8 best positive books: Uplift your spirits with these feel-good reads

Best: Overall

In the wrong hands, this remarkable debut about the friendship between two women – one teenage, one elderly – who meet at an art therapy class held by their hospital, could have been unbearably schmaltzy. Instead, it’s a beautiful, funny, and incredibly assured story filled with rich characters. Lenni is 17, alone, and living on a ward for patients with terminal cancer. Margot, 83, is on the next ward along, and when they realise they have lived for a combined 100 years, they start an art project to tell a story for each one of those years that leads to some hilarious and tragic realisations for them both.

Best: Unorthodox Cinderella

This 1934 novel is another treasure unearthed by Persephone – the publishing house that specialises in forgotten books that deserve more time in the sun. Like many women in her village of Silverstream, Miss Buncle is troubled by money worries (we can glean that this is thanks to the Depression of the 1930s). Reluctant to turn to keeping chickens, let alone to fire her maid, she turns to literature and writes an incredibly thinly-veiled portrait of life in the village and, crucially, its residents.

When the book is published, it becomes a smash hit, but then trouble hits Miss Buncle as it’s not only her publisher (convinced that his star author is a genius satirist) who wants to find out who the author is, but her neighbours as well, who start to recognise themselves and want to know who has been committing them to the page.

Best: “Fish out of water” story

Simsion originally wrote this as a screenplay, and cinematic flourishes and cliffhangers run through this brisk, funny, and at times outrageous story of Australian genetics professor Don Tillman who, at 39, decides he is ready to get married and embarks on a project to find a wife. He subsequently becomes embroiled in helping a doctorate student, Rosie, to find her birth father. Along the way, he realises that what he is looking for in a mate doesn’t mean much if there isn’t chemistry.

While never overtly stated, Tillman’s tics and devotion to routine are meant to show he is autistic, and the book has come in for criticism from people with ASD who are tired of Rain Man-style depictions of this neurotype. However, Don and Rosie’s companionable sparring, and their wider circle of colleagues, make for a completely charming story that is as engaging as it is funny. The sequels, sadly, don’t live up to The Rosie Project’s sparkle.

Best: “Never too late” story

The perfect read for anyone worrying that they’ve left it too late, whatever “it” is. In 64-year-old Albert Entwistle’s case, it’s his personal life. Having focused on his job as a postman for the 18 years since his mother died, he is distraught to discover he is being forced to retire in three months’ time. With the prospect of nothing to do – and nobody to care for – he tentatively reaches out to the people around him to see if he can track down the man he loved, and let go, as a teenager, and find a community in the process.

Cain’s interviews with older British men about their experiences of falling in love when homosexuality was first illegal, and then looked upon with disgust, form an extremely moving postscript that will inspire you to keep pushing for progress and equality.

Best: Saga

Whether for the first time or the 20th, this gorgeous book (and the novels that follow it) is always worth reading. Based on a fiction serial Maupin wrote for a San Francisco newspaper, this lively story is as frothy as it is heartfelt, spanning the stories of gay, straight, trans, queer and undecided characters as they find themselves (and love) in 1970s San Francisco.

Centred around a group of lodgers boarding at 28 Barbary Lane, and watched over by their benignly mysterious landlady, Anna Madrigal, there are enough cliffhangers to distract you from whatever ails you. Maupin, now living in south London, found global fame for his series, and these Tales (readapted as a contemporary TV series by Netflix in 2019) are as engaging as when they were first published.

Best: Coming-of-age story

To say that this American playwright is good with words is like saying that Lin-Manuel Miranda, her collaborator on the hit stage- and soon-screen musical In The Heights, is quite good at music. She wrote the book for both versions of that show and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Water By The Spoonful.

This electrifying memoir, which is her first book, brings together the threads of her Philadelphia upbringing as the daughter of a Puerto Rican mother and Jewish father, never quite fitting in and trying to find her place in the world. Part coming-of-age story and part lyrical tale of the women she grew up with, this is a wonderful book about finding your voice and telling the stories that helped build you as a person.

Best: Screwball comedy

Not many books have the laugh-out-loud per page quotient of Semple’s second novel, except maybe Tina Fey’s Bossypants or something by PG Wodehouse. This hysterically funny and surprisingly moving story follows young Bee as she tries to track down her missing mother, the titular Bernadette, a genius-level architect who for years has suffered from creative block, and found herself hopelessly adrift in the poisonous pool of the PTA at Bee’s school. This is an immaculately written story with a huge heart, as well as being one of the sharpest, funniest novels of recent times. A classic.

Best: Advice

Havrilesky, a longtime art critic, has also become the internet’s most beloved agony aunt, thanks to her lengthy, impassioned (and inevitably spot-on) replies to readers’ questions sent to New York Magazine’s The Cut. In this collection of essays, she highlights the beauty and stark difficulty of being a human being in a world where perfection is considered a realistic goal. In prose that is variously savage, incisive and screamingly funny, she deconstructs the messaging that has led us to constantly try to upgrade ourselves and asks the reader to stop chasing a mythical and shinily perfect future, and start living in the present moment – however imperfect.