The End Or Something Like That


Book Description

As the first anniversary of her best friend Kim's death nears, fourteen-year-old Emmy tries to fulfill her promise to make contact with Kim's spirit, but she gains new perspective from unexpected connections.




The End of Something Wonderful


Book Description

With gentle humor and quirkiness, this sympathetic book demonstrates how to say goodbye to a beloved pet and give it a proper sendoff. “[The End of Something Wonderful is] really good. It’s funny and sardonic and it gets to be touching at the end.” —Betsy Bird, School Library Journal Children love their pets very much—and when the animals die, that loss can be hard to process. The End of Something Wonderful helps kids handle their feelings when they’re hurting and can’t find all the right words. In a warm, understanding, sometimes funny way, it guides children as they plan a backyard funeral to say goodbye, from choosing a box and a burial spot to giving a eulogy and wiping away tears. Most of all, it reassures them that it’s not the end of everything . . . and that Something Wonderful can always happen again.




If He Had Been with Me


Book Description

If he had been with me everything would have been different... I wasn't with Finn on that August night. But I should've been. It was raining, of course. And he and Sylvie were arguing as he drove down the slick road. No one ever says what they were arguing about. Other people think it's not important. They do not know there is another story. The story that lurks between the facts. What they do not know—the cause of the argument—is crucial. So let me tell you...




Everything I Never Told You


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bustle, and Time Our New York The acclaimed debut novel by the author of Little Fires Everywhere and Our Missing Hearts “A taut tale of ever deepening and quickening suspense.” —O, the Oprah Magazine “Explosive . . . Both a propulsive mystery and a profound examination of a mixed-race family.” —Entertainment Weekly “Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet.” So begins this exquisite novel about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. Lydia is the favorite child of Marilyn and James Lee, and her parents are determined that she will fulfill the dreams they were unable to pursue. But when Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act that has been keeping the Lee family together is destroyed, tumbling them into chaos. A profoundly moving story of family, secrets, and longing, Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, uncovering the ways in which mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle, all their lives, to understand one another.




John Dies at the End


Book Description

John Dies at the End is a genre-bending, humorous account of two college drop-outs inadvertently charged with saving their small town--and the world--from a host of supernatural and paranormal invasions. Now a Major Motion Picture. "[Pargin] is like a mash-up of Douglas Adams and Stephen King... 'page-turner' is an understatement." —Don Coscarelli, director, Phantasm I-V, Bubba Ho-tep STOP. You should not have touched this flyer with your bare hands. NO, don't put it down. It's too late. They're watching you. My name is David. My best friend is John. Those names are fake. You might want to change yours. You may not want to know about the things you'll read on these pages, about the sauce, about Korrok, about the invasion, and the future. But it's too late. You touched the book. You're in the game. You're under the eye. The only defense is knowledge. You need to read this book, to the end. Even the part with the bratwurst. Why? You just have to trust me. The important thing is this: The sauce is a drug, and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I'm sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault.




Tree of Smoke


Book Description

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me. This is the story of Skip Sands—spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong—and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature. Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date. Tree of Smoke is the 2007 National Book Award Winner for Fiction.




Norwegian Wood


Book Description

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore: A magnificent coming-of-age story steeped in nostalgia, “a masterly novel” (The New York Times Book Review) blending the music, the mood, and the ethos that were the sixties with a young man’s hopeless and heroic first love. Now with a new introduction by the author. Toru, a serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. As Naoko retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman. Stunning and elegiac, Norwegian Wood first propelled Haruki Murakami into the forefront of the literary scene.




This Is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You


Book Description

Adam Gnade's third novel This is the End of Something But It's Not the End of You is held up by a Springsteenian sense of hope and a desire for redemption, of finding glory and escape, friendship and love in hard times. Like Dickens' David Copperfield, Ferrante's Neapolitan tetralogy, and Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, this is the story of a human life, kindergarten to adulthood, ratty beach apartment to bohemian party house, feverish basement to ramshackle farmhouse. Through the eyes of Gnade's protagonist, James Jackson Bozic, we see how life scars you, changes you as you fight to find a safe place for yourself. It is, in turn, a murder mystery, a love story, and a vast, sweeping, panoramic look at America on the edge of collapse. It's a story of displacement, strange shores, new mornings. As James says in the book, I thought of how sometimes in the midst of survival, life will jerk you away from your home, how it will push you out across the map, away from the people you love, or into the path of others. This Is the End... is about scratching and clawing for a better, safer, more satisfying life, even as the sky comes crashing down.




Something Like the End


Book Description

Laced with foreboding and propulsive menace, Ashley Morrow Hermsmeier's new collection of short fiction reverberates with the clang of alarm bells. Confronted by inescapable dark in the face of a certain end or its apocalyptic aftermath, the characters in these six stories must come to terms with the lonely, inevitable questions that surround something as small and powerful as death, as big and catastrophic as the end of the world. Grim and haunting in one turn, uncanny and wildly strange in the next, Something Like the End asks us to look long and hard into the darkness-and then dive in.




Sometimes I Lie


Book Description

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?