“What are the best books for solitude?” We looked at 274 books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

Some of the best fiction and nonfiction books for and about solitude. The top 19 books, all appearing on 2 or more lists, are ranked below with images, description, and links. The remaining titles, as well as the sources we used, can be found at the bottom of the page.

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The Top Books For Quiet and Solitude

19 .) Celebrating Time Alone: Stories of Splendid Solitude by Lionel Fisher

Lists It Appears On:

• Online Psychology Degree
• Lone Wolf

“Choosing to enrich your life by yourself is very different from being “lonely.” In Celebrating Time Alone, Lionel Fisher shares his personal reflections on solitude, brought into sharp focus by living alone for six years on a remote Pacific Northwest beach.

He supplements his own reflections by interviewing men and women in sixteen states, in both rural and urban settings, who have stretched the envelope of their aloneness to Waldenesque proportions.

All the material is intended to offer counsel, inspiration, affirmation, insights, encouragement, and advice on living well alone, to help learn to use solitude and periods of aloneness for self-discovery and personal growth—whether they choose aloneness or have it thrust on them.”

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18 .) Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Lone Wolf

“With eye-opening statistics, original data, and vivid portraits of people who live alone, renowned sociologist Eric Klinenberg upends conventional wisdom to deliver the definitive take on how the rise of going solo is transforming the American experience.
Klinenberg shows that most single dwellers—whether in their twenties or eighties—are deeply engaged in social and civic life. There’s even evidence that people who live alone enjoy better mental health and have more environmentally sustainable lifestyles. Drawing on more than three hundred in-depth interviews, Klinenberg presents a revelatory examination of the most significant demographic shift since the baby boom and offers surprising insights on the benefits of this epochal change.”

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17 .) I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

Lists It Appears On:

• The Hungry Reader
• Goodreads 2

“Robert Neville may well be the last living man on Earth . . . but he is not alone.

An incurable plague has mutated every other man, woman, and child into bloodthirsty, nocturnal creatures who are determined to destroy him.

By day, he is a hunter, stalking the infected monstrosities through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn…”

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16 .) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Lists It Appears On:

• The Bookshelf of Emily J.
• The Guardian

Orphaned into the household of her Aunt Reed at Gateshead, subject to the cruel regime at Lowood charity school, Jane Eyre nonetheless emerges unbroken in spirit and integrity. She takes up the post of governess at Thornfield, falls in love with Mr. Rochester, and discovers the impediment to their lawful marriage in a story that transcends melodrama to portray a woman’s passionate search for a wider and richer life than Victorian society traditionally allowed.

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15 .) Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Lone Wolf

“I am here alone for the first time in weeks,” May Sarton begins this book, “to take up my ‘real’ life again at last. That is what is strange―that friends, even passionate love,are not my real life, unless there is time alone in which to explore what is happening or what has happened.” In this journal, she says, “I hope to break through into the rough, rocky depths,to the matrix itself. There is violence there and anger never resolved. My need to be alone is balanced against my fear of what will happen when suddenly I enter the huge empty silence if I cannot find support there.”

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14 .) Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Lists It Appears On:

• The Bookshelf of Emily J.
• Goodreads 2

The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them “the truth.” After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional–but is it more true?

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13 .) Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo & William Patrick

Lists It Appears On:

• About Great Books
• Lone Wolf

University of Chicago social neuroscientist John T. Cacioppo unveils his pioneering research on the startling effects of loneliness: a sense of isolation or social rejection disrupts not only our thinking abilities and will power but also our immune systems, and can be as damaging as obesity or smoking. A blend of biological and social science, this book demonstrates that, as individuals and as a society, we have everything to gain, and everything to lose, in how well or how poorly we manage our need for social bonds.

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12 .) Notes From the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Lists It Appears On:

• Lone Wolf
• Goodreads 2

From the primitive peasant who kills without understanding that he is destroying a human life, to the anxious antihero of Notes From Underground—a man who both craves and despises affection—this volume and its often-tormented characters showcase Dostoyevsky’s evolving outlook on man’s fate. The compelling works presented here were written at distinct periods in the author’s life, at decisive moments in his groping for a political philosophy and a religious answer.

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11 .) One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Lists It Appears On:

• The Bookshelf of Emily J.
• The Hungry Reader

One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of the rise and fall, birth and death of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendia family. Inventive, amusing, magnetic, sad, and alive with unforgettable men and women—brimming with truth, compassion, and a lyrical magic that strikes the soul—this novel is a masterpiece in the art of fiction.

