"When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence? Astrid's youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is intentionally pregnant yet struggling to give...

"For as long as Elizabeth can remember, she has watched her father trail after her mother, kissing her multiple times a day and holding her hand. She watched her mother smooth the lines in her father's face and pay attention to his every move, even when she was desperate for some time to herself. When her parents began to age, Elizabeth and her siblings are placed in the difficult position of taking over more and more supportive roles and tasks. They...

Carrie Hanwell is a female firefighter in Texas, and she's a total pro at handling other people's emergencies. But when her ailing mother asks her move to Boston, Cassie suddenly has an emergency of her own. She finds a job at a tough, old-school Boston firehouse, but firemen aren't exactly thrilled to have a "lady" on the crew--except for the infatuation-inspiring rookie. But she can't think about that, because love is girly, and it's not her thing....

In telling the intimate story of caring for her aged and ailing mother, Jane Gross offers indispensable, and often surprising, advice for the rapidly increasing number of adult children responsible for aging parents.Gross deftly weaves the specifics of her personal experience-a widowed mother with mounting health problems, the attendant collision of fear and ignorance, the awkward role reversal of parent and child, unresolved family relationships...

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." —Ann Patchett
Growing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother;...

"An exquisitely written, expertly reported memoir and expose; of modern medicine that leads the way to more humane, less invasive end-of-life care based on the author's acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece. This is the story of one daughter's struggle to allow her parents the peaceful, natural deaths they wanted and to investigate the larger forces in medicine that stood in the way. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker that caused her...

Twenty-six-year-old Jean Louise Finch, "Scout", returns home from New York City to visit her aging father, Atticus. Set against the backdrop of the civil rights tensions and political turmoil that were transforming the South, Jean Louise's homecoming becomes bittersweet when she learns disturbing truths about her close-knit family, the town and the people dearest to her.

"What do you do when the people you love are declining right in front of your eyes? What can you do but rage at all that is cruel, laugh at all that is absurd, and show up for whatever happens next Mira Cayne's father has been in physical decline for decades, ever since his spinal cord injury at the age of forty-four. He was never the dad who ran a marathon, but he was the strongest and most resililent man Mira knew. Now, at seventy-nine, Matt Frank...

Alice Brill wakes up one day with a vague, but nagging sensation of unease in her chest that signals trouble. Is it her marriage-drifting along for years on auto pilot-that's so troubling? Her unrealized aspirations as a writer? Her unsettled younger son? Or is it something about her father, once a prominent surgeon but now slipping deeper into senility in a nursing home? There is also the matter of the writer whose book she's editing, in her new...

Three siblings, Sydney, Gina, and Rick, each have full lives, complex relationships, and serious personal problems. But when their mother suffers a debilitating stroke, her need for extensive care forces them to examine the strength of the bonds between them. A Blackboard best-selling author, Roby tackles several contemporary issues in this moving novel, including marital violence and childhood abuse.