In addition to the P-38, there are four gifts, one for each of my friends. I want to say good-bye to them properly. I want to give them each something to remember me by. To let them know I really cared about them and I'm sorry I couldn't be more than I was--that I couldn't stick around--and that what's going to happen today isn't their fault. Today is Leonard Peacock's birthday. It is also the day he hides a gun in his backpack. Because today is...

National Book Award Finalist: “Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself and emerged with a powerful, gripping story.” —The Boston Globe
 
One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never have killed himself, and yet he had. His death made a mystery of his entire life. Who was he? Why did he do...

Tia and Mike Baye never imagined they'd become spying, overprotective parents. But their sixteen-year-old son Adam has been unusually distant and aloof lately, and after the recent suicide of his classmate, Spencer Hill, they can't help but worry. They install a spy program on Adam's computer and within days they are jolted by a strange message to their son from an unknown correspondent: "Just stay quiet and all safe."

When the Earth is doomed by an imminent and unavoidable asteroid collision, New Hampshire homicide detective Hank Palace considers the worth of his job in a world destined to end in six months and investigates a suspicious suicide that nobody else cares about.

"Felix Pink is a retired widower leading a boring life and hoping to die a boring death. He volunteers as an Exiteer-someone who sits with terminally ill people as they die by suicide, assisting with logistics and lending moral support, then removing the evidence to take the burden off their loved ones. When Felix lets himself in to Number 3 Black Lane, he's there to perform an act of kindness and charity: to keep a dying man company as he takes his...

"Rebecca Spiegel is working as a teacher in New Orleans when she learns of her sister's suicide. Only after the funeral does shock give way to grief--and to many questions. How could Emily do this to herself? How could she have abandoned all those who loved her? And what could have been done differently to prevent this devastating loss? In the days and weeks that follow, Spiegel embarks on a search for answers. She unpacks family history, documents...

After a suspicious suicide, the members of a high school cheerleading squad, along with their new, perfectly cool coach, Colette French, are drawn into the investigation.

When a notorious millionaire banker hangs himself, his death attracts no sympathy. But the legacy of a lifetime of selfishness is widespread, and the carnage most acute among those he ought to be protecting: his family.
Meanwhile, in a wealthy suburb of Glasgow, a young woman is found savagely murdered. The community is stunned by what appears to be a vicious, random attack. When Detective Inspector Alex Morrow, heavily pregnant with twins, is...

"A decade ago, two vans filled with high school seniors on a school service trip crashed into a Tennessee ravine-a tragedy that claimed the lives of multiple classmates and teachers. The nine students who managed to escape the river that night were irrevocably changed. A year later, after one of the survivors dies by suicide on the anniversary of the crash, the rest of them make a pact: to come together each year to commemorate that terrible night.To...

Worldwide, more people die by suicide than by murder, and many more are left behind to grieve. Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history's most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments...