"Piercy successfully illustrates how stories can connect people to universal human experiences, showing how literature can be a balm for the soul." - Library Journal (starred review)

“The self-help companion 100 Books to Life By answers the bibliophile’s questions of ‘What should I read next?’ from a mental health perspective.” - Foreword

Joseph Piercy is a freelance writer. He holds a Master of Philosophy degree and is a regular contributor to various magazines and journals. Joseph is the author of books on a variety of subjects ranging from English language and literature to history and popular philosophy.

Introduction: What Is Bibliotherapy?

1. Remedies for the Heart

• The Master and Margarita (1967) by Mikhail Bulgakov
• The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• A Room with a View (1908) by E. M. Forster
• Conversations with Friends (2017) by Sally Rooney
• The Beauty of the Husband (2001) by Anne Carson
• Women Who Love Too Much (1985) by Robin Norwood
• Anne Karenina (1878) by Leo Tolstoy
• A Handful of Dust (1934) by Evelyn Waugh
• Love in the Time of Cholera (1985) by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Tale of Genji (11^th century) by Murasaki Shikibu
• Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
• Middlemarch (1871-72) by George Eliot
• The Good Soldier (1915) by Ford Maddox Ford
• Madame Bovary (1857) by Gustave Flaubert
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) by Louis de Bernières
• Enduring Love (1997) by Ian McEwan
• The Museum of Innocence (2008) by Orhan Pamuk
• The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• My Antonia (1918) by Willa Cather
• The Go-Between (1953) by L. P. Hartley
• Les Liaisons Dangereuses (1782) by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

2. Remedies for the Soul and Spirit

• The Power and Glory (1940) by Graham Greene
• Go Tell It on the Mountain (1853) by James Baldwin
• Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse
• The Quest (1911) by Frederik van Eeden
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) by Milan Kundera
• I May Be Wrong (2022) by Björn Natthiko Lindeblad
• The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco
• The White Book (2016) by Han Kang
• After You’d Gone (2000) by Maggie O’Farrell
• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981) by Ramond Carver
• Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel
• The Hunger Angel (2001) Herta Müller
• Life Begins on Friday (2009) by Ioana Pârvulescu
• Meditations (167 AD) by Marcus Aurelius
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold (2015) by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• The Alchemist (1988) by Paolo Coelho

3. Remedies for the Mind

• The Outsider (1942) by Albert Camus
• Hunger (1899) by Knut Hamsun
• Murphy (1938) by Samuel Beckett
• Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) by Richard Bach
• Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad
• The Magus (1965) by John Fowles
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) by Robert M. Pirsig
• Midnight’s Children (1981) by Salman Rushdie
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
• Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) by Thomas Pynchon
• The General of the Dead Army (1963) by Ismail Kadare
• As I Lay Dying (1930) by William Faulkner
• The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) by J. M. Coetzee
• The Secret History (1992) by Donna Tartt
• The Tin Dream (1959) by Günter Grass
• Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
• Nausea (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre
• The Sea, The Sea (1978) by Iris Murdoch

4. Remedies for the Self and Others

• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951) by J. D. Salinger
• Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
• If This Is a Man (1947) by Primo Levi
• Germinal (1885) by Émile Zola
• Nervous Conditions (1988) by Tsitsi Dangarembga
• Norwegian Wood (1987) by Haruki Murakami
• The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by Ernest Hemingway
• Great Expectations (1861) by Charles Dickens
• The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) by Ayi Kwei Armah
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
• The Country Girls (1960) by Edna O’Brien
• The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker
• Jane Eyre (1846) by Charlotte Brontë
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
• Schindler’s List (1982) by Thomas Keneally
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by by Zora Neale Hurston
• The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton

5. Remedies for Everyday Living

• Last Love in Constantinople (1994) by Milorad Pavić
• The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank
• The Magic Mountain (1924) by Thomas Mann
• The Bridge on the Drina (1945) by Ivo Andrić
• American Pastoral (1997) by Philip Roth
• The Trial (1925) by Franz Kafka
• A Suitable boy (1993) by Vikram Seth
• Zorba the Greek (1946) by Nikos Kazantzakis
• Little Women (1868-69) by Louisa May Alcott
• The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy
• On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
• Things Fall Apart (1958) by Chinua Achebe
• The Blue Umbrella (1980) by Ruskin Bond
• I Am a Cat (1906) by Natsume Sōseki
• Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes
• Dead Souls (1842) by Nikolai Gogol
• Money (1984) by Martin Amis
• Cannery Row (1945) by John Steinbeck
• Beloved (1987) by Toni Morrison
• A Little Life (2015) by Hanya Yanagihara
• Mr Phillips (2000) by John Lanchester
• The Remains of the Day (1989) by Kazuo Ishiguro

6. List of Books and Authors