5 sad girl books to read under the sun

If you are avid readers or simply like to keep up with the latest titles to show off at company dinners, your FYP will probably be invaded by the so-called sad girl books. Rivista Studio, in a recent article, defines them as "stories of depression, medications, psychotic crises, bad dates, in which, however, in the end, the protagonist always comes out unharmed, always looking splendid, even after an overdose or ghosting." While the trend is relatively recent in Italy, in the United States, publishers have been courting female acedia for years, back when Tumblr was a far more toxic environment than TikTok, and all forms of malaise were not just recounted but celebrated. Relatively new voices like Sally Rooney, Megan Dolan, Otessa Moshfegh, Naoise Dolan, join classics like Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar and Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life, creating a new literary sub-genre dedicated to young women eager to see themselves reflected in what they read. So, to not feel excluded from the trend and to enjoy a dark novel under the beach umbrella, here is our list of Sad Books for the summer.

The Witch - Johanne Lykke Holm

Rafaela is nineteen years old when she reaches the town of Strega, in the Alps, to work as a maid at the Olympic hotel. The days are marked by an alienating routine, dictated by the three housekeepers who teach Rafaela how to wash, cook, and prepare the rooms. But the guests are slow to arrive. In the meantime, the girls get lost in the woods, secretly smoke, admire the mountains, but their training is infiltrated by increasingly strict rules. Rafa and the others start to feel like one single body, experiencing the same nightmares, until the arrival of the first guests triggers a series of events. A modern gothic fable, as well as a haunting allegory of patriarchal culture, built on rituals and sacrifices handed down from one generation to another. Johanne Lykke Holm narrates the violence and the courage necessary to stop it.

The Idiot - Elif Batuman

I have not yet decided whether Selin suffers from chronic depression or simply teenage apathy. The fact remains that nothing seems to excite her, not even her lover, for whom she surely reserves words of affection, but with the enthusiasm of a hearse. There appears to be a total discrepancy between what others see in Selin and what Selin thinks of herself. In the first case, we have a spontaneous girl, capable of taking a plane to the ends of the earth without a second thought, and in the second, a young girl with insecurities and a conflicting relationship with her own hair, unable even to return a call after missing it. One thing we agree on: it is difficult to be objective about oneself. The idiot is a very sincere and plausible novel about how complex it is to find one's place in the world, assuming it is even found, because we are still searching.

Megan Nolan - Acts of Desperation

Acts of Desperation it is not a love story, but rather a story of obsession, about what it means to live for the desires of others, and the willingness to be loved at all costs. The plot revolves around two main characters: Emma, a woman with remarkable intelligence and strong will, and Thomas, a man with unsettling charisma who cultivates a dominant personality. By overturning certainties, moralisms, claims, and clichés, Nolan provides us with a profound analysis of human relationships and the mechanisms of control and manipulation that can creep into them. A story that tackles complex themes such as power and submission, but precisely because of this, it is able to stimulate and fascinate us.

The Vegetarian - Han Kang 

"I had a dream", with this seemingly innocent sentence, Yeong-hye's first daily acts of revolution begin, quietly, with the refusal to eat meat, then to cook it, and finally to consume any food at all. We are not told why the protagonist suddenly becomes a vegetarian, vegan, fasting: her body thins and disappears, translucent skin giving way to veins and covering her bone structure like a veil. Hang's narrative is enriched with powerful and evocative images, like painted bodies entwined in passion, a nude figure in the forest under a pouring rain, Freudian dreams mingled with memories, showing us how simplicity, at times, can be the most powerful form of communication.

Euforia - Elin Cullhed 

The portrait of the perfect young woman embodying the American dream but concealing the shadow of depression: this is what emerges in The Bell Jar and sixty years later in Euforia, Elin Cullhed's first novel for adults, freely inspired by the biography of Sylvia Plath. Cullhed developed a true obsession with the life and work of the American poet when she found herself in a similar position to Sylvia's: a mother, the wife of a writer, struggling to find space and time for her own work. Perhaps, in order to exorcise and to embrace a better fate than Plath's, the only choice left for her was to write about it.