High school all-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years have gone by since those glory days, and Neely has come home to Messina to bury Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty. Now, as Coach Rake's "boys" sit in the bleachers waiting for the dimming field lights to signal his passing, they replay the old games, relive the...

Fascinated by our pervasive fear of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for the dead. In rural Indonesia, she watches a man clean and dress his grandfather's mummified body, which has resided in the family home for two years. In La Paz, she meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls), and in Tokyo she encounters the Japanese kotsuage ceremony, in which relatives use chopsticks...

"Like all citizens since the Ruining, Carrington Hale knows the importance of this day. But she never expected the moment she'd spent a lifetime preparing for--her Choosing Ceremony--to end in disaster. Ripped from her family, she'll spend her days serving as a Lint, the lowest level of society. She knows it's her duty to follow the true way of the Authority. As Carrington begins this nightmare, rumors of rebellion rattle her beliefs. Though the whispers...

When they find a dead bird, a group of children bury it in the woods, sing a song to it, and put flowers on the grave.

Nathan Clark's gravestone reads: At rest. But Nathan is not at rest, and knows he won't be until he finds out why he died. How has he come to hover over his own funeral, a spectral spectator to the grief of his family and friends? Privy now to their innermost thoughts and feelings, Nathan spends the day of his wake getting to know the living as he has never known them before. But why isn't Nathan's young daughter Lois at the wake? Who are the two...

Three children set a special white table in memory of service members fallen or missing in action, and especially in honor of their Uncle John, a POW in Vietnam.

As a Gracekeeper, Callanish administers shoreside burials, laying the dead to their final resting place deep in the depths of the ocean. Alone on her island, she has exiled herself to a life of tending watery graves as penance for a long-ago mistake that still haunts her. Meanwhile, North works as a circus performer with the Excalibur, a floating troupe of acrobats, clowns, dancers, and trainers who sail from one archipelago to the next, entertaining...

"Kraken's first girlfriend, Ana Belén Liaño, has been murdered as part of a ritual not seen for 2,600 years. She has been burned, hung, and then placed upside down in a Bronze Age cauldron. But she is not the only one. Pregnant women all over the region are dying at the hands of a psychopath who imitates "the water rituals" in sacred places in the Basque country and Cantabria. There is no time to waste, because Deputy Superintendent Díaz de Salvatierra...

"When a woman travels to Nigeria to attend the funeral of the father she never knew, she meets an over-the-top family, a new love interest, and discovers parts of herself she didn't know were missing in this engrossing novel from Jane Igharo, the acclaimed author of Ties That Tether. Hannah Bailey has never had a relationship with her father, the Nigerian businessman who had a fling with her white mother, so she's always felt clueless about part of...