Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Virginia

An award-winning best-seller from the UK recounts how the author, an experienced falconer grieving the sudden death of her father, endeavored to train for the first time a dangerous goshawk predator as part of her personal recovery.

H Is for Hawk

f791a39c-4270-4caa-92f1-c2e47d4b818f-1

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Louisiana

Granddad Bill’s Song #50

Kathryn Erskine

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Arizona

Mockingbird

cacfcebf-ffa9-440a-be1d-493372e5897c-1

Sheryl Sandberg

Adam. Grant

Pencil mark on inside cover. Slightly worn dust jacket. See pictures. 

New York

Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy

"The author's experience with grief after the sudden death of her husband, combined with social science on resilience"--

Option B

666a7254-1827-468b-b65b-65014ac9fc2f-1

Jason Gurley

No dust jacket. Ex library book. Cover isn't the prettiest, but the rest of the book is in tip top shape.

Alabama

A Novel

Years after an accident claims her twin's life and triggers her father's abandonment and mother's ascent into alcoholism, Eleanor begins to experience supernatural dissociations that reveal her parents' unhappy pasts and her role in helping them heal.

Eleanor

40cded1e-eb4e-4593-9c54-748ee9c394b0-1

#hardcover #fiction #grief #historicalfiction #drama #contemporary


Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

New Jersey

Wally Lamb's two previous novels, She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, struck a chord with readers. They responded to the intensely introspective nature of the books, and to their lively narrative styles and biting humor. One critic called Wally Lamb a "modern-day Dostoyevsky," whose characters struggle not only with their respective pasts, but with a "mocking, sadistic God" in whom they don't believe but to whom they turn, nevertheless, in times of trouble (New York Times). In his new novel, The Hour I First Believed, Lamb travels well beyond his earlier work and embodies in his fiction myth, psychology, family history stretching back many generations, and the questions of faith that lie at the heart of everyday life. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, at once a meditation on the human condition and an unflinching yet compassionate evocation of character. When forty-seven-year-old high school teacher Caelum Quirk and his younger wife, Maureen, a school nurse, move to Littleton, Colorado, they both get jobs at Columbine High School. In April 1999, Caelum returns home to Three Rivers, Connecticut, to be with his aunt who has just had a stroke. But Maureen finds herself in the school library at Columbine, cowering in a cabinet and expecting to be killed, as two vengeful students go on a carefully premeditated, murderous rampage. Miraculously she survives, but at a cost: she is unable to recover from the trauma. Caelum and Maureen flee Colorado and return to an illusion of safety at the Quirk family farm in Three Rivers. But the effects of chaos are not so easily put right, and further tragedy ensues. While Maureen fights to regain her sanity, Caelum discovers a cache of old diaries, letters, and newspaper clippings in an upstairs bedroom of his family's house. The colorful and intriguing story they recount spans five generations of Quirk family ancestors, from the Civil War era to Caelum's own troubled childhood. Piece by piece, Caelum reconstructs the lives of the women and men whose legacy he bears. Unimaginable secrets emerge; long-buried fear, anger, guilt, and grief rise to the surface. As Caelum grapples with unexpected and confounding revelations from the past, he also struggles to fashion a future out of the ashes of tragedy. His personal quest for meaning and faith becomes a mythic journey that is at the same time quintessentially contemporary—and American. The Hour I First Believed is a profound and heart-rending work of fiction. Wally Lamb proves himself a virtuoso storyteller, assembling a variety of voices and an ensemble of characters rich enough to evoke all of humanity.

The Hour I First Believed

de475322-1323-49a6-adcc-1d13e7ad5f48

Karen Raney

Missouri

A stunning debut novel about a teenage girl and her mother as they grapple with first love, family secrets, and tragedy.

Maddy is sixteen. Smart, funny, and profound, she has loyal friends, a mother with whom she's unusually close, a father she's never met, devoted grandparents, and a crush on a boy named Jack. Maddy also has cancer. Living in the shadow of uncertainty, she is forced to grow up fast.

All the Water in the World is the story of a family doing its best when faced with the worst. Told in the alternating voices of Maddy and her mother, Eve, the narrative moves between the family's lake house in Pennsylvania; their home in Washington, DC; and London, where Maddy's father, Antonio, lives. Hungry for experience, Maddy seeks out her first romantic relationship, finds solace in music and art, and tracks down Antonio. She continually tests the depths and limits of her closeness with her mother, while Eve has to come to terms with the daughter she only partly knows, in a world she can't control.

