Books like The Last Man

If The Last Man stayed with you, these share its feel: death, melancholy and grief. Each comes with a real page, so you can tell in a minute.

About The Last Man · Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

1.The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi, 1819

Also melancholy and grief. Poetry that captures the profound beauty and crushing weight of existence, tracing the line from idealized youthful hope to the acceptance of universal melancholy.

Nor wilt thou rest forever, weary heart.The last illusion is destroyed,That I eternal thought. Destroyed!I feel all hope and all desire depart,For life and its deceitful joys.Forever rest! Enough! Thy throbbings cease!Naught can requite thy miseries;Nor is earth worthy of thy sighs.Life is a bitter, weary load,The world a slough. And now, repose!Despair no more, but find in DeathThe only boon Fate on our race bestows!
2.Toilers of the Sea

Victor Hugo, 1866

Also dread and solitude. A solitary Guernsey fisherman sets out to salvage a steamship's engine from a rock in open sea, to win a girl who barely notices him.

The year advanced; the time came when the trellises were heavy with roses, and haunted by the butterflies. By little and little, he had come to conceal himself for hours behind her wall, motionless and silent, seen by no one, and holding his breath as Déruchette passed in and out of her garden. Men grow accustomed to poison by degrees.
3.New Moon

Stephenie Meyer, 2006

Also love and grief. A girl who has lost the person she built her life around has to learn how to keep breathing—and whether the old stories in her town are real.

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

Excerpt from New Moon, Stephenie Meyer, Epsilon Yayinevi 2006. Quoted for discovery. Source Rights & removals
4.The Castle of Otranto

Horace Walpole, 1764

Also dread and death. A castle, an enormous helmet fallen from nowhere, and a tyrant with a guilty bloodline: the 1764 novel that invented gothic fiction and is still genuinely strange, funny and frightening.

Manfred, though persuaded, like his wife, that the vision had been no work of fancy, recovered a little from the tempest of mind into which so many strange events had thrown him. Ashamed, too, of his inhuman treatment of a Princess who returned every injury with new marks of tenderness and duty, he felt returning love forcing itself into his eyes; but not less ashamed of feeling remorse towards one against whom he was inwardly meditating a yet more bitter outrage, he curbed the yearnings of his heart, and did not dare to lean even towards pity. The next transition of his soul was to exquisite villainy.
5.The Raven

Edgar Allan Poe, 1845

Also grief and death. A grieving scholar, a midnight raven, and one word that refuses to become comfort. The poem that made grief sound like a knock at the door.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore— While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. “’Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door— Only this and nothing more.”
6.Twice-told tales

Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1837

Also melancholy and solitude. Short fables from Puritan New England: veiled ministers, men who step out of their own lives, and the strange, small hours before dawn.

Poor Wakefield! little knowest thou thine own insignificance in this great world. No mortal eye but mine has traced thee. Go quietly to thy bed, foolish man, and on the morrow, if thou wilt be wise, get thee home to good Mrs. Wakefield and tell her the truth. Remove not thyself even for a little week from thy place in her chaste bosom. Were she for a single moment to deem thee dead or lost or lastingly divided from her, thou wouldst be woefully conscious of a change in thy true wife for ever after. It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections—not that they gape so long and wide, but so quickly close again.
7.Bag of Bones

Stephen King, 1998

Also grief and death. A grieving novelist returns to a Maine lake house and finds a haunted history that won't stay buried.
8.Poems by Emily Dickinson, Three Series, Complete

Emily Dickinson, 1890

Also death and melancholy. Short poems that fit in a single scroll and still leave you rearranging your view of hope, fear, nature and death. Read them slowly, once aloud, and they get stranger.
9.The Fault in Our Stars

John Green, 2012

Also love and grief. A witty, dying teenager meets a boy who refuses to be solemn, and together they argue with oblivion, love, and the author of an unfinished book.
10.The Iliad

Homer, -750

Also death and grief. A war stalled outside a city, a commander's wounded pride, and the best fighter in the army refusing to fight. Seven weeks of rage, grief and armour.
11.The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Brontë, 1847

Also melancholy. In a world governed by rigid social expectations, one woman fights to protect herself and her son from a marriage that is destroying them.
12.Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems

Christina Rossetti, 1862

Also love and melancholy. Poems of goblin fruit, ghostly visitors and stubborn refusals, by a Victorian who made longing sound like a nursery rhyme.