Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

"It's Holy Week in the small town of Las Penas, New Mexico, and thirty-three-year-old unemployed Amadeo Padilla has been given the part of Jesus in the Good Friday procession. He is preparing feverishly for this role when his fifteen-year-old daughter Angel shows up pregnant on his doorstep and disrupts his plans. Their reunion sets her own life down a startling path. Vivid, tender, darkly funny, and beautifully rendered, The Five Wounds spans the...

In "The Lay of the Land," the lethargic third installment of Frank?s story (it follows "The Sportswriter," published in 1986, and the 1995 sequel "Independence Day"), Mr. Ford gives us three days in his hero?s life in New Jersey. It is Thanksgiving week in the year 2000, as the contested presidential election drags on, and the boom years of the 90?s are beginning to turn a corner. Frank has been treated for prostate cancer, his second wife has unexpectedly...

A young man's treatment for cancer inspires profound changes in his family. Paul Bannerman, an ecologist in South Africa, believes he understands the trajectory of his life, with the usual markers of vocation and marriage. But when he's diagnosed with thyroid cancer and, after surgery, prescribed treatment that will leave him radioactive, for a period a danger to others, he begins to question, as Auden wrote, "what Authority gives / existence its...

The gripping story of a woman dying from cancer. The narrator is Ann Stanley, an unhappily married nurse. All the more reason for her to admire Ruth Thomas who leaves her husband, even though it means leaving her son, too. A bond develops between the two and when Ruth is struck with cancer Ann helps her die, the process described in minute detail. By the author of Durable Goods.

Upbeat cancer survivor Lydia and her pragmatic sister, Margaret, start a "Knit to Quit" group in their Blossom Street yarn store in Seattle, bringing in a delightful assortment of customers for weekly self-help sessions, including a local baker who wants a baby as much as Lydia does, a super-stressed chocolate magnate who takes the knitting class after his doctor suggests it, and a young woman who is trying to quit obsessing about a broken engagement....

Inspired by personal experiences, an original story about friendship, love, survival, and finding humor in unlikely places. Two best friends' lives change when one of them is diagnosed with cancer.

"This lyrical debut novel is at once a passionate coming-of-age story, a meditation on illness and death, and a kaleidoscopic journey through one woman's life--told in part by the malevolent voice of her disease." "Lia, her husband Harry, and their beloved daughter, Iris, are a precisely balanced family of three. With Iris struggling to navigate the social tightrope of early adolescence, their tender home is a much-needed refuge. But when a sudden...

Women who share a love of knitting support each other through the vicissitudes of life in Macomber's unsurprising third novel set on Seattle's fictional Blossom Street. Lydia Goetz, the proprietor of the knitting store (and series anchor) A Good Yarn, has begun teaching a new knitting class on prayer shawls. Fellow knitters include Colette Blake, a 31-year-old widow who rents the apartment above the shop and whose grief over her dead husband is being...