A terrific book.
I’m not so sure about sad but it is thought provoking in the extreme. Anyone interested in animal rights will be impressed by this work.
A day no pigs would die.
I forgot all about “Flowers for Algernon”. (Short story, I’ve not read the novel.) Makes me hopeful, then happy, then angry, then utterly depressed when I read it.
Nearly anything by Edith Wharton. House of Mirth is one slow slide all the way down for Lily Bart, but I read it at least once every other year. Age of Innocence is also very sad and I love it even more than House of Mirth. And Wharton’s novella False Dawn can make me cry no matter how many times I read it.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera always does me in. I cry, and I cry, and then I cry some more.
Damn I love that book. (I think I’ve read it about 15 times - every time I find something new to cry about. )
Thomas Hardy’s “The Mayor of Casterbridge.”
It’s hearbreaking to watch a man fail so miserably in his attempts to atone for earlier sins.
The Magic Journey by John Nichols
Regeneration, by Pat Barker
It’s not fiction, but A Snowflake in My Hand has reduced me to helpless sobbing every time I’ve ever read it.
Ethan Frome isn’t exactly a barrel load of laughs either.
1984
The Painted Bird
;j
It’s unfinished, of course, but the version of the “Tale of Turin Turambar” in Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales is perhaps the best writing I’ve ever read. It might be a good idea to read the Silmarillion version first, though, so you know what all fits into the big middle chunk that never made it into the Unfinished version.
If there’s a Heaven, I hope there’s a typewriter there, so the good Professor can finish all his writings.
Charlotte’s Web is one of the best-written books I’ve ever read, and I’ve read a few.
**Johnny Got his Gun ** always chokes me up, especially the scene where the old man lets the protagonist zork his only daughter, then brings them both breakfast in bed, because he knows what kind of unutterable Hell the kid is going to be walking into.
Of Mice and Men
The ending would bring a tear to my eye if I wasn’t such a manly man who didn’t cry. Damnit, all Lennie wanted was some rabbits! 
Valerie Martin’s A Recent Martyr comes quickly to mind.
The Lord of the Rings isn’t THOROUGHLY sad, but it comes close.
Charlotte’s Web and similarly, The Trumpet of the Swan, which is melancholy though not sob-out-loud sad.
Jude the Obscure for adult fiction. Lord I wanted to hang myself after that book, Sue!!
I find most modern lit pretty morose, though. I mean, it’s not as though I felt terribly skippy after Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, The Namesake, Blind Assassin, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake…(the list goes on to any modern book of “note” I’ve read since the age of 12)
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By Vikram Seth, right? (Just to make sure I’m talking about the same one.) just started this one. Do you think I’ll enjoy it? I didn’t know it was a tragic story because it was an impulse buy. (I salivated over the idea of such a big, thick book.)
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It’s not tragic as much as it is melancholy.