The saddest book you've ever read . . .

[expatinscotland]

or didn't finish b/c it was just too depressing?

'White Oleander' by Janet Fitch

Definately with you on the Lovely Bones. Made the mistake of trying to read it round the pool on holiday, it got a bit embarrasing when a sob snook out. Trouble is I didn't think the film lived up to it but isn't that always the way?. And this from the woman who cried at the childrens film UP sitting next to a stranger on a plane!!!

I agree with 'Goodbye Mog', and I nearly cried in Waterstones the other day when I read 'Sad Book' by Michael Rosen.
When I was about 10 I read 'Red Sky in the Morning' by Elizabeth Laird for the first time. I have read it loads of times since and I cry every time.
Moving on to adult books 'On The Beach' by Nevil Shute is unrelentingly depressing, even more so than most books about nuclear holocausts, and The Road has only faint glimmers of hope.
Oh, and also, another children's book 'Ways to Live Forever' by Sally Nicholls. I loved this book but cried and cried. I probably should have read it in the privacy of my own home rather than on a train travelling through France!

Just finished reading Coram Boy which is a 'children's book'. About a man in the 18th century who was paid by women to take their babies to the orphanage and he just buried them instead.

'Room' by Emma Donoghue

Never Let Me Go -Kazuo Ishiguro. Thought the film was a bit of a let down though (although DD wailed at the end!)

Hmm...I shed a few tears at the end of a biography of Natalie Clifford Barney :) recently

Paula, lovely lovely book but just so sad

have also just finished 'the hand that first held mine' so sad had a good weep and sophies choice x

there's a goodbye mog?

Another vote for Birdsong

It's making me want to cry just reading this. Loads already listed here,but A Prayer For Owen Meany, made me sob and sob.

So many already listed.

I recently read "things I want my daughters to know" by Eliazbeth Noble and that had me crying on the bus.

Birdsong
To Kill A Mockingbird
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (fictional story of a boy whose father was killed in the 9/11 attack)
The Grapes of Wrath
Chesil Beach
The Perks of Being A Wallflower

Opal

I am haunted by Beloved by Toni Morrison. It's so bleak and I find it unbearable to know that that's what life was like for generations of people. They didn't even know their own names. Inhuman.

whispers I didn't believe A Child Called It. It just didn't ring true to me.

The Velveteen rabbit

Home by Marilynne Robinson. Sad in the sense that while its predecessor Gilead also dealt with incredibly injured people and difficult things, there was at least a sense of the possibility of redemption. Home offers not a shred of hope or comfort. It is unremitting.

Having said that, I recommend it (and Gilead) wholeheartedly. They're both beautiful and profound and massively moving.

Many of the ones above.

I cried and cried reading 'Deaf Sentence' by David Lodge. I was on the train, but this being England, everyone was terribly reserved and simply shuffled their newspapers.

When my DH met me at the station he thought something dreadful had happened.

I also cried when I read Goodbye Mog. In a bookshop.

But then I am a crier, it's one of the reasons I could never have a Kindle, I'd fuse it.

Found the Outcast by Sadie Jones thoroughly depressing - and it had an optimistic ending. But it was written in such a depressing tone that I'll never read another book by her again.

And lots that have been mentioned.

mrs k, also didnt like a child called it! thought it a bit dubious x

The God of Small Things - very moving but made me feel desperately sad and cast down. Wonderful, but I wouldn't recommend reading it if you're going through a low phase.

The Four Swans - an Irish legend retold in one of my childhood books of fairytales. Unbearably sad, and I think I find it more so as I get older.

The Kite Runner
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Angela's Ashes
Katherine
Gone With The Wind
The Pursuit of Love

Mary Barton made me cry long ago but I remember feeling slightly annoyed with myself (or Mrs Gaskell) as I felt the scene, with two very unlikely people making up at a deathbed was a bit manipulative.

South Riding also made me cry long ago - and again very recently when I re-read it following the recent TV series.

Not really a sad book, but I wept buckets at the end of The Amber Spyglass.

The most harrowing/affecting things I've read are Lucky by Alice Sebold and more recently The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I read it when I was pregnant and sobbed all the way through and then shortly after the babies were born we (my husband and I) tried to watch the film on DVD and he had to keep stopping it cos I kept bursting into tears. Such a grim, depressing story.

A Thousand Splendid Suns. How could I forget that?

Emma and the later books by Sheila Hocken, I reed them as a child and remember sobbing over parts of them.

I don't think I have been so affected by a book since.