Death Theme

 Coming in at a close second is another of life and literature’s universal themes: death.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find many books that don’t deal with death in some way or another. Whether it’s an exploration of grief after the loss of a loved one, an existential musing on the nature of the life-and-death cycle, or a question about what, if anything, comes ‘after’, death is a popular topic across many genres.

Here are some examples of books that explore this theme:

• The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is, in fact, narrated by Death himself, exploring the nature of his role in taking human lives against the backdrop of WWII Germany.
• In The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold explores death through another unusual perspective: that of a girl who has recently been murdered, and who watches over her family in a sort of limbo state while trying to come to terms with her own death.
• The Fault in Our Stars features teenage characters coming to terms with their mortality in the face of terminal illness.
• J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series encompasses many themes (most, if not all of the ones on this list, in fact!). But perhaps the most pervasive theme of the series is death, which is explored constantly from the death of Harry’s parents through to Voldemort’s final attempts to become immortal.