I've been thinking about what distinguishes a book that is merely sad from a book that is truly devastating. The category doesn't correlate with subject matter — I've read books about terrible things that left me unmoved and books about small domestic losses that wrecked me.

My theory is that devastation requires trust. You have to care about the characters enough that their losses feel like losses you have experienced rather than losses you have observed. This requires the author to have made the characters real, which takes time and precision. Books that rush the character-building and go straight for emotional payoff don't land.

The books that have actually devastated me: The Remains of the Day, Housekeeping, A Little Life, Never Let Me Go, and The Farthest Shore — the last for reasons I find hard to articulate, having to do with the specific quality of Ged's loss in a world where magic is a given and then taken away.