Books like

Books like The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity

12 books with a reading profile close to The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity by Esther Perel. Deep, inward-looking and contemplative; a moderate read.

1

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

by Bessel van der Kolk

Also deep and inward-looking · analytical, narrative

Bessel van der Kolk explains how traumatic stress physically reconfigures the brain’s wiring, specifically impacting the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex.
2

Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

In Love’s Executioner, Irvin D.
3

Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

Caden Bosch is a bright teenager who is slipping into mental illness.
4

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family

by Robert Kolker

analytical, narrative

Don and Mimi Galvin raised twelve children in mid-century Colorado, only to see six of their sons develop schizophrenia.
5

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, psychology

Tsukuru Tazaki is a railway engineer in Tokyo whose life is defined by a sudden, unexplained rejection from his tight-knit group of high school friends.
6

Heaven

by Mieko Kawakami

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

In a Japanese middle school, a fourteen-year-old boy suffers daily physical and psychological torment from his classmates because of his lazy eye.
7

Transcendent Kingdom

by Yaa Gyasi

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

Gifty is a PhD candidate in neuroscience at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where she studies reward-seeking behavior in mice to understand the neural pathways of addiction and depression.
8

Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, psychology

Set in 1980s Glasgow, the narrative follows young Shuggie Bain as he grows up in public housing schemes shaped by deindustrialization and poverty.
9

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

by Michael Pollan

Also deep and contemplative · analytical, narrative

Michael Pollan chronicles the resurgence of clinical research into lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, tracing their transition from fifties psychiatric tools to prohibited counterculture symbols.
10

My Dark Vanessa

by Kate Elizabeth Russell

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

In 2000, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye begins a sexual relationship with her forty-two-year-old English teacher, Jacob Strane, at a Maine boarding school.
11

Real Life

by Brandon Taylor

Also deep and inward-looking · narrative, psychology

Wallace, a Black queer doctoral student from Alabama, navigates a tense weekend at a predominantly white Midwestern university.
12

Cat’s Eye

by Margaret Atwood

Also inward-looking and contemplative · narrative, psychology

Elaine Risley, a middle-aged painter, returns to Toronto for a retrospective of her art.

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