Seven titles about the heartbreak of losing a sibling

Willa C. Richards is the author of The Comfort of Monsters.

She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review and she is the recipient of a PEN/Robert J. Dau Prize for Emerging Writers.

At Electric Lit Richards tagged "seven books that showcase the specific horror and heartbreak of loving and losing a sibling," including:

The Unpassing by Chia-Chia Lin

In this debut novel, set against the bleak backdrop of the Alaskan wilderness, Chia-Chia Lin portrays a Taiwanese immigrant family of six as they try to make a new home in a beautiful but nearly inhospitable place. Tragedy strikes the family when several of the children contract meningitis. The narrator, Gavin, is so sick that he is unconscious for a spell. When he awakes, he finds out that his sister Ruby has died. Gavin grapples with his grief throughout the novel, believing himself partially responsible for passing the sickness onto Ruby, and thus for her death. Ruby’s death haunts the whole novel’s telling, and remains a powerful vacuum of grief, like a large black hole, that the family struggles not to fall into. The Unpassing is an empathetic, deeply felt, and lyrical portrait of childhood loss, of never-ending grief, and of unbearable unbelonging.

Read about the other entries on the list.

The Unpassing is among Jae-Yeon Yoo's top books to combat anti-Asian racism in America.

--Marshal Zeringue