With unforgettable voices that range from tender to funny, despairing to defiant, this novel illuminates the transformative power of love, humor, and hope.

All the Water in the World

01d196f1-edbf-4173-9d63-5f91ae1aa8d1-1

Helen Macdonald

From the afterlife--a new perspective on your life

"I know this may come as a shock, and you know I'm not fond of using stale one-liners, but--'reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.' I'm as alive now as I was on the day we met, except, maybe, more so."

If the dead could speak, don't you wonder what they would say to those of us they've left behind? What would they tell us to soothe our sorrow for their loss, calm our fears of what happens when we die, and fire us up to live the best possible lives we can right now?

In pages filled with wisdom, humor, and, yes, joy, New York Times best-selling author Mike Dooley explores our most pressing and profound questions about the afterlife--and this life--from the fresh perspective of those who have made the transition to the next phase. Among the revelations and insights they share:

· We were ready; you are not.
· There's no such thing as a devil or hell.
· We're sorry for any pain we may have caused.
· Your pets are just as crazy, brilliant, and loving here as they were there.
· Nothing we say can prepare you for the beauty of the moment you arrive.

You'll learn that our loved ones are not lost to us; that our time on earth is both a school and an adventure; that, all appearances to the contrary, life truly is fair; and that we have it in us to reshape our own fortunes, starting today.

The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU

bca27bdb-8b69-42d0-b0f5-63d80c43dd4b-1

John Irving

Nice solid book. No writing, dog ears or tears. Front page is a little worn where it looks like a label was removed (see photo). Outside page edges have a couple smudges but mostly clean (see photos). Spine completely intact. Cover looks in perfect condition. Dust jacket has light shelf wear. 

Michigan

A story of loss, grief, and the power of second chances and the will to change.

The Fourth Hand

f350b4a9-11bd-4097-b57a-e027f6039018-1

#paperback #fiction #mystery #detective #aspersions #thefallingbetweenus #lovestory #grief #love #compelling

Georgia

At fifteen, Joshua Blackbird becomes an international singing star but, as his hometown girlfriend relates, after more than a year, the pressures and dangers of fame take a toll and "Shu" disappears.

Holding on to You

b2980b42-addc-4091-b861-1187e3ecb845-1

Melanie Conklin

Contains a ‘belongs to the library of’ stamp in the front.

Indiana

"Thyme Owens moves across the country with her family so her younger brother can take part in a promising cancer drug trial, and though all she wants is for him to get better, adjusting to life in Manhattan is anything but easy."--

Counting Thyme

be3d53a0-40bf-48e2-9e8e-31430d675f9f-1

Ruta Sepetys

Massachusetts

Between Shades of Gray

07165c82-da8b-431a-8fa8-98d2059c940f-1

Natasha Trethewey

A Daughter's Memoir

A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became. With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother's life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985. Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.

Memorial Drive

e292bb2a-5437-423d-a721-cb5555361917-1

Marv Weidner

Carol GoldfainDavis

North Carolina

A Story of Love, Loss, and Learning to Live Again

Grief is an organic, unstructured experience. There is no schedule or correct timeframe for grief. The emotions we have while grieving, and when we experience them, are as individualized as the people experiencing them. Everyone's grief is unique to them, and any expectation to the contrary is counterproductive to the grieving process and counterintuitive to anyone who has lost a loved one. Much of this book is about how Marv Weidner found the resilience and sense of purpose to begin living his life again. If you've lived through that kind of loss, you will likely see and hear echoes of your own experience-your own grief. This book addresses a variety of topics that may speak to your experience or your desire for healing and moving forward. Those topics include harnessing resiliency, facing grief head on, embracing loss as an integral part of life, staying present in the midst of trauma, de-stressing in healthy ways, reaffirming or discovering a new sense of purpose, and much more. When we embrace the impermanence of life, we can experience the joy of living every day and can more naturally live with a sense of gratitude. This is powerful at any time but especially so when we are faced with a health crisis or a loss. When the Rocks Sing will be the perfect companion on your journey.

When the Rocks Sing

de871863-92f4-4c9e-9bda-bb93bdf97e0e-0

Marisa Renee Lee

Puerto Rico

Living with Loss

In Grief is Love, author Marisa Renee Lee reveals that healing does not mean moving on after losing a loved one-healing means learning to acknowledge and create space for your grief. It is about learning to love the one you lost with the same depth, passion, joy, and commitment you did when they were alive, perhaps even more. She guides you through the pain of grief-whether you've lost the person recently or long ago-and shows you what it looks like to honor your loss on your unique terms, and debunks the idea of a grief stages or timelines. Grief is Love is about making space for the transformation that a significant loss requires.

