Books about autism

We asked our followers on Instagram what books about autism they would recommend to others and below are their answers. All book descriptions are from Amazon.com. 

1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children with Autism or Asperger's This one-stop-shop of solutions, explanations, and strategies guides the reader to quickly find ideas that speak to the variety of developmental levels, learning styles, and abilities inherent in children with autism and Asperger's.

All Birds Have Anxiety Life as a bird can be stressful! From worrying about airplanes, windows, and getting enough worms to eat, it is clear that birds can be anxious beings. Through a light-touch, quizzical depiction of bird behaviour, All Birds Have Anxiety uses colourful images and astute explanations to explore with gentle humour what it means to live with anxiety day-to-day, and how to begin to deal with it.

An Early Start for Your Child with Autism Cutting-edge research reveals that parents can play a huge role in helping toddlers and preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) connect with others and live up to their potential. This encouraging guide from the developers of a groundbreaking early intervention program provides doable, practical strategies you can use every day. 

Aspergirls: Empowering Females with Asperger Syndrome This is a must-have handbook written by an Aspergirl for Aspergirls, young and old. Rudy Simone guides you through every aspect of both personal and professional life, from early recollections of blame, guilt, and savant skills, to friendships, romance and marriage. 

Atypical: Life with Asperger's in 20 1/3 Chapters Diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism, Jesse Saperstein has struggled since childhood with many of the hallmark challenges of his condition-from social awkwardness and self-doubt to extreme difficulty with change and managing his emotions. 

AUTISM - Behind The Locked Door: Understanding My Life as an Autistic Paul Louden, an adult on the spectrum, provides astonishing and unique insights into how the world appears to him compared to those wired neuro-typically. He bravely shares personal and sometimes painful experiences to bridge understanding between those with autism and those without. 

Born on a Blue Day Bestselling author Daniel Tammet (Thinking in Numbers) is virtually unique among people who have severe autistic disorders in that he is capable of living a fully independent life and able to explain what is happening inside his head.

Carly's Voice: Breaking Through Autism In this international bestseller, father and advocate for Autism awareness Arthur Fleischmann blends his daughter Carly’s own words with his story of getting to know his remarkable daughter—after years of believing that she was unable to understand or communicate with him.

House Rules: A Novel When your son can’t look you in the eye . . . does that mean he’s guilty? Jacob Hunt is a teen with Asperger’s syndrome. He’s hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, though he is brilliant in many ways. But he has a special focus on one subject—forensic analysis. A police scanner in his room clues him in to crime scenes, and he’s always showing up and telling the cops what to do. And he’s usually right.

How to Speak Dolphin Lily loves her half-brother, Adam, but his autism has taken over her life. Lily can't make friends or go out after school -- caring for Adam has forced Lily to become as much mother as sister. All Lily wants is for her stepfather, Don, to acknowledge that Adam has a real issue, and to find some kind of program that can help him. Then maybe she can have a life of her own. 

Different From his early childhood, Nathan was bursting with creativity and uncontainable energy, struggling not only with learning issues but also with anxiety and OCD. He saw the world through his own unique lens―one that often caused him to be labeled as “bad,” “troubled,” or someone in need of “fixing.”

Engaging Autism: Using the Floortime Approach to Help Children Relate, Communicate, and Think An essential guide to the highly recommended Floortime approach for treating children with any of the autism spectrum disorders (ASD). 

In a Different Key: The Story of Autism Nearly seventy-five years ago, Donald Triplett of Forest, Mississippi, became the first child diagnosed with autism. Beginning with his family’s odyssey, In a Different Key tells the extraordinary story of this often misunderstood condition, and of the civil rights battles waged by the families of those who have it. 

Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism Imagine being trapped inside a Disney movie and having to learn about life mostly from animated characters dancing across a screen of color. A fantasy? A nightmare? This is the real-life story of Owen Suskind, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind and his wife, Cornelia. An autistic boy who couldn't speak for years, Owen memorized dozens of Disney movies, turned them into a language to express love and loss, kinship, brotherhood.

Life with Lauren: An Odyssey into Autism This is the story of strikingly beautiful Lauren Elizabeth de Villiers who is autistic and lives in a silent world of her own. 

