Time may heal all wounds, but there’s nothing like a good book to mend a broken heart. Settle in with one (or all!) of these twenty-one books that address despair of a love lost in its own unique and healing way.

The Idiot by Elif Batuman

Selin, the daughter of Turkish immigrants has just arrived for her freshman year at Harvard and she’s slowly making friends – one, Svetlana, her Siberian classmate, and another, Ivan, an older mathematics student from Hungary. As Selin’s story spans cultures and continents, it brings together the joys, fears, insecurities and unknowns of discovering one’s self amid life and love.

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Juliet Takes A Breath by Gabby Rivera

Juliet just came out to her parents and left the Bronx to “find herself” in Portland. The trouble is, she’s found a great internship with her favorite author and feminist mentor, but she’s low on confidence and questioning that she can pull her life together this summer. Humorous and inspiring, readers will fall in love with the heroine in Juliet Takes A Breath.

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The Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee by Saki Kawashiro

After twenty-nine-year-old Momoko is suddenly dumped, she joins the many brokenhearted and gets drunk. When she wakes up in a nearly empty cafe, she is telling her story to the curious manager and the only other customer, a Buddhist monk. While talking about cooking for her ex-boyfriend, the manager invites her to cook her ex’s favorite dish in the cafe kitchen. While making a warm, delicious butter chicken curry, she realizes that sharing her story while cooking has helped her to feel better. The manager then has the idea to make it a therapy group where people can cook dishes that were important in past relationships while sharing about their heartbreak. Consequently, Momoko and the cafe manager form the “Ex-Boyfriend’s Favorite Recipe Funeral Committee” to help other people get through heartbreak. 

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Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur

No. 1 New York Times bestseller Milk and Honey is a four-part collection of poetry and prose, each part dealing with heartache and pain. Author Rupi Kaur gracefully explores the bitter moments in life while never failing to find the healing sweetness that is hidden among the heartache.

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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp has used letters, throughout her life, to understand the world and where she fits in it. Almost every morning, she writes letters, to her brother, her best friend, to the president of a university where she wants to audit a class, to authors with reviews of the newest books, and to the person she writes to the most but never sends. Sybil has lived a long good life as a mother, wife, grandmother, divorcee, and lawyer. She isn’t expecting her world to change anymore, but then she receives letters from someone in her past that force her to look at an extremely painful time in her life. Sybil comes to learn that the letter she has been working on the longest over the years must be read, and that offering forgiveness is what stands in the way of moving forward. 

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Heartburn by Nora Ephron

The writer of Sleepless in Seattle expertly weaves hilarity into the breakup of a perfect marriage as the very pregnant Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband, Mark, is in love with another woman. She’s a cookbook author, so naturally, she turns to food as she processes her confusing emotions. She just needs to decide whether she wants Mark back, or dead.

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The Pisces by Melissa Broder

Lucy’s been so focused on her dissertation that she hardly realized that her relationship with her boyfriend was crumbling. When the flame finally goes out, Lucy heads to her sisters’ in L.A. to pick up the pieces. Instead, she finds herself anxious, jaded and frankly unlovable. Then she spots a swimmer – and it’s nearly love at first sight until she finds out his identity.

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The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Phoebe Stone is determined to spoil herself one last time at the Cornwall Inn. After dreaming of coming with her husband for years, she’s here by herself after his devastating affair. At the same time, the hotel is crawling with wedding guests and a meticulously organized bride prepared for any problems threatening to plague her wedding. What she didn’t plan for was Phoebe and their unlikely friendship.

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The Wisdom of a Broken Heart: How to Turn the Pain of a Breakup Into Healing, Insight, and New Love by Susan Piver

Author Susan Piver recognizes that when a relationship ends, the anguish and disappointment can be crippling. She lovingly encourages readers to forget the typical advice about staying busy and moving on, and instead, pushes them to take this opportunity to self-transform. Throughout the book, she shares her own story of heartbreak and delivers a strong dose of hope to those who need it most.

