What are the top book recommendations for 'heart wrenching and insightful'?

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#1

A classic work on grief, A Grief Observed is C.S. Lewis's honest reflection on the fundamental issues of life, death, and faith in the midst of loss. Written after his wife's tragic death as a way of surviving the "mad midnight moments," A Grief Obse... More details on A Grief Observed

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to ta...
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#2

The #1 New York Times bestselling novel that introduced Khaled Hosseini to millions of readers the world over.

"A vivid and engaging story that reminds us how long his people [of Afghanistan] have been struggling to triumph over the forces of violenc... More details on The Kite Runner

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the fro...
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#3

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

This inspiring, exquisitely observed memoir finds hope and beauty in the face of insurmountable odds as an idealistic young neurosurgeon attempts to answer the question What makes a life worth ... More details on When Breath Becomes Air

PAUL DIED ON MONDAY, March 9, 2015, surrounded by his family, in a hospital bed roughly two hundred yards from the labor and delivery ward where our daughter, Cady, had entered the world eight months ...
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#4

It's 1939 in Molching, Germany, and horror is everywhere. Nazi rule has divided the nation into those who are brutalized and those who are merely oppressed. Hunger, fear, and isolation reign. There are stories here, and who better to tell them than D... More details on The Book Thief

When the coughing stopped, there was nothing but the nothingness of life moving on with a shuffle, or a near-silent twitch. A suddenness found its way onto his lips then, which were a corroded brown c...
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#5

From the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day comes a devastating novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss.

As children, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an excl... More details on Never Let Me Go

My name is Kathy H. I’m thirty-one years old, and I’ve been a carer now for over eleven years. That sounds long enough, I know, but actually they want me to go on for another eight months, until the e...
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#6

Winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, the powerful, classic story about a man who receives an operation that turns him into a genius...and introduces him to heartache.

Charlie Gordon is about to embark upon an unprecedented journey. Born with a... More details on Flowers for Algernon

progris riport 1 martch 3 Dr Strauss says I shoud rite down what I think and remembir and evrey thing that happins to me from now on. I dont no why but he says its importint so they will see if they c...
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#7

MORE THAN TWO MILLION COPIES SOLD

"You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll feel new sympathy for the curmudgeons in your life." -People

Meet Ove. He's a curmudgeon-the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his... More details on A Man Called Ove

He drives a Saab. He’s the kind of man who points at people he doesn’t like the look of, as if they were burglars and his forefinger a policeman’s flashlight. He stands at the counter of a shop where ...
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#8

THE RICHARD & JUDY NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER

'A suspenseful epic' Daily Telegraph

'A triumph' Financial Times

'Heartbreaking' Mail on Sunday... More details on A Thousand Splendid Suns

It happened on a Thursday. It must have, because Mariam remembered that she had been restless and preoccupied that day, the way she was only on Thursdays, the day when Jalil visited her at the kolba. ...
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#9

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The go... More details on A Fine Balance

THE OFFICES OF AU REVOIR EXPORTS looked and smelled like a warehouse, the floors stacked high with bales of textiles swaddled in hessian. The chemical odour of new fabric was sharp in the air. Scraps ...
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#10

A masterpiece of Biblical scope, and the magnum opus of one of America's most enduring authors

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden "the first book," and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set ... More details on East of Eden

I remember my childhood names for grasses and secret flowers. I remember where a toad may live and what time the birds awaken in the summer—and what trees and seasons smelled like—how people looked an...
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