Goodnight Mr Tom

Makes me tear up just thinking about either. What's yours?

Quotes would be much appreciated, even though I was too lazy to look any up!

(This thread will probably contain assorted spoilers, don't read on if you're going to complain about them )

There was one I read and her husband was a journalist and was going to Canary Wharf. There was an explosion and she called his office to check if he was ok. They told her he had changed appointments so wasn’t at Canary Wharf. The line was something along the lines of ‘as she sat in her chair she was exhausted, her eyes dropped and she thought ‘husbands name was really late tonight’...’ you can guess the rest.

There's a beautiful book called "The Snow Goose" by Paul Gallico. The final scene where Fritha is calling out to Philip, who has perished at Dunkirk, is heart-breaking.

"God speed ye, Philip!"

For me these threads always remind me of a passage in Tarka the Otter. Tarka had a cub with an elderly female called Greymuzzle; she gave birth during a really hard winter, and couldn't find enough food to feed the cub.

Much later on in the book, Tarka "...hunted the brackish waters until the stars were dimmed by dawn, when he pressed through the reeds by a way he had trodden before, but forgotten, and slept on an old couch where lay bones, and a little skull."

"And she quickly struck the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother with her. And the matches burned with such a glow that it became brighter than daylight. Grandmother had never been so grand and beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and both of them flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor fear-they were with God."
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Screamingvalenta* absolutely! Ds has this as a reading book from school- I sobbed for ages!

Am I the only one completely unmoved by anything written by either Hardy or Elliot? Helen’s death in Jane Eyre and Beth might not rank as my most emotive passages, but I still think they’re moving and see why others might find them more so. But despite numerous attempts I just find Hardy spoils an otherwise good book with a parody of depressive gloom at some point. Elliots I just think of as ott sentimental claptrap, but I’ll admit I don’t think much of any of her books to start with. And I accept I might get lynched by fans!

Another is the dog killed at the beginning of the dead zone. And the end of rabbit proof fence just when you think she was the exception with a relatively happy ending and then you learn about her children being taken.

Definitely Atonement. Did not see that coming and I sat in the bright sunshine in my garden sobbing.

Also in Star Wars when Han and Leia's youngest son die. But I'm a bit of a geek. But it is heart breaking.

@Trainspotting, I love Hardy, but some of the misery is so over the top I find it comical — ‘Done because we were too menny’ cracks me up. I love George Eliot too, but don’t find any of her writing particularly sad. And the death of Bronte’s Helen Burns leaves me cold. It’s like the death of a ten year old Early Stoic, all resignation and speeches. I know she was based on CB’s precocious elder sister who died at Cowan Bridge, but she’s pretty insufferable.

glorious thanks for answering. That’s exactly how I feel about Hardy, scenes that might have been emotional become comedy because it’s laid on too thick.

With Helen it’s more that Jane’s behaviour spoils the scene for me, wanting comfort when it’s Helen dying. Again though I’m probably biased because I’ve always found Jane too keen to relish the role of pious martyr. Huge tribute to CB’s writing that I can still love the book despite feeling no empathy or liking for the central character, or even interest in what happens to her when usually that’s integral.

I was inconsolable at the ending of handling the undead

Which was a bit of a shame as i was on Weymouth beach at the time

The entire family had to be uprooted so we could find me another book to take my mind off it

And doras eggs

Which is a toddler book

But i cried every time i read it...had to hold it together with a trembling lip til i was out of the children’s bedroom

There’s a children’s book called Once There Were Giants......

@TrainspottingWelsh, no, I think you're right that Jane Eyre is both a gloriously stubborn insister on her own value, and also something of a self-righteous martyr. I see the latter more clearly as I get older, while it's still a novel I love -- it comes out in her relationships with other women who don't share her absolute standards, like the unfortunate Blanche Ingram, groomed for the marriage market and getting slightly long in the tooth and desperate. She's as powerless as Jane in many ways, but gets no sympathy from her...

I have sat and cried through most of this thread! The end of The Mayor of Casterbridge is so bleak. It didn't help that I was going through a particularly bad time when I read it: " happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain".

I think I cried on almost every page of The Book Thief: "I am haunted by humans".

I read The Colour Purple when I was at university, and sobbed and sobbed when Celie realises Shug has a lover: "My heart broke. Shug love somebody else"

I wish people wouldn’t keep mentioning The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas on these threads, though. It’s manipulative schlock which does a gross disservice to the people actually murdered at Auschwitz.

Absolutely agree with this. Awful book.

Glad to hear of another person who knows of Rabbit-Proof Fence!

Talking of toddler's books Giraffes Can't Dance and Stick Man both make me well up in an entirely embarrassing fashion.

The end of “The Paper Dolls” where the daughter makes paper dolls with her child.

Watership Down:

“ My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”

glorious yy, she lives in anticipation of everyone noticing how victimised poor perfect Jane is. Yes her life is grim at times but she seems to expect others to sympathise with her lot even when they aren’t any luckier. Eg the standing on the chair scene and follow up at Lowood when she wants/ needs other pupils to acknowledge she is particularly to be pitied when they’re all in the same circumstances.

piggy yy, so nice to hear of someone that doesn’t assume you mean the film!

I loved a Rabbit Proof Fence.

Also a kids book 'The Blessing Seed'. I have to do breathing exercises when I read it to my kids to stop myself sobbing.

Stick Man makes me well up because I read it to all of my DC, my eldest three are a little too old for it now so I read it to my youngest who is the last DC and then I'll probably not read it ever again.

Which reminds me. The Poisonwood Bible, the passage about the last child:

"A first child is your own best foot forward, and how you do cheer those little feet as they strike out. You examine every turn of flesh for precocity, and crow it to the world. But the last one: the baby who trails her scent like a flag of surrender through your life when there will be no more coming after--oh, that' s love by a different name. She is the babe you hold in your arms for an hour after she's gone to sleep. If you put her down in the crib, she might wake up changed and fly away. So instead you rock by the window, drinking the light from her skin, breathing her exhaled dreams. Your heart bays to the double crescent moons of closed lashes on her cheeks. She's the one you can't put down."

Ruth's death

‘The Confession’ by John Grisham got to me quite badly, its basically about an innocent man on death row coming up for execution when the real killer confesses. Despite the confession the incarcerated man is executed and there’s a heartbreaking passage where his mum washes his body and dresses him for burial. I howled my eyes out and I’ve never been able to forget it.

Most of ‘A Quiet Belief In Angels’ is dark and depressing but the bit where the child’s mutilated body is found was particularly awful.

The bit in Northern Lights when Lyra finds a little boy called Tony in a hut in the middle of nowhere, whose daemon Ratter has been cut away from him and he's holding a dried fish instead and talking to it.

Beth dying in little women and Sara crewe losing her father in a little princess.

I think it is a Maggie O'Farrell book (if not then Kate Atkinson) where a mum is swimming in the sea and gets into trouble and can see her child on the beach getting smaller and knowing she is going to die. This stuck with me for such a long time.

The first book I cried and cried at was Watership Down. Then some Maeve Binchy - Light A Penny Candle and The Copper Beech.

I still have my copy of When Marnie Was There and started rereading it recently. It was an old copy sold off by the library.