"Alice Culvert is a force: passionate, independent, smart, and gorgeous, she -- to her delight -- attracts attention wherever she goes, even amid the buzz of mid-90s New York. In knee-high boots, with her newborn daughter, Doe, strapped to her chest, Alice is one of those people who just seem so vividly alive, which makes her cancer diagnosis feel almost incongruous. How could such a being not go on? But all at once, Alice's existence, and that of...

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.

When Keira first receives her breast cancer diagnosis, she never expects to end up joining a running group with three women she's only just met. Totally blind-sided, all she can think about is how she doesn't want to tell her family or step back from work. Nor does she want to be part of a group of fellow cancer patients. Cancer is not her club. And yet it's running - hot, sweaty, lycra-clad running in the company of brilliant, funny women all going...

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...

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...

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....

What would you do if you knew you only had 100 days left to live? So begins the last hundred days of Lucio's life, as he attempts to care for his family, win back his wife (the love of his life and afterlife), and spend the next three months enjoying every moment with a zest he hasn't felt in years. From helping his hopelessly romantic, widowed father-in-law find love, discovering comfort in enduring friendships, and finding new ones, Lucio becomes,...

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...

When she returns home to care for her mother during cancer treatment, Sylvie uncovers secrets regarding her sister's murder sixteen years ago -- Sixteen years ago, Sylvie's sister Persephone never came home; her murder remains unsolved. When Sylvie returns home to care for her estranged mother, Annie, as she undergoes treatment for cancer, it's an uncomfortable reunion all these years later. Worse, Persephone's former boyfriend, Ben, is now a nurse...