The Secret History
Donna Tartt
1992
Books with the “Melancholic” trope
A quiet sadness and a sense of loss run through the story and the lives of its characters.
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66 books10% of the catalog
Atmosphere and mood · Melancholic
Books with this trope
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V. E. Schwab
2020
Persuasion
Jane Austen
1817
It Ends with Us
Colleen Hoover
2016
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice
1976
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
2014
The Time Machine
H. G. Wells
1895
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
2005
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
1856
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse
1927
The Book Thief
Markus Zusak
2005
Looking for Alaska
John Green
2005
The Fault in Our Stars
John Green
2012
Thirteen Reasons Why
Jay Asher
2007
A Monster Calls
Patrick Ness
2011
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
1999
Kristin Lavransdatter
Sigrid Undset
1920
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
1891
The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
1920
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
1937
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
1963
They Both Die at the End
Adam Silvera
2017
Normal People
Sally Rooney
2018
A Thousand Ships
Natalie Haynes
2019
The Witch's Heart
Genevieve Gornichec
2021
Elric of Melniboné
Michael Moorcock
1972
The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
1989
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold
2002
The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger
2003
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
2012
The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender
Leslye Walton
2014
Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward
2017
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
2017
The Astonishing Color of After
Emily X.R. Pan
2018
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
2020
The Kamogawa Food Detectives
Hisashi Kashiwai
2013
Replay
Ken Grimwood
1986
The Little Friend
Donna Tartt
2002
Then She Was Gone
Lisa Jewell
2017
The Push
Ashley Audrain
2021
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
2012
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
1999
Anna Karenina
Leo Tolstoy
1878
A Hero of Our Time
Mikhail Lermontov
1840
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
Victor Hugo
1831
The Mad Women's Ball
Victoria Mas
2019
The Last Unicorn
Peter S. Beagle
1968
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu Kawaguchi
2015
Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt
2022
The Last Werewolf
Glen Duncan
2011
Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry
1985
The Sisters Brothers
Patrick deWitt
2011
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque
1929
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré
1974
The Fisherman
John Langan
2016
Me Before You
Jojo Moyes
2012
The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
1951
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky
1866
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
1967
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
1958
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
2007
The King of Elfland's Daughter
Lord Dunsany
1924
Earth Abides
George R. Stewart
1949
Severance
Ling Ma
2018
Life After Life
Kate Atkinson
2013
The Dry
Jane Harper
2016
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Star-Crossed LoversRelated tropes
Dark Fantasy
A bleak fantasy world without clear good or evil, where magic always comes at a high price.
Cozy Mystery
A gentle whodunit full of tea, small towns, and amateur sleuthing rather than graphic violence.
Creeping Dread
Horror that slowly builds a quiet sense that something is terribly wrong, instead of using jump scares or gore.
Magical Realism
Magic and the strange are woven naturally into everyday, ordinary life.