Wherever It Leads is, at one level, a novel about quantum physics. At another level, it is a novel about grief — specifically, about the kind of grief that turns into a question, and the kind of question that turns into a life's work.
The books on this list are the books that shaped the emotional world of the novel. They are not all science books. They are not all grief memoirs. They are books that take both science and grief seriously — that refuse to sentimentalise either, that follow both wherever they lead.
*The Year of Magical Thinking* — Joan Didion
The best book about grief I have read. Didion's account of the year following her husband's sudden death is precise, unsentimental, and honest about the specific irrationality of grief — the magical thinking that the title names, the conviction that the dead person is still somehow reachable, that the right action could undo what has happened.
The book is not about science. But it is about the collision between the mind's need for meaning and the world's indifference to that need — which is, in a different register, what Wherever It Leads is about.
*When Breath Becomes Air* — Paul Kalanithi
A neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer writes about the relationship between medicine, mortality, and meaning. The book is precise about the science — Kalanithi is a trained neuroscientist as well as a surgeon — and honest about the limits of what the science can say about the questions that matter most.
The passage in which Kalanithi describes the moment he understood that his patients' brains were not just organs but the physical substrate of their personalities, their memories, their loves — that to operate on a brain was to operate on a person — is one of the most precise accounts of the relationship between neuroscience and personhood I have read.
*The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks* — Rebecca Skloot
A science journalist traces the history of HeLa cells — the first human cells to be successfully grown in a laboratory, taken without consent from a Black woman named Henrietta Lacks who died of cervical cancer in 1951. The book is about science and ethics and race and the specific way that grief and injustice interact when the people who are grieving have no power.
It is also, unexpectedly, a book about what it means for a person to persist after death — not in any metaphysical sense, but in the specific sense that Henrietta Lacks's cells are still alive, still dividing, still being used in laboratories around the world, seventy years after her death.
*Grief Is the Thing with Feathers* — Max Porter
A prose poem about a man and his two sons in the aftermath of the mother's death, visited by Crow — the trickster figure from Ted Hughes's poetry. The book is not realistic. It is not trying to be. It is trying to do something that realistic prose cannot do: to render the specific texture of grief, the way it distorts time and perception and the sense of self.
I read it while writing the scenes in Wherever It Leads in which Sarah Chen is dealing with her mother's illness, and it changed how I wrote those scenes.
*Being Mortal* — Atul Gawande
A surgeon writes about the medicine of dying — about the way that modern medicine has become very good at prolonging life and very bad at thinking about what makes life worth living. The book is precise about the science and honest about its limits, and it is one of the clearest accounts I have read of the collision between the medical understanding of death and the human experience of dying.
The chapter about his father's death is one of the most honest pieces of writing about grief I have encountered.
These are the books that shaped the emotional world of Wherever It Leads. They are not the only books that did. But they are the ones I would recommend to readers who want to understand where the novel came from.