The inspiring story of a son and his dying mother, who form a "book club" that brings them together as her life comes to a close.

Alice Howland -- Harvard professor, gifted researcher, and lecturer, wife, and mother of three grown children -- sets out for a run and soon realizes she has no idea how to find her way home. She has taken the route for years, but nothing looks familiar. She is utterly lost. Medical consults reveal early-onset Alzheimer's. Alice slowly but inevitably loses memory and connection with reality, as told from her perspective. She gradually loses the ability...

"Near-death experiences are controversial. Thousands of people have had them, but many in the scientific community have argued that they are impossible. Dr. Eben Alexander was one of those people. A highly trained neurosurgeon, Alexander knew that what people of faith call the "soul" is really a product of brain chemistry. NDEs, he would have been the first to explain, might feel real, but they are fantasies produced by brains under extreme stress....

"Anna Forster, in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease at only thirty-eight years old, knows that her family is doing what they believe to be best when they take her to Rosalind House, an assisted living facility. She also knows there's just one another resident her age, Luke. What she does not expect is the love that blossoms between her and Luke even as she resists her new life at Rosalind House. As her disease steals more and more of her memory,...

"Melody Beattie's compassionate and insightful look into codependency--the concept of losing oneself in the name of helping another--has guided millions of readers toward the understanding that they are powerless to change anyone but themselves and that caring for the self is where healing begins. Is someone else's problem your problem? If, like so many others, you've lost sight of your own life in the drama of tending to a loved one's self-destructive...

Midwestern movie house owner Virgil Wander is "cruising along at medium altitude" when his car flies off the road into icy Lake Superior. Virgil survives but his language and memory are altered and he emerges into a world no longer familiar to him. Awakening in this new life, Virgil begins to piece together his personal history and the lore of his broken town, with the help of a cast of affable and curious locals--from Rune, a twinkling, pipe-smoking,...

"A divinity professor and young mother with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis explores the pain and joy of living without certainty. Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke, and had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart after years of trying, when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed...

In this exquisite, emotionally rich novel, New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Berg offers a deeply satisfying story about the bonds of love and the balm of friendship. A young man named Jay lies in a coma after suffering a freak accident, and his wife, Lainey, is the only one who believes he will recover. She sits at his bedside, bringing him reminders of the ordinary life they shared: fragrant flowers, his children’s drawings,...

"We all know, intellectually, that our time on earth is limited. What would we change if we knew it viscerally? Kate Bowler was thirty-five when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Now that she's responded to immunotherapy Kate has to figure out how to make a new life between CT scans. Before she got sick, she'd accepted the very American idea that life was an endless horizon of possibilities. Now she has to figure out what to do within...

Runaways Axi, sixteen, and Robinson, seventeen, who met on a cancer ward, leave small-town Oregon on a cross-country trip to experience the best of life before it is too late.