what book did you engage with so much that it made you cry?

[BBBee]

sometimes you feel like the author is tugging at your heart strings for no reason and then other times they just really get you.

Gone With The Wind, Jodi Picoult's My Sister's Keeper and The Time Traveller's Wife, for starters.

I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb

Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult

Fallen Angels by Tracey Chevalier

Don't often blub, but these did touch me right down inside

The last Harry Potter (the fight scene at the castle)

thanks for the warning about Call the Midwife - as I've just started reading this on train journeys!

Mill On The Floss always dos it for me. Faked coughing fit at school in Eng Lit for the last page as knew I'd blub.

Kids books are bad too - even the cover of Goodbye Mog gets me (and have just had shiver down spine) - I've never dared to read it!

The Shell Seekers is fantastic but it has me in tears every time.

The Christmas Miracle Of Jonathon Toomey (kids book) has me blubbing too!

And when the kids at school do Goodnight Mr Tom, I'm right with Housemum on the fake coughing fits!!!

Ditto re The Book Thief, The Kite Runner, and The Time Traveller's Wife (in fact following The Time Traveller's Wife Incident I have to check that any book I borrow from my parents is appropriate to be read at work, or whether I will find myself sobbing helplessly into my sandwiches while people look at me strangely).

I read a book called Living In Little Rock With Miss Little Rock years ago which made me cry, though I have no recollection of why ... must find it and re-read.

The mention of Watership Down has reminded me of one of Richard Adams' books, The Plague Dogs. I must have been about 12 when I read it but can make myself well up to this day by thinking 'hello Rowf, have a bone'.

I Heard the Owl Call my Name - A first novel in which a dying Anglican priest is sent to an Indian village in the wilds of British Columbia, shares the joys and sorrows of a once proud tribe, and learns enough of life to be ready to die - I first read this as a teenager and wept buckets. I re-read it 20 years later and found it just as moving as an adult. This thread made me look on Amazon for it and I have just ordered another copy.I have never met anyone else who has read it!

The lovely Bones and The history of little tree both have me weeping buckets for very different reasons.

The time travellers wife.... I kind of struggeled to keep up with up at times and found it quite confusing, but something made me stick with it.

I'm glad i did, because the very last chapter affected me in a way that no book ever has. I literally sobbed (no exageration). Thought about it and filled up for ages after.

Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody. Amazing book, and a true story. I haven't read it again since I have become a mum...I think I would find it overwhelmingly moving if I did.

The Chalet School books were the first to make me cry I think. Because I wanted to go there and my mum told me it wasn't real, so I had a harsh waking up to the difference between fiction and fact.

Paullina Simons writes books that make me cry and I'm not a weeper really. Tully, and The Girl in Times Square.

I cried my heart out at the last episode of the West Wing, I've just remembered. And when Friends finished. I'm not sure I completely absorbed the Chalet School fact/fiction lesson...

The Kite runner and a Thousand Splendid Suns
The Girls
One about a little boy who goes missing on a school trip, can't remember who it's by..
The Pianist
Bridges Over Madison County
Time Travellers Wife
To Kill a Mockingbird etc.....

MOOMIN I think it is so lovely that you cry when you read the books to your classes, the kids will look back when they are older and think that you were such a cool teacher!!!!

"The Story of You" had me sobbing uncontrolably at the end. Plus so many already mentioned. The Thorn Birds and Birdsong certainly made me cry. Recently Notes from an Exhibition...and bits from Call the Midwife which I have just finished.

I avidly avoid anything I think might be a "tear jerker".

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time made me cry, although later my mum told me she knew some people who worked with autistic/aspergers children and that book was a load of rubbish. That sort of ruined it for me.

another vote for The Kite Runner, sniffle

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian.
Anne of Green Gables - Matthew 'my girl, My girl that I'm proud of' gets me every time.

Agree The WOman in Black is scary. Went to watch the west end play but it was ruined by a group of people talking, laughing, playing with their mobiles etc. those tickets weren't cheap.

Ooh and THe Outsiders, by SE Hinton - 'Stay gold, Ponyboy, stay gold'

Charlotte Gray-when the two little boys are transported to the concentration camp, and are all alone looking for a grown up to look after them, but of course you know they get gassed.

I cried buckets in the middle od the aftrenoon in my front room.

Also, 'Birdsong' when the Vicar(I think) watches the Somme from a hill and is scraming, 'for God's sake some one stop this', as more and more young men go over the top to certain death for hours (days).

I think these books affect me most as I know they are true experineces of event, even if fictional.

The Widower by Ray Kluum. I bawled my eyes out at that one.
Lovely / Lonely Bones or whatever it was called and also the author's other book about when she was raped.
Shadow the Sheep Dog by Enid Blyton but I was only about 9 years when I read that but it made me cry nonetheless. Little Women too.

The Book Theif too.