Tag Archives: Grief & Loss Depiction

This page lists books that contain trigger warnings for the depiction of grief and loss depiction.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Vol. 1 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe

For Vicente Bernal, truth is all he’s known. The son of an infamous drug lord, Vicente was born to help run the family business, which means he’s been raised on a throne of sordid pasts and dirty laundry, violence and pride. But when Vicente stumbles across someone he’s not supposed to know about – a woman from his father’s checkered past – he sets out to California to find her behind his father’s back. What Vicente doesn’t expect to find in San Francisco is Violet McQueen, the woman’s twenty-year-old daughter. Beautiful and edgy with vulnerability he can’t resist, Violet…. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Suicidal ideation
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • War themes & battle scenes

The Devil You Know by Kit Rocha

Maya has had a price on her head from the day she escaped the TechCorps. Genetically engineered for genius and trained for revolution, there’s only one thing she can’t do—forget. Gray has finally broken free of the Protectorate, but he can’t escape the time bomb in his head. His body is rejecting his modifications, and his months are numbered. When Maya’s team uncovers an operation trading in genetically enhanced children, she’ll do anything to stop them. Even risk falling back into the hands of the TechCorps. And Gray has found a purpose for his final days: keeping Maya safe.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
  • Pregnancy & abortion mentioned
  • Alcohol consumption mentioned
  • Seizure
  • Medical experimentation recounted
  • Nonconsensual body modification
  • Surgery
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a close friend recounted
  • Death of a parent
  • Murder
  • Gun violence
  • Torture, on-page & recounted
  • Kidnapping of children

Starlings by Amanda Linsmeier

Kit’s father had always told her he had no family, but four months ago his sudden death revealed the truth. Now she has a grandmother she never knew she had–Agatha Starling–and an invitation to visit her father’s hometown, Rosemont.

And Rosemont… it’s picture perfect: the famed eternal roses bloom year-round, downtown is straight out of the 1950s… there’s even a cute guy to show Kit around… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Anxiety
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Drugging
  • Emesis, on-page
  • Starvation & cannibalism recounted
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a father recounted
  • Murder
  • Kidnapping
  • Drowning

The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer

What’s the point of giving someone a beautiful death if you can’t give yourself a beautiful life?

From the day she watched her kindergarten teacher drop dead during a dramatic telling of Peter Rabbit , Clover Brooks has felt a stronger connection with the dying than she has with the living. After the beloved grandfather who raised her dies alone while she is traveling, Clover becomes a death doula in New York City, dedicating her life to ushering people peacefully through their end-of-life process… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Physical injury & illness including liver failure and death of secondary characters from heart attacks and cancer
  • Grief & loss depiction (theme)
  • Death of parents recounted
  • Death of a grandfather & guardian

The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

Sometimes, the worst day of your life happens, and you have to figure out how to live after it.

So Clementine forms a plan to keep her heart safe: stay busy, work hard, find someone decent to love, and try to remember to chase the moon. The last one is silly and obviously metaphorical, but her aunt always told her that you needed at least one big dream to keep going. And for the last year, that plan has gone off without a hitch. Mostly. The love part is hard because she doesn’t want to get too close to anyone—she isn’t sure her heart can take it… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of an aunt from suicide by an overdose recounted, off-page
  • Death of a grandparent from dementia recounted, off-page

Banyan Moon by Thao Thai

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life—a beautiful lake house, a charming professor boyfriend, and invites to elegant parties that bubble over with champagne and good taste—but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. With both her relationship and carefully planned future now in question, Ann returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Child & domestic abuse
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a grandmother

Family Meal by Bryan Washington

Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai’s ghost won’t leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When Cam returns to his hometown of Houston, he crashes back into the orbit of his former best friend, TJ, and TJ’s family bakery. TJ’s not sure how to navigate this changed Cam, impenetrably cool and self-destructing, or their charged estrangement. Can they find a way past all that has been said – and left unsaid – to save each other? Could they find a way back to being okay again, or maybe for the first time?.. Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Cheating
  • Drug use & abuse
  • Sex addiction
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a partner
  • Death of parents in a car accident recounted

Knockout by Sarah MacLean

With her headful of wild curls and wilder ideas and an unabashed love of experiments and explosives, society has labeled Lady Imogen Loveless peculiar…and doesn’t know she’s one of the Hell’s Belles—a group of vigilantes operating outside the notice of most of London

Thomas Peck is not most of London. The brilliant detective fought his way off the streets and into a promising career through sheer force of will and a keen ability to see things others miss, like the fact that Imogen isn’t peculiar… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Abortion mentioned
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted
  • Murder mentioned
  • Explosions
  • Fire and resulting destruction of property
  • Police corruption

Monstrilio by Gerado Sámano Córdova

Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago’s lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family’s decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses—though curbed by his biological and chosen family’s communal care—threaten to destroy this fragile second chance at life… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Blood & gore depiction including body horror
  • Grief & loss depiction (theme)
  • Death of a child
  • Murder
  • Animal death

Hello Stranger by Katherine Center

Sadie Montgomery never saw what was coming . . . Literally! One minute she’s celebrating the biggest achievement of her life—placing as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society competition—the next, she’s lying in a hospital bed diagnosed with a “probably temporary” condition known as face blindness. She can see, but every face she looks at is now a jumbled puzzle of disconnected features. Imagine trying to read a book upside down and in another language. This is Sadie’s new reality with every face she sees… Read more.

Goodreads

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Sibling abuse recounted*
  • Cheating recounted
  • Prosopagnosia
  • Brain surgery & recovery
  • Grief & loss depiction
  • Death of a parent recounted

*Context: Discussions of the toxic relationship and harassment from a stepsibling including being bullied and being kicked out of school, and being framed for cheating, stealing, and tormenting a classmate resulting in attempted suicide.