It's not that they've been all that close in the past few years, but sisters Willa and Sawyer Stannard are bonded by the ups and downs of the life they've lived with their mercurial single mother. When Willa is found dead in her apartment from an apparent suicide, Sawyer just knows it's not possible. A cryptic note from the acclaimed broadcast journalist leads police to rule out foul play. Shattered by grief - and obsessed by the idea that her sister's...

Squeezed into a coat closet with his classmates and teacher, first grader Zach Taylor can hear gunshots ringing through the halls of his school. A gunman has entered the building, taking nineteen lives and irrevocably changing the very fabric of this close-knit community. While Zach's mother pursues a quest for justice against the shooter's parents, holding them responsible for their son's actions, Zach retreats into his super-secret hideout and loses...

Two years after the death of his wife, Oliver meets an unusual woman while jogging and begins to fall in love.

"Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summers evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they could...

"'Have you ever heard of supernovas? They shine brighter than anything else in the sky and then fade out really quickly, a short burst of extraordinary energy. I like to think you and Ben were like that . . . in that short time, you had more passion than some people have in a lifetime.' Elsie Porter is an average twentysomething and yet what happens to her is anything but ordinary. On a rainy New Year's Day, she heads out to pick up a pizza for one....

"The day she died was only the beginning... Sam Cooper is on the verge of a happy life-a true feat after his disastrous childhood. Sam's mother, Laurie, died tragically and his father was torn apart by grief. But now after years of silence, Sam's father makes a shocking confession on his deathbed. Who was Laurie Cooper? What happens when you discover you've been lied to for twenty-five years? Sam is determined to find out, but someone wants to silence...

2012 Christy Award finalist, Contemporary series category. Andrew Jones was once one of the few surgeons in the world to have that rare, God-given ability called The Touch. But after failing to save his young fiancée, Faith, at the scene of a car accident, Jones abandons his gift and shuns the operating room. Lara Blair owns a Chicago-based biomedical engineering company developing a surgical tool that will duplicate precisely the movement of a surgeon's...

Seventeen-year-old Quinn provides closure to grieving families by taking on the short-term role of a deceased loved one, until huge secrets come to the surface about Quinn's own past. In a world before The Program.... Quinlan McKee is a closer-- she provides closure to grieving families by "becoming" a deceased loved one between the ages of fifteen and twenty. She's not an exact copy, of course, but she wears their clothes, acts like them, is them...

"Brilliant, dark stories of women's lives by "a very major talent" (Joseph O'Connor, Irish Times) In these visceral, stunningly crafted stories by the author of the much-acclaimed Trespasses, women's lives are etched by deprivation-material, emotional, sexual-but also splashed by beauty, sometimes even joy, as they search for the good in the cards they've been dealt. A wife is abandoned by her new husband in a derelict housing estate. An expectant...

Grieving for eight years after the stillborn birth of her daughter, writer Geniver Loxley is astonished when a stranger claims that the baby was stolen and is still alive, a revelation that strains Geniver's grasp on sanity and her relationship with her husband.