Sixteen-year-old Georgia Richter feels conflicted about the funeral home her parents run—especially because she has the ability to summon ghosts. With one touch of any body that passes through Richter Funeral Home, she can awaken the spirit of the departed. With one more touch, she makes the spirit disappear, to a fate that remains mysterious to Georgia. To cope with her deep anxiety about death, she does her best to fulfill the final wishes of the deceased whose ghosts she briefly revives. Then her classmate Milo's body arrives at Richter—and his spirit wants help with unfinished business, forcing Georgia to reckon with her relationship to grief and mortality.

A dazzling and darkly comic memoir about coming of age in a black funeral home in Baltimore Sheri Booker was only fifteen when she started working at Wylie Funeral Home in West Baltimore. She had no idea her summer job would become nine years of immersion into a hidden world. Reeling from the death of her beloved great aunt, Sheri found comfort in the funeral home and soon had the run of the place. With AIDS and gang violence threatening to wipe out a generation of black men, Wylie was never short on business. As families came together to bury one of their own, Booker was privy to their most intimate moments of grief and despair. But along with the sadness, Booker encountered moments of dark humor: brawls between mistresses and widows, and car crashes at McDonald’s with dead bodies in tow. While she never got over her terror of the embalming room, Booker learned to expect the unexpected and to never, ever cry. Nine Years Under offers readers an unbelievable glimpse into an industry in the backdrop of all our lives.

“[Evokes] both Jeanette Winterson and Ian McEwan . . . an elegiac and uplifting novel about the indissoluble bonds between mothers and daughters, and a reminder of how the imagination can set you free.” — The Guardian On Ruby’s thirteenth birthday, a wish she didn’t even know she had suddenly comes true: the couple who raised her aren’t her parents at all. Her real mother and father are out there somewhere, and Ruby becomes determined to find them. Venturing into the forest with nothing but a suitcase and the company of her only true friend—the imaginary Shadow Boy—Ruby discovers a group of siblings who live alone in the woods. The children take her in, and while they offer the closest Ruby’s ever had to a family, Ruby begins to suspect that they might need her even more than she needs them. And it’s not always clear what’s real and what’s not—or who’s trying to help her and who might be a threat. Told from shifting timelines, and the alternating perspectives of teenage Ruby; her mother, Anna; and even the Shadow Boy, The Doll Funeral is a dazzling follow-up to Kate Hamer’s breakout debut, The Girl in the Red Coat, and a gripping, exquisitely mysterious novel about the connections that remain after a family has been broken apart.

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.

In this beautifully written memoir, Tracy ONeal Daniel Lee takes readers on a candid and emotional journey through her life as a child of divorce, a preachers kid, a young bride, and a mother of a special needs infant son. After her sons shocking death, Tracy, who was later blessed with six daughters, sadly endured more trials, one being her diagnosis of the deadly autoimmune disease sarcoidosis. Later, while assuming shed finally be allowed to live the happily-ever-after life shed always dreamed of, another awful trial emerged causing her to angrily walk away from the God shed loved and served since childhood. After eventually finding her way back to Him, God blessed His prodigal daughter dramatically, proving to her that she was still His girl. As Tracys brother, I have had a front row seat for most of her major life events. Now, through this memoir, she is opening her life up to the world, exposing the good, the bad and the ugly. Throughout this book, readers get an opportunity to experience her roller coaster ride and understand how it is possible to hold on through the bad and enjoy and celebrate all the good in life. Tracy helps us to see that it is really true that all things work together for good to them that love God. William B. ONeal, Sr. Pastor, Author, Motivational Speaker, & Trainer Fairburn, GA

A true story of love, loss, and the mother-daughter relationship across generations, this biography describes Rebecca Huntley's search for her maternal grandmother's story. Following the death of her Italian "Nonna," Huntley discovers that there was much unknown about the kind-hearted, quiet individual she thought she knew. With evocative stories and tender honesty, Huntley explores the young life of the woman who cooked masterfully and embroidered daily and those of the men and women in her family from Northern Queensland during World War II. In the process, old issues with her own mother are awakened and the concept of what it really means to be a mother is contemplated.

A thrilling novel from #1 international bestselling author Sara Blaedel, author of The Forgotten Girls "One of the best I've come across." -- Michael Connelly "Sara Blaedel is a force to be reckoned with. She's a remarkable crime writer who time and again delivers a solid, engaging story that any reader in the world can enjoy." -- Karin Slaughter "One can count on emotional engagement, spine-tingling suspense, and taut storytelling from Sara Blaedel." -- Sandra Brown Already widowed by the age of forty, Ilka Nichols Jensen, a school portrait photographer, leads a modest, regimented, and uneventful life in Copenhagen. Until unexpected news rocks her quiet existence: Her father--who walked out suddenly and inexplicably on the family more than three decades ago--has died. And he's left her something in his will: his funeral home. In Racine, Wisconsin. Clinging to this last shred of communication from the father she hasn't heard from since childhood, Ilka makes an uncharacteristically rash decision and jumps on a plane to Wisconsin. Desperate for a connection to the parent she never really knew, she plans to visit the funeral home and go through her father's things--hoping for some insight into his new life in America--before preparing the business for a quick sale. But when she stumbles on an unsolved murder, and a killer who seems to still be very much alive, the undertaker's daughter realizes she might be in over her head . . .

"Olivia's parents were killed fourteen years ago. Now, new evidence reopens the case . . . and she finds herself involved"--

When their father calls the police on a local drug dealer, two little girls witness the brutal murders of their parents. Years later, the twins have spent their entire lives preparing as they ruthlessly pursue the killer. As beautiful as they are deadly, will love quench their thirst for vengeance or will it be the one thing that tears what binds them? Payback is a bitch. This time it s coming in twins.