The Best Children’s Books About Loneliness

Loneliness arrives early and without warning. It is the toddler at the top of the stairs discovering the house has gone quiet, the five-year-old holding a birthday invitation that never got handed to her, the nine-year-old who has decided—on solid evidence, he thinks—that lunch is a table for one. Children’s books are unusually good at this, maybe because they can hand the feeling to a firefly, a cactus, a china rabbit, or a polka-dotted elephant in a very large city and let a child recognize it from a safe distance. The best ones do not rush the rescue. They sit in the empty room first, which is exactly what makes the knock at the door land.

Drawing from Bookroo’s collection of 265 books about loneliness, our editors chose stories that name the feeling honestly and then show a way out of it—usually one friend, one letter, one unexpected hug. Start with our fixed shortlist of 13 favorites, then browse by age: first books about waiting for someone to come back, picture books for the years a child starts counting who did and didn’t play with them, and longer novels for readers who are old enough to want the whole truth about it.