Kachemak Winkel's mother used to tell him that Alaska doesn't forgive mistakes. A lot of mistakes where made the day she died in a plane crash with Kache's father and brother-- and Kache still feels responsible. He fled Alaska for good, but now his aunt Snag insists on his return. Returning to his family's cabin in the woods, he finds smoke rising from the chimney and a mysterious Russian woman hiding from her own troubled past. Nadia has stayed there,...

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.

Fifteen-year-old loner Jason lives a precarious life with his mentally ill father, who thinks he is an Argonaut and wears tinfoil ear guards as he prepares for imminent attack from the Furies. When Jason was 6, his father tried to bury him alive, and his nightmares of suffocation continue to haunt him. Now that his mother has died from a stroke, Jason struggles to care for his needy father alone and with few resources. To help him cope, he creates...

"Having forged a new identity as a gay man in New York, Daniel Henriquez returns to the floodlands where he went to high school, to mourn Aubrey, the self-identified "redneck" girl he loved back then. His track team buddies--Twig, a long-distance runner; Desmond, a sprinter; Des's girlfriend, Egypt; and Jess, Aubrey's best friend--help him reckon with who they are to him, and he to them. Recklessly, he confronts the good-ole-boy responsible for Aubrey's...

When a young black teen is murdered, his two best friends decide to keep his memory alive by promoting his music -- rhymes that could turn any hangout into a party -- with the help of his younger sister, Jasmine, who is out for justice. As the buzz builds, it forces Quadir, Jarrell, and Jasmine, to each confront the death in their own ways. Brooklyn, 1998. When their best friend Steph is killed, Quadir and Jarrell don't want his tracks to lie forgotten....

Two brothers meet at the remote fence line separating their cattle ranches in the lonely outback. In an isolated belt of Western Australia, they are each other's nearest neighbor, their homes four hours' drive apart. The third brother lies dead at their feet. Something caused Cam, the middle child who had been in charge of the family homestead, to die alone in the middle of nowhere. So the eldest brother returns with his younger sibling to the family...

Reeling from the death of her cousin, Hannah concocts a risky plan to enroll in her cousin's elite private school and find who gave her the lethal pills, but the deeper Hannah goes the more she risks losing everything. A year ago Hannah MacLaren's cousin and best friend Sophie died of an overdose. Drowning in grief, Hannah became obsessed with one question: Who gave Sophie those pills? She enrolls at her cousin's fancy private school with a new look...

"Erin and her friends from college, now in their mid-twenties, are shaken by the death of Silas, one of their own. They are plunged into a waking nightmare when they take a pill Silas learned of that allows them to see-and interact with-ghosts"--

After John Tetherly and Becca Copaken die in a freak car accident an hour after their wedding, their families are left to bridge stark class and cultural divides, and eventually forge deep-rooted bonds thanks to the twin deities of love and music. Becca's family is well off, from New York, and summers in Red Hook, Maine, a small coastal town where John's blue-collar single mother, Jane, cleans houses for a living. They interact, awkwardly, over how...

Alternating between present day and flashbacks, multiracial Filipina-American teen Marisol tries to figure out who she really is in the wake of her mother's sudden death. Marisol and her mom were forever locked in an argument with no beginning and no end. When her mother dies suddenly, Marisol is left with no one to fight against, haunted by all the things that she both said and didn't say. When Marisol sleeps with her best friend's boyfriend;- and...