A fearless writer confronts grief and transforms it into art, in a book of surprising beauty and love, "a masterpiece by a master” ( Elizabeth McCracken,   Vanity Fair ). "Li has converted the messy and devastating stuff of life into a remarkable work of art.”— The Wall Street Journal WINNER OF THE PEN/JEAN STEIN AWARD • LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST FICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Parul Seghal, The New York Times • NPR • The Guardian • The Paris Review The narrator of Where Reasons End writes, “ I had but one delusion, which I held on to with all my We once gave Nikolai a life of flesh and blood; and I’m doing it over again, this time by words .” Yiyun Li meets life’s deepest sorrows as she imagines a conversation between a mother and child in a timeless world. Composed in the months after she lost a child to suicide, Where Reasons End trespasses into the space between life and death as mother and child talk, free from old images and narratives. Deeply moving, these conversations portray the love and complexity of a relationship. Written with originality, precision, and poise, Where Reasons End is suffused with intimacy, inescapable pain, and fierce love.

A rivals-to-lovers forced proximity romance set in the competitive gaming world, featuring a sticker sheet to design your own cozy bookstore under the front cover and gorgeous stenciled edges. Lara vs. Luca. Introverted vs Charismatic. Cozy gamer vs. horror gamer. Lara is a shy programmer in London pouring her whole heart into Novel Haven, a gentle pixel-art game about books, healing, and community. Luca is the confident developer behind Desolate Dread, a psychological horror game that mines his own nightmares for inspiration. They couldn’t be more different, yet both are fighting for the same prize at the prestigious GameChanger Convention: recognition, visibility, and desperately needed prize money that could decide the future of their studios.

Utter boredom leads one imaginative girl to inspiration in this clever story from much-loved creator Felicita Sala. Rita is bored. So, so, so bored. She’s tried stretching her body across her bedroom, side-eyeing herself in the mirror, stomping her feet and swinging her arms. Time drags on, and there she remains: catatonic with boredom. In her tragic and weakened state, her mind drifts to the beginning of a daydream. What if all the bored people in the world gathered together and got onto a bus? What if the boredom filled them up like balloons, with tiny heads and arms sticking out? What if they floated into the sky, bobbing along until they each spied something exciting enough to make them toot the boredom out? By the time Rita’s mother calls her for dinner, she’s very, very busy. Anyone who’s ever been bored will find catharsis in Rita’s plight. As all creative people eventually learn, boredom can be the best launchpad to great ideas. Felicita Sala’s expressive, inviting illustrations and sly storytelling are a guaranteed antidote to the doldrums. A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection

Chronic illnesses are lifelong health issues that can make growing up different for kids who have them. And that sometimes feels lonely and frustrating. But learn from an author with a chronic illness how to reshape your mindset, find new passions, and pour your energy into things that empower you and fill your life with joy. Meet A Kids Co., a new kind of media company with a collection of beautifully designed books that kickstart challenging, empowering, and important conversations for kids and their grownups. Learn more about us at akidsco.com.

A novel for anyone who has loved and lost, and lived to tell the tale. As a young woman boxes up her ex-boyfriend’s belongings and prepares to see him one last time, she wonders where it all went wrong, and whether it was ever right to begin with. Burdened with a broken heart, she asks herself the age-old question . . . is love really worth it? Out of Love is a bittersweet romance told in reverse. Beginning at the end of a relationship, each chapter takes us further back in time, weaving together an already unravelled tapestry, from tragic break-up to magical first kiss. In this dazzling debut Hazel Hayes performs a post-mortem on love, tenderly but unapologetically exploring every angle, from the heights of joy to the depths of grief, and all the madness and mundanity in between. This is a modern story with the heart of a classic: truthful, tragic and ultimately full of hope.

