Joyce Carol Oates shares her struggle to comprehend a life absent of the partnership that had sustained and defined her for nearly half a century.

"Mark and Giulia's life together began as a storybook romance. The fell in love at eighteen, married at twenty-four, and were living their dream life in San Francisco. When Giulia was twenty-seven, she suffered a terrifying and unexpected psychotic break that landed her in the psych ward for nearly a month. One day she was vibrant and well-adjusted; the next she was delusional and suicidal, convinced that her loved ones were not safe. Eventually,...

"Paul Kalanithi, a young and promising neurosurgeon, received a devastating diagnosis of stage IV lung cancer at the age of thirty-six. He was a doctor treating patients one day and the next was struggling for his own life. On the verge of completing a decade's worth of training, he decided to begin writing this book to come to terms with and give closure to his life, and to face death with courage. What makes a life worth living in the face of death?...

"Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of thirty-two years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, through Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered...

"A deeply moving memoir about two lives that were changed in the blink of an eye, and the love that helped them rewrite their future. Five months pregnant, on a flight to their "babymoon," Allison Pataki turned to her husband when he asked if his eye looked strange, and watched him suddenly lose consciousness. After an emergency landing, she discovered that Dave -- a healthy thirty-year-old athlete and surgical resident -- had suffered a rare and...

Trussoni believed she controlled the narration of her life. But from their first kiss she was spellbound by Nikolai, a novelist from Bulgaria, sharing a love of jazz and books and travel, passions that intensify their whirlwind romance. Eight years later, hopeful to renew their marriage, they move to the south of France, to a picturesque medieval village in the Languedoc, where they buy a thirteenth-century stone fortress. It is here she finds the...