Hello, readers! It is Monday again! As it is Monday, welcome to another #5OnMyTBR update. The rule is relatively simple. I must pick five books from my to-be-read piles that fit the week’s theme.

This week’s theme: Grief

5OnMyTBR is a bookish meme hosted by E. @ Local Bee Hunter’s Nook where you chose five books from your to-be-read pile that fit that week’s theme. If you’d like more info, head over to the announcement post!

Title: H Is for Hawk
Author: Helen Macdonald
Publisher: Grove Press
Publishing Date: 2014
No. of Pages: 279

Synopsis: 

The instant New York Times bestseller and award-winning sensation, Helen Macdonald’s story of adopting and raising one of nature’s most vicious predators has soared into the hearts of millions of readers worldwide. Fierce and feral, her goshawk Mabel’s temperament mirrors Helen’s own state of grief after her father’s death, and together raptor and human “discover the pain and beauty of being alive” (People). H Is for Hawk is a genre-defying debut from a unique and transcendent new voice in literature.

.Title: Grief is the Thing With Feathers
Author: Max Porter
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 114

Synopsis: 

Here he is, husband and father, scruffy romantic, a shambolic scholar – a man adrift in the wake of his wife’s sudden, accidental death. And there are his two sons, who, like him, struggle in their London flat to face the unbearable sadness that has engulfed them. The father imagines a future of well-meaning visitors and emptiness while the boys wander, safe and unsupervised.

In this moment of violent despair, they are visited by Crow – an antagonist, trickster, goad, protector, therapist, and bay-sitter. This self-described “sentimental bird,” at once wild and tender, who “finds human dull except in grief,” threatens to stay with the wounded family until they no longer need him. As weeks turn to months and the pain of loss lessens with the balm of memories, Crow’s efforts are rewarded and the little unit of three begins to recover: Dad resumes his book about the poet Ted Hughes; the boys get on with it, grow up.

Title: Lincoln in the Bardo
Author: George Saunders
Publisher: Random House
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 343

Synopsis: 

February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willlie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth,” the president says at the time. “God has called him home.” Newspapers report that a grief-stricken Lincoln returns, alone, to the crypt several times to hold his boy’s body.

Title: Nora Webster
Author: Colm Tóibín
Publisher: Penguin Books
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 311

Synopsis: 

Nora Webster is recently widowed. Unmoored by her sudden loss and the needs of her children whom she now must raise alone, she faces a future that was never meant to be. But within Nora is a strength – a quiet resolve not to succumb to others’ expectations – and through the discovery of music and gift of friendship, she may just find a way to live again.

Title: The Shack
Author: WM Paul Young
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Publishing Date: 2008
No. of Pages: 246

Synopsis: 

Mackenzie Allen Philip’s youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later, in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, inviting him back to that shack for a weekend.

Against his better judgment, he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant, THE SHACK wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him.