Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer and viruses; helped lead to in vitro...

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

After being diagnosed with a rare eye cancer, twelve-year-old Ross discovers how music, art, and true friends can help him survive both treatment and middle school.

Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the School of Divinity at Duke, and had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart after years of trying, when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. As she navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, Kate pulls the reader deeply into her life, which...

There's a new shop on Seattle's Blossom Street'a flower store called Susannah's Garden, right next door to A Good Yarn. Susannah Nelson, the owner, has just hired an assistant named Colette Blake, a young widow who's obviously hiding a secret'or two. When Susannah and Colette both join Lydia Goetz's new knitting class, they discover that Lydia and her sister, Margaret, have worries of their own. Margaret's daughter, Julia, is the victim of a random...

"Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She'd lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry's death, she decided to make one small change in her life--she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell. She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist,...

"The last person Zac expects in the room next door is a girl like Mia, angry and feisty with questionable taste in music. In the real world, he wouldn't--couldn't--be friends with her. In hospital different rules apply, and what begins as a knock on the wall leads to a note--then a friendship neither of them sees coming"--

Corporate billionaire Edward Cole and working class mechanic Carter Chambers have nothing in common, except they both have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. While sharing a hospital room together, they decide to make a Bucket List of all the things they have ever wanted to do before they die. In the process of completing the list, both of them heal each other, become unlikely friends, and ultimately find the joy in life.

While recovering from breast cancer in a remote cabin in North Carolina, Mia Landan finds the journal of Kate Watkins, a 1920s fly fisher, and, inspired by Kate's example, learns to fish and uncovers many secrets around her.

"Born blind in Vietnam, Julie Yip-Williams narrowly escaped euthanasia by her grandmother, only to then flee the political upheaval of the late 1970s with her family. Loaded into a rickety boat with three hundred other refugees, Julie made it to Hong Kong and, ultimately, America, where a surgeon at UCLA gave her partial sight. Against all odds, she became a Harvard-educated lawyer, with a husband, a family, a life. Then, at age thirty-seven, with...