In beautiful, compassionate prose, Lee elegantly offers wisdom about what it means to authentically and defiantly claim space for grief's complicated feelings and emotions. And Lee is no stranger to grief herself, she shares her journey after losing her mother, a pregnancy, and, most recently, a cousin to the COVID-19 pandemic. These losses transformed her life and led her to question what grief really is and what healing actually looks like. In this book, she also explores the unique impact of grief on Black people and reveals the key factors that proper healing requires: permission, care, feeling, grace and more.

The transformation we each undergo after loss is the indelible imprint of the people we love on our lives, which is the true definition of legacy. At its core, Grief is Love explores what comes after death, and shows us that if we are able to own and honor what we've lost, we can experience a beautiful and joyful life in the midst of grief.

Grief Is Love

5d1b7593-25af-48b3-b5ed-a3c856181452-1

#hardcover #autobiography #memoir #baseball #MLB #travel #loss #grief #cancer #photography 

Ohio

Love, Loss, and the Ultimate Baseball Adventure

Join Katie Russell, cancer survivor and baseball enthusiast, as she embarks on the adventure of a lifetime: visiting all thirty Major League Baseball parks in one season. Along the way, she shares memories and reflections of her baseball-loving mother, who died of cancer before her and Katie could check this item off their bucket list together.

A Season with Mom

91fdd084-83a2-499e-bb1d-8ddb91880533-1

Jeff Hoffmann

Nebraska

Decades ago, four friends concealed a deadly secret–but not all lies stay buried in this psychological suspense for fans of Ashley Winstead and Alison Gaylin. Thirty years ago, Tommy, Malcolm, Henry, and Kevin were best friends graduating high school, brothers almost, until the night they did something terrible. The decision to keep hidden what they did in that parking lot shattered their friendship and warped their lives. But when Kevin, struggling with a heroin addiction, drives his motorcycle into the side of a truck, the other three find themselves together again—at Kevin’s funeral. When they meet Kevin’s wife Naomi at the wake, they can tell that she knows everything, and when they learn that she’s a reporter, they’re terrified. When she sends them to visit one of their victims from that night—at the nursing home where he’s been suffering for decades—they do as they’re told, even though they know it won’t stop there. After watching her husband pay a steep price for keeping the friends’ secret, Naomi has crafted a plan to make Tommy, Malcolm, and Henry pay their fair share. When the three men decide to fight back, they’re forced to decide just how far they’ll go this time.

Like It Never Happened

37c5bfef-f1fb-4aaa-afae-e99f3fe8b7d6-0

Anne Valente

One of Refinery29's Best Reads for October One of Ploughshares "Most Necessary Books for the End of 2016" The lives of four teenagers are capsized by a shocking school shooting and its aftermath in this powerful debut novel, a coming-of-age story with the haunting power of Station Eleven and the bittersweet poignancy of Everything I Never Told You. As members of the yearbook committee, Nick, Zola, Matt, and Christina are eager to capture all the memorable moments of their junior year at Lewis and Clark High School—the plays and football games, dances and fund-drives, teachers and classes that are the epicenter of their teenage lives. But how do you document a horrific tragedy—a deadly school shooting by a classmate? Struggling to comprehend this cataclysmic event—and propelled by a sense of responsibility to the town, their parents, and their school—these four "lucky" survivors vow to honor the memories of those lost, and also, the memories forgotten in the shadow of violence. But the shooting is only the first inexplicable trauma to rock their small suburban St. Louis town. A series of mysterious house fires have hit the families of the victims one by one, pushing the grieving town to the edge. Nick, the son of the lead detective investigating the events, plunges into the case on his own, scouring the Internet to uncover what could cause a fire with no evident starting point. As their friend pulls farther away, Matt and Christina battle to save damaged relationships, while Zola fights to keep herself together. A story of grief, community, and family, of the search for understanding and normalcy in the wake of devastating loss, Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down explores profound questions about resiliency, memory, and recovery that brilliantly illuminate the deepest recesses of the human heart.

Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

b78fb13b-fbe4-442b-b35b-3a401a9a4e92-1

Ethan Joella

Minnesota

From the author of A Little Hope--a Read with Jenna Bonus Pick--comes an enormously powerful and life-affirming novel about three individuals whose lives intersect in unforeseen ways.

