Alice Howland a 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...

At the age of thirty-six, on the verge of completing a decade's training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. One day he was a doctor treating the dying, the next he was a patient struggling to live. When Breath Becomes Air chronicles Kalanithi's transformation from a medical student asking what makes a virtuous and meaningful life into a neurosurgeon working in the core of human identity - the brain - and finally...

Diagnosed at age 29, Fox is engaged in Parkinson's advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research, the world's leading non-profit funder of PD science. Here he shares personal stories and observations about illness and health, aging, the strength of family and friends, and how our perceptions about time affect the way we approach mortality. Running through...

"As children, Callie, Brie, Bode, and Sela shared a rare closeness, the kind that seems destined to last forever. Though their backgrounds could hardly have been more different, none of that mattered when they played together in the grounds of Callie's lavish home. There, they learned about love, loyalty, and forgiveness, never realizing how little they really knew about each other or about Pearl, the woman who was a mother figure to them all. Callie's...

Carrigan, Ella Rae, and Laine have been friends since kindergarten. They all still live in the small town of Bon Dieu Falls, Louisiana, and they've been through everything together, from a State Softball Championship to Carrigan's elopement at seventeen. And Laine is still trying to keep the other two out of trouble. But when cancer threatens to rip the trio apart, their world spins in a way they've never known before. How deep do the bonds of friendship...

The author describes her battle against polio when she was thirteen and her efforts to overcome its debilitating effects.

Temperance Brennan is a brilliant, forensic anthropologist called on to solve the toughest cases. But for Tempe, the discovery of a young girl's skeleton in Acadia, Canada, is more than just another assignment. Évangéline, Tempe's childhood best friend, was also from Acadia. Thirty years later, flooded with memories, Tempe cannot help wondering if this skeleton could be the friend she lost so many years ago. And what is the meaning of the strange...

A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's...

When rodeo champion Cody Gunner returns to Colorado Springs, he has no intention on keeping his deathbed promise to his beloved wife--to love again. But when his concern for his brother Carl takes him to the Independent Learning Center, he sees how much Carl and his fellow Down syndrome students are progressing. He also notices their teacher Ellie Downs, who glows with such infectious joy and inner beauty that he almost forgets their philosophical...

"'Blood Work' - that's what Terry McCaleb used to call his job at the FBI. Eight weeks ago he was a dead man, but now someone else's heart is keeping him alive. Then a newspaper report of his brush with death brings him an unwanted visitor. Graciela Rivers reveals to McCaleb that the anonymous donor of his heart was her murdered sister. Knowing that he lives because of a cold blooded killing, McCaleb takes the moribund investigation on. Nothing about...