"I never got the chance to know you and play with you, but I think of you a lot. A child eagerly waits for their younger sibling to be born. They help Daddy decorate the room, pick out toys with Grandma and build a sled with Grandpa. Auntie and Uncle are excited too, and the narrator helps them to pick out an exciting book and prepare a magic trick to show the baby. When Mommy and Daddy come back from the hospital, there is no baby with them -- only...

"After Grandpa dies, a girl and her mother take the trip he had planned for her, kayaking along the Pacific west coast to look for the whales that he loved. The trip will do them good, Mom says, but the girl isn't sure. How can that be true when grandpa isn't there? And how will they find a whale in all that water, anyway? There is so much to see as they paddle through white-tipped waves and calm coves: glowing moon jellies, fluttering anemones and...

"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...

Kate is a bit of a mess. Two years after losing her young husband Cameron, she's grieving, solo parenting, working like mad at her university fundraising job, always dropping the ball--and yet clinging to her sense of humor. Lurching from one comedic crisis to the next, she also navigates an overbearing mom and a Tinder-obsessed best friend who's determined to matchmake Kate with her hot new neighbor. When an in-flight problem leaves Kate and her...

"Grieving mother Magos cuts out a piece of her deceased eleven-year-old son Santiago's lung. Acting on fierce maternal instinct and the dubious logic of an old folktale, she nurtures the lung until it gains sentience, growing into the carnivorous little Monstrilio she keeps hidden within the walls of her family's decaying Mexico City estate. Eventually, Monstrilio begins to resemble the Santiago he once was, but his innate impulses--though curbed...

"An environmental journalist in Washington, DC, Rachel has shunned her New England working-class family for years. Divorced and childless in her middle age, she's a true independent spirit with the pain and experience to prove it. Coping with challenges large and small, she thinks her life is in free fall--until she's summoned home to deal with the aftermath of her mother's death. Then things really fall apart. Surrounded by a cast of sometimes comic,...

"Eleanor is doing just fine. Yes, she's keeping secrets from her husband. Sure, she quit her PhD program and is now conducting unauthorized research on illegitimately procured mice. And, true, her mother is dead, and Eleanor has yet to go through her things. But what else is she supposed to do? What shape can grief take when you didn't understand the person you've lost? Resisting at every turn, Eleanor tumbles blindly down a path toward confronting...

"This gorgeous, haunting saga tells the story of modern Turkey and its diverse communities through the life of a gravestone maker. In the city of Mardin, near Turkey's border with Syria, the orphaned Avdo finds purpose when an old mason takes him on as an apprentice. From Master Josef, he learns the importance of their art, which looks after the dead and bears witness to their lives. Avdo then travels the country and meets a woman he loves wholeheartedly,...

"A form-shifting and soul-crunching chronicle of grief and crisis, Venita Blackburn's debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, is a fleet-footed marvel of self-discovery and storytelling that explores the depths of humankind's capacity for harm and healing. With the daring, often hilarious imagination that made her an acclaimed short-fiction innovator, Blackburn crafts a layered, page-turning reckoning with what it means to be alive, dead, and...

Three months after surviving a mass shooting at a Parisian bistro, Mia is determined to reconstruct the sequence of events by bonding with fellow survivors, and piecing together their stories to rediscover her own.