In this unforgettable debut, a moment of metaphysical transformation launches a woman’s beautiful and terrifying journey through her twenties, through loneliness and complicated love that takes her from the depths of the Pacific Ocean to the plains of TexasA Real Animal follows Lucy through the decade dividing college and real adulthood, as she navigates three distinct romantic relationships, reckons with the false promise of family intimacy, and seeks connection with the sublime and natural worlds. Lucy wants her life to be extraordinary. But this desire never seems to graft easily onto the smallness of her world. As a senior in college struggling to quell the destructive effects of a sexual assault, she gets a glimpse of a different plane of existence—more wild, physical, animal. She moves away from home, breaks up with her long term boyfriend, stops speaking to her mother, and starts dating an alternative, alternatively violent man. As she changes cities, friends, and partners, there is a persistent sense of wildness in Lucy and in her world that’s only ever barely being controlled. The thrum of a nonhuman existential force in the back of her mind urges her to reject the ordinary, but also reminds her that she is alone in the world. She feels it in the depths of the ocean while deep sea diving, in the cold silences on phone calls with her sister and her mom, in the misunderstanding gaze of a man she thought would love her forever. Guided by Emeline Atwood’s lightspeed, suspenseful prose, we follow Lucy across states, jobs, relationships, and stages of intimacy with her family, witnessing both moments of horrific pain and quotidian happiness. The years pass by seamlessly, bringing her to the edge of her twenties and back to an altered, barren version of her childhood home, where she must finally come to terms with the fear that being human itself might mean feeling alone, and wild, and unknowable.

With gentle humor and unflinching realism, Gail Giles tells the gritty, ultimately hopeful story of two special ed teenagers entering the adult world. We understand stuff. We just learn it slow. And most of what we understand is that people what ain’t Speddies think we too stupid to get out our own way. And that makes me mad. Quincy and Biddy are both graduates of their high school’s special ed program, but they couldn’t be more different: suspicious Quincy faces the world with her fists up, while gentle Biddy is frightened to step outside her front door. When they’re thrown together as roommates in their first "real world" apartment, it initially seems to be an uneasy fit. But as Biddy’s past resurfaces and Quincy faces a harrowing experience that no one should have to go through alone, the two of them realize that they might have more in common than they thought — and more important, that they might be able to help each other move forward.Hard-hitting and compassionate, Girls Like Us is a story about growing up in a world that can be cruel, and finding the strength — and the support — to carry on.

A long-lost friend reappears and ignites an old spark, leading to an emotionally fraught love triangle. One bright blue day, on a bench by the river, Nora’s partner Robin proposes. It is unexpected; they’d always agreed that they didn’t need a wedding. But after a decade of in-jokes, dancing in the low-lit kitchen and sharing morning toast in bed, Nora says yes. Why wouldn’t she? The answer lands on the night of their engagement party, when Bren turns up on her doorstep. Growing up, Bren and Nora were the sort of best friends who everyone swore would end up together. But when a sudden heartbreak turned their lives upside down, Bren left, Nora stayed, and the silent longing between them remained unspoken. Now, he’s back, and their tentative yet undeniable spark reignites, forcing Nora to ask herself: How can you know your heart, if it feels like it’s split in two? Tender and compelling, People in Love is a story about what-ifs and maybes, and the moments of misunderstanding that can shape our lives. It’s a book about living one life while musing on another, exploring how our choices shape our relationships and inform our regrets, and revealing, in the end, that the real love story is not always the one you'd expect.

Three women navigate their late twenties together in a bittersweet novel about female friendship, identity, and growing up—from the hope and promise of college to the realities that lie beyond. Lily, Ana, and Margot have been best friends ever since Hawthorne Res Life assigned them as roommates during their first year of college. Ten years later and Lily is planning her wedding to the endlessly supportive and entirely symmetrical Jack. Ana is a fourth-grade teacher at the prestigious Horizon Academy, alma mater of her long-term boyfriend, who’s finally asked her to move in. Margot is about to land a life-changing promotion at ad agency McQueen O’Doul’s. It all looks good from here. But when the three friends converge on Maine for the wedding, the real challenges they’ve been able to keep from each other begin to surface. It’s finally time to open up about their secrets, the very private struggles they’ve hidden for too long, and the risks they’ve taken to protect themselves, and those they love, from the truth. For Ana, Lily, and Margot, whatever unsettled course their lives take next, one thing is Acceptance, unconditional love, and friendship are forever.

She erased their past. He’s betting on their future. When Landon receives a letter from Rose—the woman he once planned forever with—he learns their love story is over. She’s undergone a radical memory-erasing treatment, leaving behind her grief, her past… and him. But Landon can’t bear to lose the love of his life. If she fell for him once, couldn’t she fall for him again? Now living in Edinburgh, Rose’s world is a blank canvas, and she’s dating someone new. When Landon reenters her life as a stranger, they become fast friends, their lives entwining once more. But what Rose doesn’t know is that this new friend carries the weight of everything they once shared: their firsts, their marriage, and the heartbreak they barely survived. And when she starts exhibiting strange symptoms, it becomes clear their history isn’t gone—it’s just buried. And remembering could come at a devastating cost. Told in alternating timelines—his from the present, hers from the past—The Good Parts is an achingly poignant story about the people we become across a lifetime, and the quiet grace of learning to let go while holding on to what’s worth keeping.

