Top 10 books about loneliness

The creepy and weirdly original Mrs. Munck by Ella Leffland should have made that list. In fact it could have taken the place of Journal of a Solitude by the wildly over-rated May Sarton; a book-length pity party Sarton threw for herself when she discovered that some reviewers didn't think she was the greatest female poet of the age. Amusingly, Sarton's biographer was to point out that for all Sarton's mooning prose about the need for solitude, she apparently disliked her own company sufficiently that she kept herself surrounded by acolytes and admirers, and seldom managed to tough out being completely on her own for more than a few days at a time. But Laing's The Lonely City surely does belong on that list, and is one of the most unsettling works I've read on the stigmas that attach to 'the lonely people'.