NarratAbility is a searchable directory of books featuring chronic illness, mental health, and disability representation. As of its launch in July 2026, it has over 1500+ books in the directory.
This database has been a genuine labour of love. Every entry has been researched and curated manually, with well over 300 hours spent building it so far. It’s a living directory, which means it is continually growing and improving, and I hope it continues to grow for years to come, with new books, new voices, and new stories that deserve to be discovered.
I hope NarratAbility becomes the go-to resource for readers, reviewers, educators, researchers, and authors looking to discover stories that engage meaningfully with health, illness, disability, and neurodivergence.
How NarratAbility came to be…
During one of the most difficult periods of my own health journey, I found myself in the exhausting limbo of hospital visits, lab tests, and diagnostic uncertainty. I didn’t have answers. I didn’t have a name for what I was experiencing. And while reading, one night, I found a character experiencing the same symptoms and (later diagnosed with) the same condition as me. I remember crying over that book at three in the morning because, for the first time, I felt understood and seen. There was an immense comfort in seeing an experience that had felt so isolating reflected back at me on the page. It reminded me that literature doesn’t just entertain us; it can make us feel seen when we need it most. It felt a lot like someone had taken a boulder off my shoulder.
That book, of course, has stayed with me.
It also deepened an academic interest I’ve had in the ways literature represents health, illness, disability, and the many different ways we move through the world. The personal and the scholarly have always been intertwined for me, and NarratAbility really sits at that intersection.
Over the past year, I’ve watched countless readers ask for recommendations online. During Mental Health Awareness Month, Disability Pride Month, and many other moments throughout the year, my feeds have been filled with people searching for books that reflected their experiences.
Sometimes the requests were incredibly specific: a particular chronic illness, a specific disability, a certain identity. Other times, people were looking for memoirs, accessible non-fiction, or simply a novel that would help them better understand someone else’s experience.
Finding those books, however, often meant relying on fragmented recommendation threads or social media algorithms that decide, seemingly at random, what we get to see.
I kept thinking: wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were simply one place to search?
A place where you could filter by genre, by condition, by disability, or simply browse and build your next reading list without hoping an algorithm surfaces the right recommendation.
That’s the idea of NarratAbility.
At the same time, I hope this database serves a broader purpose. While I absolutely want it to help people find stories that reflect their own lived experiences, I also hope it encourages readers who don’t personally share those experiences to seek these books out. Reading has always been one of our greatest tools for building empathy, and disability, chronic illness, and mental health stories deserve to be read not only by the people who live them, but by everyone.
Welcome to NarratAbility. I hope it helps you find the book you didn’t know you were looking for, and the ones you were 🙂
You were reading a note from Kritika Narula, the curator of this database.