This book is a meditation on loss and solitude and a celebration of the transfiguring power of human-dog devotion. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and literary mentor, she finds herself burdened with the dog he has left behind, a huge Great Dane that is not allowed in her Manhattan apartment building. Nevertheless, she refuses to be separated from the dog, and becomes increasingly obsessed with the animal's care, determined...

"Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still...

"February 1862. The Civil War is less than one year old. The fighting has begun in earnest, and the nation has begun to realize it is in for a long, bloody struggle. Meanwhile, President Lincoln's beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, lies upstairs in the White House, gravely ill. In a matter of days, despite predictions of a recovery, Willie dies and is laid to rest in a Georgetown cemetery. "My poor boy, he was too good for this earth," the president...

Looking back at a tragic event that occurred during his thirteenth year, Frank Drum explores how a complicated web of secrets, adultery, and betrayal shattered his Methodist family and their small 1961 Minnesota community.

Comfort Snowberger is well acquainted with death since her family runs the funeral parlor in their small southern town, but even so the ten-year-old is unprepared for the series of heart-wrenching events that begins on the first day of Easter vacation with the sudden death of her beloved great-uncle Edisto.

Grieving over the death of her husband from cancer, thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton finds her personal and professional world in a shambles and, in an attempt to reinvent her life, moves to Ashland, Oregon.

"After her mother dies, twelve-year-old Talia McQuinn goes to the Arctic with her father, a whale researcher. Over the course of one summer, and through several unlikely friendships, Talia learns that stories have the power to connect us, to provide hope, and to pull us out of the darkness"--

Tess Medina is dealing with the loss of her beloved father, a new school, and the troubling fact that the thing she enjoys most in life, baking, seems to be making her increasingly ill--something she is trying to hide from everybody.

Gathering at their Berkshires summer home to mourn the loss of youngest sibling and journalist adventurer Leo, who was killed while on assignment in Iraq, the Frankels endure shared grief and private challenges that shape their views about family.

Following her mother's death in the early 1900s, thirteen-year-old Harry lives on Aunt Sarah's farm where an accident with her spirited colt leaves her a changed young woman.