The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness—751 Books to Cure What Ails You. By Ella Berthoud and Susan Elderkin. Penguin Press; 420 pages; $26.95. Canongate; £17. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

ON A therapist’s couch, a patient complains of heartache, work stress and a creepy sense of anomie. The session ends with a prescription: Ali Smith’s 2011 novel, “There but for the”, a darkly amusing book about a man who escapes a dinner party by locking himself in the host’s spare bedroom, which he refuses to leave for months. It is an inspired tonic—absurd and vicariously satisfying. Days later a letter prescribes another eight carefully selected books, from Thomas Hardy’s “Tess of the d’Urbervilles” to Iris Murdoch’s “The Green Knight”, each one a salve for a rather literary sort of problem.

This is “Shelf Help”, a service from the School of Life, an enterprise launched by Alain de Botton, a British writer, that caters to the financially comfortable and emotionally discontented (with lectures and programmes about “how to balance work with life”, for example, or “how to be creative”). Customers seeking bibliotherapy trade £80 ($130) for an hour of chat with an insightful and dauntingly well-read “therapist”, who then crafts a bespoke reading list designed to meet someone’s special needs—perhaps some New York-based classics with a touch of romance? Or a few futuristic escapist fantasies, with a dash of hubris? There is something for everyone.

Fiction is often more “powerful than self-help books”, explains Ella Berthoud, a bibliotherapist at the School of Life, whose “patients” range from the newly retired to the newly divorced. She reckons that a good book leaves people “feeling altered in a fundamental way”, and life is too short for bad books.

But if a session of bibliotherapy seems a bit dear, help is at hand with “The Novel Cure”, an A-Z of literary remedies by Ms Berthoud and Susan Elderkin, a novelist and fellow bibliophile. This entertaining tour of 2,000 years of literature matches beloved books with specific ailments, from “abandonment” (try Kent Haruf’s heartening “Plainsong”) to “zestlessness” (go for the “tumult and tumble” of E.L. Doctorow’s “Ragtime”).

The result is astute and often amusing. Readers who have lost a job can find solace in Kingsley Amis’s hapless “Lucky Jim” or Herman Melville’s rebellious “Bartleby, the Scrivener”. Married to the wrong person? Try George Eliot’s “ruthlessly unsentimental” “Middlemarch”. Anxieties about flatulence? Reach for a dose of John Kennedy Toole’s brilliantly funny “A Confederacy of Dunces”.

Written in plain and inviting language, “A Novel Cure” is a charming addition to any library. Time spent leafing through its pages is inspiring—even therapeutic, if not quite therapy.