Life lists · Emotional Truth Diaries

100 books for every feeling

Not a ranking. A shelf sorted the way we actually choose books: by what we feel right now. Tick what you’ve read, or let the cards pick your next one.

100 books 10 feelings classics & new

Read the list

How to use it

Find the chapter that matches your mood today.
Tick the books you’ve already read and watch your shelf grow.
Can’t choose? “Shuffle” draws a book for tonight.
“Find ↗” opens a search in a bookshop.

Our own selection, not an official “best of” list. Years are of first publication.

When your heart is broken

Books that sit next to you and don’t rush you.

1
A married woman chooses passion over the rules of her world, and pays for it.
2
A wild, destructive love between Heathcliff and Catherine on the Yorkshire moors.
3
A mysterious millionaire throws lavish parties hoping one woman will walk in.
4
A student in 1960s Tokyo torn between a fragile first love and a lively new one.
5
Two people from a small Irish town who keep drifting together and apart.
6
An English butler looks back on a life of duty, and a love he never spoke of.
7
A provincial doctor’s wife dreams of a life like the ones in novels.
8
A girl writes a love letter to a bored dandy. Years later, the roles reverse.
9
A New York lawyer in the 1870s, engaged to one woman and in love with her cousin.
10
Two people seen on the same day, 15 July, over twenty years.

When you’re falling in love

For the butterflies, and for the doubts.

11
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy: first impressions are almost always wrong.
12
A poor governess who won’t give up her self-respect, even for love.
13
The devil visits Moscow, and Margarita risks everything for her Master.
14
A man waits more than fifty years for the woman who once turned him down.
15
Eight years after a broken engagement, Anne meets the man she let go.
16
A young Englishwoman in Florence, a stolen kiss and the courage to choose for herself.
17
A summer in Italy and a first love that stays forever.
18
She has known him since she was six. He meets her for the first time years later.
19
A poet and doctor torn between his wife and Lara in the years of revolution.
20
A cheerful carer and a paralysed man who no longer wants to live.

When you want to start over

Permission to change your life.

21
A shepherd boy follows a dream about treasure and learns to listen to his heart.
22
After a divorce, a writer spends a year in Italy, India and Indonesia.
23
Between life and death, a woman finds a library of all the lives she could have lived.
24
After losing her mother, a woman walks more than a thousand miles alone.
25
A lonely woman with strict routines slowly learns she is allowed to be happy.
26
A grumpy widower’s plans are ruined by his noisy new neighbours.
27
A young man leaves everything to seek the meaning of life, and finds it by a river.
28
An old fisherman battles a giant fish far out at sea. A book about dignity.
29
An American writer buys an old villa in Tuscany and brings it, and herself, back to life.
30
A pilot in the desert meets a boy from a tiny planet. More for adults than for children.

When you feel alone

Proof that someone felt this before you.

31
Seven generations of one family in the town of Macondo, and the solitude each of them carries.
32
A teenager expelled from school wanders New York for three days.
33
A young woman’s breakdown after a summer in New York, told with painful honesty.
34
The quiet life of a university teacher that turns out to be anything but ordinary.
35
A girl who grows up alone in the marshes, and a death the town blames on her.
36
In a small Southern town, lonely people confide in a deaf man.
37
A lonely intellectual torn between the man and the wolf inside him.
38
Pechorin, a bored and brilliant officer who breaks other lives, and his own.
39
A man who won’t pretend to feel what others expect him to.
40
One June day in London as a woman prepares for her party.

About family

The people we don’t choose, and can’t forget.

41
The four March sisters grow up during the American Civil War.
42
Several noble families during the Napoleonic wars: love, war and the search for meaning.
43
Two families in California live out the story of Cain and Abel across generations.
44
Brothers, a murdered father and the biggest questions about faith and guilt.
45
The rise and slow decline of a merchant family over four generations.
46
An elderly mother wants her grown-up children home for one last Christmas.
47
A perfect suburban family and a mysterious artist who rents their house.
48
A memoir about growing up with brilliant, chaotic and very poor parents.
49
A young nihilist clashes with the older generation, and with his own heart.
50
A boy in Kabul betrays his best friend and spends his life trying to make it right.

About growing up

At any age.

51
A girl in the American South watches her father defend a Black man in court.
52
A shy teenager writes letters about his first year of high school.
53
A talkative orphan arrives by mistake at a farm that wanted a boy.
54
One summer of a twelve-year-old boy in 1928, when he realises he is alive.
55
A seagull who wants to fly for the joy of it, not just for food.
56
Classics students at an elite college, and a murder they commit together.
57
Two girls from a poor Naples neighbourhood and a friendship that lasts a lifetime.
58
An orphan gets money from a secret benefactor and goes to London to become a gentleman.
59
In Nazi Germany a girl steals books, and Death tells her story.
60
A man with an intellectual disability has an operation that makes him a genius.

When you need courage

People who kept going.

61
The diary of a Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex in Amsterdam.
62
A psychiatrist who survived the camps on why meaning helps us live.
63
A home-loving hobbit is swept into an adventure with thirteen dwarves and a dragon.
64
A girl from a survivalist family who never went to school ends up at Cambridge.
65
Two women in Afghanistan, married to the same man, find strength in each other.
66
A sailor wrongly imprisoned escapes, finds a treasure and returns for revenge.
67
A boy survives 227 days in a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger.
68
A blind French girl and a German boy whose paths cross during the war.
69
Black maids in 1960s Mississippi secretly tell their stories to a young writer.
70
Scarlett O’Hara lives through war and loss, and never gives up.

When the world feels dark

Big questions, asked honestly.

71
A world where Big Brother is watching, and even a thought can be a crime.
72
A society where everyone is happy by design. That is exactly what’s frightening.
73
A fireman whose job is to burn books starts reading them.
74
In a theocratic state, women have lost every right, even their own names.
75
Three friends from an English boarding school slowly learn what they were raised for.
76
A poor student commits a murder to test a theory, then has to live with it.
77
A father and son walk through a burned world, carrying the fire.
78
Boys stranded on an island try to build their own society.
79
A scientist creates life, then abandons what he made.
80
A young man stays beautiful while his portrait ages and carries his sins.

To escape into another world

Magic, maps and doors in wardrobes.

81
A boy who lives under the stairs learns he is a wizard.
82
A hobbit carries the most dangerous ring in the world to destroy it.
83
A magical circus open only at night, and two young magicians bound to a duel.
84
A girl follows a white rabbit down a hole into a world without logic.
85
Four children step through a wardrobe into a land of endless winter.
86
A gifted young wizard lets a shadow loose, and has to face it.
87
A young man crosses the wall into Faerie to bring back a fallen star.
88
Two magicians bring magic back to England during the Napoleonic wars.
89
A boy reads a book about a dying world and realises it needs him.
90
In postwar Barcelona, a boy finds a book whose author someone wants erased.

To understand yourself

Non-fiction that gives feelings their names.

91
Why in love some of us cling, some run, and some feel safe.
92
How trauma lives in the body, and what helps it heal.
93
Why vulnerability isn’t weakness but the root of courage and closeness.
94
Myths and fairy tales as a map back to a woman’s wild, instinctive self.
95
Seven goddess archetypes that shape how a woman loves, works and chooses.
96
A twelve-week course for anyone who wants to find their way back to creativity.
97
Seven conversations that help couples feel close again.
98
What decades of research show about marriages that last.
99
Why understanding emotions can matter as much as IQ.
100
Ten letters about solitude, love and patience with yourself.