“This is a good sign, having a broken heart. It means we have tried for something.”
There’s a quiet power in deciding that a current chapter of your life has come to a close. Whether fuelled by a major crisis, a subtle change in perspective, or just the realisation that you’ve outgrown your current path, starting over is one of the most human experiences there is. It is equal parts terrifying and liberating to leap into the unknown and rebuild who you are. Thankfully, books have long been a sanctuary for those navigating transition. Books let us witness others piece their lives back together, offering both comfort and blueprints for when our own paths feel murky. If you are currently standing at a crossroads, or just looking for stories of transformation, these books about reinvention and starting over will remind you that it’s never too late to begin again.
Fiction
The Midnight Library – Matt Haig
First up on our list of books about reinvention is Matt Haig’s global bestseller, The Midnight Library. When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.
The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in grave danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?
Check Out Our The Midnight Library Book Review
Evvie Drake Starts Over – Linda Holmes
In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house. Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, a former Major League pitcher, is wrestling with what miserable athletes call the “yips.” As the media storm heats up, an invitation to stay in Maine seems the perfect chance to hit the reset button on Dean’s future.
When he moves into an apartment at the back of Evvie’s house, the two make a deal: Dean won’t ask about Evvie’s late husband, and Evvie won’t ask about Dean’s baseball career. Yet to move forward, both Evvie and Dean will need to reckon with their pasts – the friendships they’ve damaged, the secrets they’ve kept – but in life, as in baseball, there’s always a chance – up until the last out.
Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver
From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her most private spaces and confounds her solitary existence. On a farm several miles from the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowksi finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly feuding neighbours tend to their respective farms.
Over the span of one humid summer, these characters find their connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with whom they share a place. Prodigal Summer is a powerful demonstration of narrative, drama, and ideals, and a perfect read if you’re looking for inspiration about reinvention.
Britt-Marie Was Here – Fredrik Backman
Britt-Marie cannot stand mess. She isn’t one to judge others. It’s just that sometimes people interpret her helpful suggestions as criticisms, which is certainly not her intention. But hidden inside the socially awkward, fussy busybody is a woman who has more imagination, bigger dreams, and a warmer heart than anyone around her realises.
When Britt-Marie walks out on her cheating husband and has to fend for herself in the miserable backwater town of Borg, she finds work as the caretaker of a soon-to-be demolished recreation centre. Most alarming of all, she’s given the impossible task of leading the supremely untalented children’s soccer team to victory. In this small town of misfits, can Britt-Marie find a place where she truly belongs?
Ladder Of Years – Anne Tyler
Married with three almost-grown children, Delia Grinstead has disappeared without a trace and without any valid reason. But for Delia, walking away from it all is an impulse that will lead her into a new, exciting, and unimaginable life.
Ladder of Years is a classic novel courtesy of Anne Tyler that follows a middle-aged woman as she literally walks away from her life on a family beach trip and accidentally starts a totally new one.
Non-Fiction
Designing Your Life – Bill Burnett
No matter our age, many of us are still looking for an answer to that perennial question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” In Designing Your Life, Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett and Dave Evans use their expertise to help you work out what you want – and how to get it.
Their successful Life Design course has been tried and tested by thousands of people, from students to mid-career professionals to retirees contemplating a whole new future. Using real-life stories and proven techniques like reframing, prototyping, and mind-mapping, this book about reinvention will teach you how to build your way forward to a life that’s better by a design of your own making.
Check Out The Best Books About Feeling Stuck In Life
Eat, Pray, Love – Elizabeth Gilbert
Around the time she turned thirty, Elizabeth Gilbert went through an early-onset midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.
To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. To give herself the space needed to find out who she really was, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a year-long journey around the world. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. An articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, this book is sure to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.
Check Out The Best Books About Travelling The World
Between Two Kingdoms – Suleika Jaouad
In the summer after graduating from college, Suleika Jaouad was preparing to enter the real world. She had fallen in love and moved to Paris to pursue her dreams of becoming a war correspondent. The real world she found, however, would take her into a very different kind of conflict zone. Just a few weeks shy of her twenty-third birthday, she was diagnosed with leukaemia, with a thirty-five per cent chance of survival.
Three and a half years of chemo, a clinical trial, and a bone marrow transplant – she was, according to the doctors, at least cured. But as she would soon learn, a cure is not where the work of healing ends; it’s where it begins. Between Two Kingdoms is a searing, deeply moving memoir of illness and recovery that traces one young woman’s journey from diagnosis to remission and, ultimately, a road trip of healing and self-discovery.
Personality Isn’t Permanent – Benjamin Hardy
In Personality Isn’t Permanent, psychologist and bestselling author Benjamin Hardy, PhD, draws on psychological research to demolish the popular misconception that personality – a person’s consistent attitudes and behaviours – is innate and unchanging. Hardy liberates us from the limiting belief that our “true selves” are to be discovered, and shows how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals instead.
Brimming with strategies for reframing your past and designing your future, Personality Isn’t Permanent is one of the best guides on reinvention, breaking free from the past, and becoming the person you want to be.
Untamed – Glennon Doyle
Soulful and uproarious, forceful and tender, Untamed is both an intimate memoir and a galvanising wake-up call. It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is a story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure, but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table.
And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honour our anger and our heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we might become people who can finally look at ourselves and say: There They Are.
Check Out The Best Books About Finding Yourself
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).