Set in a close-knit Pennsylvania suburb in the grip of winter, A Quiet Life follows three people grappling with loss and finding a tender wisdom in their grief.

Chuck Ayers used to look forward to nothing so much as his annual trip to Hilton Head with his wife, Cat--that yearly taste of relaxation they'd become accustomed to in retirement, after a lifetime of working and raising two children. Now, just months after Cat's death, Chuck finds that he can't let go of her things--her favorite towel, the sketchbooks in her desk drawer--as he struggles to pack for a trip he can't imagine taking without her.

Ella Burke delivers morning newspapers and works at a bridal shop to fill her days while she anxiously awaits news--any piece of information--about her missing daughter. Ella adjusts to life in a new apartment and answers every call on her phone, hoping her daughter will reach out one day.

After the sudden death of her father, Kirsten Bonato set aside her veterinary school aspirations, finding comfort in the steady routine of working at an animal shelter. But as time passes, old dreams and new romantic interests begin to surface--and Kirsten finds herself at another crossroads.

In this beautifully crafted and profoundly moving novel, three parallel narratives converge in poignant and unexpected ways, as each character bravely presses onward, trying to recover something they have lost. Emotionally riveting and infused with hope, A Quiet Life celebrates humanity in the midst of uncertainty.

A Quiet Life

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Affinity Konar

A New York Times Notable Book An Amazon Best Book of the Year A Barnes & Noble Discover Pick An Indie Next Pick A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year A Flavorwire Best Book of the Year An Elle Best Book of the Year "One of the most harrowing, powerful, and imaginative books of the year" (Anthony Doerr) about twin sisters fighting to survive the evils of World War II. Pearl is in charge of: the sad, the good, the past. Stasha must care for: the funny, the future, the bad. It's 1944 when the twin sisters arrive at Auschwitz with their mother and grandfather. In their benighted new world, Pearl and Stasha Zagorski take refuge in their identical natures, comforting themselves with the private language and shared games of their childhood. As part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo, the girls experience privileges and horrors unknown to others, and they find themselves changed, stripped of the personalities they once shared, their identities altered by the burdens of guilt and pain. That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears. Stasha grieves for her twin, but clings to the possibility that Pearl remains alive. When the camp is liberated by the Red Army, she and her companion Feliks--a boy bent on vengeance for his own lost twin--travel through Poland's devastation. Undeterred by injury, starvation, or the chaos around them, motivated by equal parts danger and hope, they encounter hostile villagers, Jewish resistance fighters, and fellow refugees, their quest enabled by the notion that Mengele may be captured and brought to justice within the ruins of the Warsaw Zoo. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it. A superbly crafted story, told in a voice as exquisite as it is boundlessly original, MISCHLING defies every expectation, traversing one of the darkest moments in human history to show us the way toward ethereal beauty, moral reckoning, and soaring hope.

Mischling

ef1f65b0-6343-453a-8680-7583eeb11c8c-1

Lily King

Maine

An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman. 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 clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

Writers and Lovers

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Kathleen Glasgow

Kentucky

Tiger, sixteen, has been pushing away from her overprotective mother, but when her mother dies suddenly Tiger must learn to live when it feels she is surrounded by darkness.

How to Make Friends with the Dark

a410e749-4078-4f70-91f3-f160b56e4c89-1

Jennifer Niven

West Virginia

This exhilarating and heart-wrenching love story is about a girl who learns to live from a boy who intends to die.

Browse by categories

Save this search

Helen Macdonald

H Is for Hawk

Jane Yolen

Granddad Bill’s Song #50

Kathryn Erskine

Mockingbird

Sheryl Sandberg; Adam. Grant

Option B

Jason Gurley

Eleanor

Wally Lamb

The Hour I First Believed

Karen Raney

All the Water in the World

Helen Macdonald

H Is for Hawk

Mike Dooley

The Top Ten Things Dead People Want to Tell YOU

John Irving

The Fourth Hand

Ash Parsons

Holding on to You

Melanie Conklin

Counting Thyme

Ruta Sepetys

Between Shades of Gray

Natasha Trethewey

Memorial Drive

Marv Weidner; Carol GoldfainDavis

When the Rocks Sing

Marisa Renee Lee

Grief Is Love

Katie Russell Newland

A Season with Mom

Jeff Hoffmann

Like It Never Happened

Anne Valente

Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down

Ethan Joella

A Quiet Life

Affinity Konar

Mischling

Lily King

Writers and Lovers

Kathleen Glasgow

How to Make Friends with the Dark

Jennifer Niven

All the Bright Places