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10 .) Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto by Anneli Rufus

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Lone Wolf

The Buddha. Rene Descartes. Emily Dickinson. Greta Garbo. Bobby Fischer. J. D. Salinger: Loners, all—along with as many as 25 percent of the world’s population. Loners keep to themselves, and like it that way. Yet in the press, in films, in folklore, and nearly everywhere one looks, loners are tagged as losers and psychopaths, perverts and pity cases, ogres and mad bombers, elitists and wicked witches. Too often, loners buy into those messages and strive to change, making themselves miserable in the process by hiding their true nature—and hiding from it. Loners as a group deserve to be reassessed—to claim their rightful place, rather than be perceived as damaged goods that need to be “fixed.” In Party of One Anneli Rufus — a prize-winning, critically acclaimed writer with talent to burn — has crafted a morally urgent, historically compelling tour de force—a long-overdue argument in defense of the loner, then and now. Marshalling a polymath’s easy erudition to make her case, assembling evidence from every conceivable arena of culture as well as interviews with experts and loners worldwide and her own acutely calibrated analysis, Rufus rebuts the prevailing notion that aloneness is indistinguishable from loneliness, the fallacy that all of those who are alone don’t want to be, and wouldn’t be, if only they knew how.

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9 .) Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• The Hungry Reader

Daniel Defoe relates the tale of an English sailor marooned on a desert island for nearly three decades. An ordinary man struggling to survive in extraordinary circumstances, Robinson Crusoe wrestles with fate and the nature of God.

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8 .) Solitude: Seeking Wisdom in Extremes: A Year Alone in the Patagonia Wilderness by Robert Kull

Lists It Appears On:

• Lone Wolf
• Goodreads

Years after losing his lower right leg in a motorcycle crash, Robert Kull traveled to a remote island in Patagonia’s coastal wilderness with equipment and supplies to live alone for a year. He sought to explore the effects of deep solitude on the body and mind and to find the spiritual answers he’d been seeking all his life. With only a cat and his thoughts as companions, he wrestled with inner storms while the wild forces of nature raged around him. The physical challenges were immense, but the struggles of mind and spirit pushed him even further.

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7 .) Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse

Lists It Appears On:

• Lone Wolf
• Goodreads 2

Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meerts a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. The tale of the Steppenwolf culminates in the surreal Magic Theater for mad men only.

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6 .) The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Lists It Appears On:

• Bustle
• Goodreads 2

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner’s words, “gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague.”

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5 .) The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz

Lists It Appears On:

• Lone Wolf
• Bustle

In this international classic, Paz has written one of the most enduring and powerful works ever created on Mexico and its people, character, and culture. Compared to Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses for its trenchant analysis, this collection contains his most famous work, “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” a beautifully written and deeply felt discourse on Mexico’s quest for identity that gives us an unequalled look at the country hidden behind “the mask.” Also included are “The Other Mexico,” “Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude,” “Mexico and the United States,” and “The Philanthropic Ogre,” all of which develop the themes of the title essay and extend his penetrating commentary to the United States and Latin America.

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4 .) Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Lists It Appears On:

• Bustle
• Goodreads

At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone. Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

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3 .) Drinking the Rain by Alix Kates Shulman

Lists It Appears On:

• What Shoul I Read Next?
• Lone Wolf
• Goodreads 2

“At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again.

In this luminous, spirited book, she charts her subsequent path as she learned not simply the joys of meditative solitude, but to integrate her new awareness into a busy, committed, even hectic mainland life.”

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2 .) Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr

Lists It Appears On:

• What Shoul I Read Next?
• Goodreads
• Lone Wolf

A pre-eminent work in self-help and popular psychology literature, Solitude was seminal in challenging the psychological paradigm that “interpersonal relationships of an intimate kind are the chief, if not the only, source of human happiness.” Indeed, most self-help literature still places relationships at the center of human existence. Lucid and lyrical, Storr’s book argues that solitude ranks alongside relationships in its impact on an individual’s well-being and productivity, as well as on society’s progress and health. Citing numerous examples of brilliant scholars and artists—from Beethoven and Kant to Anne Sexton and Beatrix Potter—he argues that solitary activity is essential not only for geniuses, but often for the average person as well. For nearly three decades, readers have found inspiration and renewal in Storr’s erudite, compassionate vision of the human experience—and the benefits and joy of solitude.

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1 .) Walden by Henry David Thoreau

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Bustle
• Goodreads 2
• What Should I Read Next?

In 1845, Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin by Walden Pond. With the intention of immersing himself in nature and distancing himself from the distractions of social life, Thoreau sustained his retreat for just over two years. More popular than ever, “Walden” is a paean to the virtues of simplicity and self-sufficiency.

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The Remaining Best Books For Quiet & Solitude

The Top Solitude Book Lists