A tender coming-of-age story about friendship, first love, loss, and facing the ultimate who am I going to be? For fans of Douglas Stuart, Michael Magee, David Nicholls and Andrew O'Hagan Brendan's best friend, his only friend, is Ronan McCoy. He knows things about Brendan that no one else about his job washing the cars at Feeney’s Funeral Home, about the loneliness he sometimes feels even when surrounded by hundreds of others at school. But Brendan never told Ronan about the dark feeling that sits at the bottom of his stomach, the feeling that tells him something bad is coming. It never comes when Ronan's around. Ronan is smart and sporty and popular, totally comfortable in his own all the things that Brendan himself isn't. But Ronan always makes him feel like a good friend, a good person, a better Brendan. Standing at the school gates on the first day of term, the dark feeling begins to form in Brendan's stomach. And when Ronan doesn’t turn up, Brendan learns that something terrible happened to his best friend over the summer and he'll never be the same again. Over the course of the final year of school, Brendan will have to learn to navigate the new shape of their friendship and find a place for himself in the world without Ronan to protect him. The Ballad of Ronan McCoy is a beautifully written, tender coming-of-age story about friendship and first love, loss and letting go, and the hopes and fears of a young man standing on the cusp of the rest of his life.

A spirited, wise, often hilarious, profoundly moving story of one woman's efforts to survive caregiving, trauma, love, and the systems seemingly set up to fail us.Only if you are a very able swimmer trained in open-water rescue should you approach drowning victims . . . Reach with a rope or branch, rowout and offer the drowning person an oar. Do not get in the water.But No one survives the wilderness alone.One night, Virginia Eubanks received the kind of news we all fear. Her partner, Jason, had been attacked, brutally beaten just steps from their house. In the weeks, then months and years that followed, they faced a cascade of police disinterest, suspended health insurance, inadequate medical care, lost income, lost friends, endless paperwork, and a serious case of post-traumatic stress disorder. Then, a second case. In her time tending to Jason, Eubanks had developed what is known as “collateral” PTSD, common among caregivers but rarely discussed.A reporter and an activist, Eubanks turned to reliable sources to figure out how to scientists, therapists, trauma theorists, social movements. But it wasn’t until she happened on an old lifesaving manual that she found practical advice that actually helped. Inspired by these lessons, she signed up for a series of kayak selfrescue, winter survival 101, map and compass, bushwhacking, wilderness first aid, lifeguarding. In a memoir as disarmingly funny as it is quietly wise, Eubanks draws lessons in kinship from these experiences, her research, and interviews with everyone from neuroscientists to forest rangers. The result is a genuinely moving, hopeful, darkly funny story of two people caught in their own kind of wilderness, trying not just to survive but to truly care for each other. Built from cataclysmic loss and tenacious love, A Guide to Open Water Lifesaving challenges readers to reconsider the networks of care that sustain our lives, reminding us that no one survives the wilderness alone.

From award-winning author and illustrator, Wolf Erlbruch, comes one of the world’s best children’s books about grief and loss. In a curiously heart-warming and elegantly illustrated story, a duck strikes up an unlikely friendship with Death. Duck and Death play together and discuss big questions. Death, dressed in a dressing gown and slippers, is sympathetic and kind and will be duck’s companion until the end. “I’m cold,” she said one evening. “Will you warm me a little?” Snowflakes drifted down. Something had happened. Death looked at the duck. She’d stopped breathing. She lay quite still. Explaining the topic of death in a way that is honest, lightly philosophical and with gentle humour, this enchanting book has been translated into multiple languages, adapted into an animated movie and short film and performed on stages worldwide.

“Grief can be really hard. It helps to remember that it is normal to grieve when someone you love is gone.” Grief is a small word for a BIG experience. Grief affects us emotionally, but also physically, socially, spiritually, and really in every part of our lives. But the important thing to know is that grief is natural, normal, and healthy, and it’s an experience we all have because we’re human. Brennan C. Wood (she/her) is the award-winning Executive Director of Dougy The National Grief Center for Children & Families. Dougy Center provides support and resources for children and families who are grieving. Brennan loves spending time with her awesome blended family and honors her mother’s legacy by making every day a celebration! Core themes in this Life, Feelings, Trauma, Hope — Meet A Kids Company About , a new kind of media company with a collection of beautifully designed books that kickstart challenging, empowering, and important conversations for kids and their grownups. Learn more about us at akidsco.com .