Recommendation

[WICKES]

Could anyone recommend a book for a 62 year old lady who recently lost her husband of 40 years?
I recommended A Grief Observed by C S Lewis. I think it would be better if it wasn't too depressing and dark (or heavy and difficult) though. I don't think she wants any self help books- novels would be best.

She is a fan of Thomas Hardy and French literature.

[bounty]

hi wickes, the first book i thought of was hinds feet on high places by hannah hurnard.

[Pecksie]

How about some Donne? His poetry is at the same time realistic (even stark sometimes) and uplifting, and his sermons are absolutely beautiful and food for thought... "All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another".

I can hardly think of anything more hope-instilled and beautiful... Except maybe Shelley in 'Adonais': "He is made one with Nature: there is heard / His voice in all her music, from the moan / Of thunder, to the song of night's sweet bird; / He is a presence to be felt and known / In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, / Spreading itself where'er that Power may move / Which has withdrawn his being to its own; / Which wields the world with never wearied love, / Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. / He is a portion of the loveliness / Which once he made more lovely: he doth bear / His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress / Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there / All new successions to the forms they wear; / Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight / To its own likeness, as each mass may bear; / And bursting in its beauty and its might / From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light".

I'm sure many people will recommend 'The Year of Magical Thinking' by Joan Didion... There's a thread about it in which I have said why I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who wasn't rich and well-connected as well as bereaved... :)