Maria and Me: A father, a daughter (and Autism) Giving a father's insight into life with his daughter Maria, aged 12, who has autism, this comic tells the story of their week holiday in the Canary Islands, Spain. Delightful illustrations and dialogue between father and daughter show the day-to-day challenges that people with autism and their carers face, and how Miguel and Maria overcome them.

Mockingbird Caitlin has Asperger's. The world according to her is black and white; anything in between is confusing. Before, when things got confusing, Caitlin went to her older brother, Devon, for help. But Devon was killed in a school shooting, and Caitlin's dad is so distraught that he is just not helpful. Caitlin wants everything to go back to the way things were, but she doesn't know how to do that. Then she comes across the word closure--and she realizes this is what she needs. 

More Than Words Updated to reflect the most current view on naturalistic models of communication, this beautifully illustrated guidebook provides a step-by-step guide for parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and other social communication difficulties. Presented in a user friendly format, the book s research-based strategies show parents how to turn everyday activities with their child into opportunities for interaction and communication.

The Autism Mom's Survival Guide (for Dads, too!): Creating a Balanced and Happy Life While Raising a Child with Autism Given the daily challenges of raising a child with autism, it’s easy for parents to lose themselves and for their overall quality of life to plummet. Susan Senator interweaves the voices of autism parents, researchers, and professionals to offer guidance and encouragement on how to find happiness and fulfillment in the midst of the struggles of raising an autistic child.

The Autistic Brain: Helping Different Kinds of Minds Succeed Temple Grandin may be the most famous person with autism, a condition that affects 1 in 59 children. Since her birth in 1947, our understanding of it has undergone a great transformation, leading to more hope than ever before that we may finally learn the causes of and treatments for autism. 

The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome This is the definitive handbook for anyone affected by Asperger's syndrome (AS). Now including a new introduction explaining the impact of DSM-5 on the diagnosis and approach to AS, it brings together a wealth of information on all aspects of the syndrome for children through to adults.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

The Journal of Best Practices: A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome, and One Man's Quest to Be a Better Husband The warm and hilarious bestselling memoir by a man diagnosed with Asperger syndrome who sets out to save his marriage.

The Reason I Jump You’ve never read a book like The Reason I Jump. Written by Naoki Higashida, a very smart, very self-aware, and very charming thirteen-year-old boy with autism, it is a one-of-a-kind memoir that demonstrates how an autistic mind thinks, feels, perceives, and responds in ways few of us can imagine. 

The Spark Kristine Barnett’s son Jacob has an IQ higher than Einstein’s, a photographic memory, and he taught himself calculus in two weeks. At nine he started working on an original theory in astrophysics that experts believe may someday put him in line for a Nobel Prize, and at age twelve he became a paid researcher in quantum physics.

Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is a gifted animal scientist who has designed one third of all the livestock-handling facilities in the United States. She also lectures widely on autism—because Temple Grandin is autistic, a woman who thinks, feels, and experiences the world in ways that are incomprehensible to the rest of us. 

Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism Autism therapy typically focuses on ridding individuals of “autistic” symptoms such as difficulties interacting socially, problems in communicating, sensory challenges, and repetitive behavior patterns. Now Dr. Barry M. Prizant offers a new and compelling paradigm: the most successful approaches to autism don’t aim at fixing a person by eliminating symptoms, but rather seeking to understand the individual’s experience and what underlies the behavior.

Unstrange Minds: Remapping the World of Autism When anthropologist Richard Grinker's daughter was diagnosed with autism in 1994, it occurred in only about 1 in every 10,000 children. Within ten years, rates had skyrocketed, and the media was declaring autism an epidemic. Unstrange Minds documents Grinker's quest across the globe to discover the surprising truth about why autism is so much more common today.

What Autism Gave Me: A Devastating Diagnosis To A Triumphant Life Supported by documentation and interviews, Michael's heartfelt memoir traces the sustained challenges and turbulent journey he faced. His life was plagued by failures, negative results, rejections from schools, an inability to complete simple karate moves or participate in activities-all of which confirmed the hopeless situation. But Michael was surrounded by support, and he was encouraged to keep trying no matter how many times he failed.