“I never found a companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
Loneliness has become one of the defining challenges of modern life. Despite us all living in an age of instant connectivity, many people feel more isolated, disconnected, and a lack of belonging than ever before. It’s no surprise that authors and thinkers have increasingly delved into these themes through fiction and nonfiction, creating some of the most powerful books about loneliness available. From contemporary novels about loneliness to insightful works examining social isolation and human connection, literature presents a unique way of understanding the emotional realities of feeling alone. These stories and perspectives help us make sense of modern loneliness while reminding us all that we aren’t alone with our experiences. Join us at What We Reading as we share our favourite books about loneliness in modern life. These picks all offer meaningful insights into one of the most universal aspects of the human experience.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine – Gail Honeyman
First up on our list of books about loneliness is Gail Honeyman’s beloved bestseller, Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. Eleanor Oliphant struggles with social skills and typically says exactly what she is thinking. She spends her life avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with her mother. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the unhygienic and bumbling IT guy from her work.
When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the pavement, the three become the sort of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one. Honeyman’s work is a warm and uplifting journey following an out-of-the-ordinary heroine who learns the only way to survive is to open your heart.
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The Lonely City – Olivia Laing
What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people? Does technology draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?
When Olivia Laing moved to New York in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between works and lives, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.
Together – Vivek H. Murthy
In this groundbreaking work, Former Surgeon General of the United States Vivek Murthy argues that loneliness is the underpinning of the current crisis in mental wellness and is responsible for the upsurge in suicide, the opioid epidemic, the overuse of psych meds, and the over-diagnosing and pathologising of emotional and psychological struggle.
The good news is that social connection is innate and a cure for loneliness. In Together, the former Surgeon General addresses the importance of community and connection and offers viable and actionable solutions to this overlooked epidemic.
Convenience Store Woman – Sayaka Murata
Keiko has never fit in, neither in her family nor in school, but when at the age of eighteen she begins working at the Hiiromachi branch of “Smile Mart,” she finds peace and purpose in her life. In the store, unlike anywhere else, she understands the rules of social interaction – many are laid out line by line in the store’s manual – and she does her best to copy the dress, mannerisms, and speech of her colleagues, playing the part of a “normal” person excellently. Keiko is very happy, but the people closest to her increasingly pressure her to find a husband and to start a proper career, prompting her to take desperate action.
A brilliant depiction of a world hidden from view, Convenience Store Woman is an ironic and sharp-eyed take on contemporary work culture and the pressures we all face to conform, as well as a charming and completely fresh depiction of an unforgettable heroine.
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Stoner – John Williams
William Stoner is born at the end of the nineteenth century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar’s life, so different from the hardscrabble existence he has always known. And yet, as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments. Driven ever deeper into himself, Stoner rediscovers the stoic silence of his forebears and confronts an essential solitude.
John Williams’ luminous and deeply moving novel about loneliness is a quiet work of perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage – Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the mind. With a keen focus on exclusion, loneliness, and the longing for belonging, it is one of the best books about loneliness for anyone looking for an escape from the modern world.
The Gifts Of Imperfection – Brené Brown
In this groundbreaking New York Times bestseller from one of the world’s most celebrated academics, Dr. Brené Brown, a research professor and thought leader on vulnerability, courage, worthiness, and shame, shares ten guideposts on the power of Wholehearted living – a way of engaging with the world from a place of worthiness. The Gifts of Imperfection is a self-help book that discusses vulnerability, belonging, and overcoming feelings of isolation.
The Remains Of The Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
In the summer of 1956, Stevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey in the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper. One of the best Kazuo Ishiguro books, The Remains of the Day, is a subtle study of emotional restraint and lifelong isolation.
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The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
Set in a small town in the middle of the Deep South, Carson McCullers’ The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is the story of John Singer, a lonely deaf-mute, and a disparate group of people who are drawn towards his kind, sympathetic nature.
The owner of the cafe where Singer eats every day, a young girl desperate to grow up, an angry drunkard, a frustrated black doctor: each pours their heart out to Singer, their silent confidant, and he in turn changes their disenchanted lives in ways they could never imagine.
Solitude – Anthony Storr
Anthony Storr’s Solitude was seminal in challenging the established belief that “interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness.” Lucid and lyrical, Storr’s book cites numerous examples of brilliant scholars and artists – from Beethoven to Beatrix Potter – to demonstrate that solitude ranks alongside relationships in its impact on an individual’s well-being and productivity, as well as on society’s progress and health.
But solitude is essential not only for geniuses, says Storr; the average person, too, is enriched by spending time alone. Ever since its first release in 1988, readers have found inspiration and renewal in Storr’s enlightening meditation on the creative individual’s need for solitude.
Whereabouts – Jhumpa Lahiri
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel about loneliness, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the centre weaves between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father’s untimely death.
In addition to colleagues at work, where she never feels quite at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change.
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation – Ottessa Moshfegh
Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?
My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly made combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is one of the most original examinations of loneliness in books.
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Loneliness – John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick
John T. Cacioppo’s groundbreaking research topples one of the pillars of modern medicine and psychology: the focus on the individual as the unit of inquiry. By employing brain scans, monitoring blood pressure, and analysing immune function, he demonstrates the overpowering influence of social context – a factor so strong it can alter DNA replication.
He defines an unrecognised syndrome – chronic loneliness – brings it out of the shadow of its cousin depression, and shows how this subjective sense of social isolation uniquely disrupts our perceptions, behaviour, and physiology, becoming a trap that not only reinforces isolation but can also lead to an earlier death. Above all, Cacioppo shows how we can break the trap of isolation for our benefit both as individuals and as a society.
Anxious People – Fredrik Backman
Looking at real estate isn’t normally a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage. Each of them carries a lifetime of grievances, hurts, secrets, and passions that are ready to boil over. None of them is entirely who they appear to be. And all of them – the bank robber included – desperately crave some kind of rescue.
As the authorities and media surround the premises, these reluctant allies will reveal surprising truths about themselves and set in motion a chain of events so unexpected that even they can hardly explain what happens next. Humorous, compassionate, and wise, Anxious People is an ingeniously constructed story about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness, and hope – the things that save us, even in the most anxious of times.
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The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
One of the most famous books about loneliness and alienation, The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under – maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully pulls readers into Esther’s breakdown with such intensity that Esther’s insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies.
Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has helped continue to cement The Bell Jar as a haunting American classic.
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A Tale For The Time Being – Ruth Ozeki
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace – and will touch lives in a way she can scarcely imagine.
Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artefacts washed ashore. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is hauled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.
Part-time reader, part-time rambler, and full-time Horror enthusiast, James has been writing for What We Reading since 2022. His earliest reading memories involved Historical Fiction, Fantasy and Horror tales, which he has continued to take with him to this day. James’ favourite books include The Last (Hanna Jameson), The Troop (Nick Cutter) and Chasing The Boogeyman (Richard Chizmar).