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When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön

Pema Chödrön’s is the perfect addition to one’s spiritual library as she shows that moving toward painful situations – rather than away from them – can open up our hearts to growth, healing and love. She draws from traditional Buddhist wisdom as she offers life-changing tools to readers suffering from heartbreak and sadness.

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How to be a Heroine: Or, What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

As Samantha Ellis reviews well-known female characters beloved since childhood, she makes a startling revelation: all this time, instead of pining over lost love, she should have been aiming to be more like the independent Jane Eyre. In How to be a Heroine, Ellis takes readers through the most inspiring characters in literature and explores what we can learn from them, and how we can use lessons from literature to become the heroine in our own lives.

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Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton

Writer Dolly Alderton has seen and tried everything in the triumphs and failures of becoming an adult. In this memoir, she details her encounters with love, landing a job, getting drunk, being dumped, and that no one compares to your friends. Everything I Know About Love may be about dating and having good friends, but most of all it is about knowing that you are enough.

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Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng

After a breakup, we often reflect on the things left unsaid. When Lydia is found dead in a lake, her parents are reeling from the loss and the pain of the things they never told their daughter. This book explores the challenges of trying to truly know someone and our struggle to understand one another.

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Letters to the Person I Was by Sana Abuleil

In this moving poetry collection, Sana Abuleil communicates to readers all the kindness, wisdom, hope, and acceptance she wishes someone had communicated to her when she experienced severe heartache. Sana reminds us that navigating through pain, we find avenues of hope and beauty to embrace.

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The Art of Breaking Up by hitRECord

This double-sided book is structured so that whether you’re the heartbreaker or the heartbroken, you’ll find something within the book to heal the wounds left behind. From break-up themed recipes to short stories, comics to vengeful arts and crafts projects, the book will keep you busy. Made from a collective art project in which thousands of people participated, it is also a reminder that heartbreak, as isolating as it may seem, is a shared experience that connects us all.

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All About Love by bell hooks

What is love? How do we practice it? And can we do it better? bell hooks explores the concept of love and the cultural norms and expectations surrounding it. In All About Love, hooks’ challenges the idea that romantic love is the ideal love. She opens readers up to the idea that love is something that goes beyond sex and desire; it is a healing, uniting force that can exist between all individuals, groups, and nations.

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Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Feeling a little lost in life, Hannah Martin moves in with her best friend Gabby. At a bar, they meet Hannah’s old high school boyfriend, Ethan, and he joins them for drinks. At the end of the night, Hannah has a choice to make: go home with Gabby, or stay a little later and let Ethan take her home. Based on this decision, Hannah’s life will go one of two ways. The book proceeds to tell the story of Hannah’s life from both timelines, ultimately showing how different her life will turn out based on this one decision. The book is thus an exploration of the choices we make, the paths we take, and how to find true love in a world of never-ending possibilities.

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You’ll Come Back to Yourself by Michaela Angemeer

A poetry book inspired by modern dating and heartbreak, poems within explore mental health, our relationship with our bodies, being our true selves, and lost love.

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The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy

This is a heart-wrenching, yet deeply satisfying and inspirational memoir on finding meaning and love. Levy spent years traveling the world and telling women’s stories. When she experiences unthinkable heartbreak, she must come to terms with the fact that, like all of us, she lives in a world she cannot control. She shares with readers how she began to live again in the face of uncertainty and in spite of pain.

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The Melting Season by Jami Attenburg

This is a book about friendship and self-discovery. When her husband Thomas deserts her, Catherine Madison packs a suitcase and heads West. She is determined to leave her pain and secrets behind. On her journey, she makes incredible friendships that teach her the meaning of human connection. With time, she learns that moving on and being her true self requires facing the truths from her past, and that doing so will help others she loves from making the same mistakes.

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Elsewhere by Rosita Boland

In Elsewhere, Rosie Boland reflects on thirty years of traveling solo around the globe. Boland shares in intimate detail her experiences in some of the most remote places on Earth and how travel can change your life.  Through joy and heartache, Boland sees the beauty and majesty of the world bloom before her.

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*Disclosure: The links above are affiliate links. These picks are editorially selected, but if you purchase, She Reads may get something in return.