Explains why people die and what death means, the purpose of funerals, and how people react when loved ones die.

In this epistolary middle-grade debut, a girl who's questioning her sexual orientation writes letters to her sister, who was sent away from their strict Catholic home after becoming pregnant.

"If ever a couple was ‘meant to be,’ it’s Tess and Gus. This is such a witty, poignant, and uplifting story of two lives crisscrossing over the years, with near miss after near miss. . . . I couldn’t put it down." — Sophie Kinsella For fans of One Day in December, The Flatshare, and This Time Next Year, a wryly romantic debut novel that asks, what if you just walked by the love of your life, but didn’t even know it? "TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE." Tess can’t get the motto from her mother’s kitchen knickknack out of her head, even though she’s in Florence on an idyllic vacation before starting university in London. Gus is also visiting Florence, on a holiday with his parents seven months after tragedy shattered their lives. Headed to medical school in London, he’s trying to be a dutiful son but longs to escape and discover who he really is. A chance meeting brings these eighteen-year-olds together for a brief moment—the first of many times their paths will crisscross as time passes and their lives diverge from those they’d envisioned. Over the course of the next sixteen years, Tess and Gus will face very different challenges and choices. Separated by distance and circumstance, the possibility of these two connecting once more seems slight. But while fate can separate two people, it can also bring them back together again. . . .

NATIONAL BESTSELLER A charmingly relatable and wise memoir-in-essays by acclaimed writer and bookseller Mary Laura Philpott, “the modern day reincarnation of…Nora Ephron, Erma Bombeck, Jean Kerr, and Laurie Colwin—all rolled into one” (The Washington Post), about what happened after she checked off all the boxes on a successful life’s to-do list and realized she might need to reinvent the list—and herself. Mary Laura Philpott thought she’d cracked the code: Always be right, and you’ll always be happy. But once she’d completed her life’s to-do list (job, spouse, house, babies—check!), she found that instead of feeling content and successful, she felt anxious. Lost. Stuck in a daily grind of overflowing calendars, grueling small talk, and sprawling traffic. She’d done everything “right” but still felt all wrong. What’s the worse failure, she wondered: smiling and staying the course, or blowing it all up and running away? And are those the only options? Taking on the conflicting pressures of modern adulthood, Philpott provides a “frank and funny look at what happens when, in the midst of a tidy life, there occur impossible-to-ignore tugs toward creativity, meaning, and the possibility of something more” (Southern Living). She offers up her own stories to show that identity crises don’t happen just once or only at midlife and reassures us that small, recurring personal re-inventions are both normal and necessary. Most of all, in this “warm embrace of a life lived imperfectly” (Esquire), Philpott shows that when you stop feeling satisfied with your life, you don’t have to burn it all down. You can call upon your many selves to figure out who you are, who you’re not, and where you belong. Who among us isn’t trying to do that? “Be forewarned that you’ll laugh out loud and cry, probably in the same essay. Philpott has a wonderful way of finding humor, even in darker moments. This is a book you’ll want to buy for yourself and every other woman you know” (Real Simple).

Young children often experience anxiety when they are separated from their mothers or fathers. A young guinea pig expresses her distress when her mother and father go away. "Missing you is a heavy, achy feeling. I don't like missing you. I want you right now!" Eventually the little guinea pig realizes that sometimes she and her parents can't be together. When that happens, she knows that others can help. "They can snuggle with me or we can play. It helps me to be warm and close to someone. They remind me that you'll be back."

A little girl misses someone so much that she wraps herself up like a package and sends herself through the mail.

He is a celebrity in the commercial dubbing industry, with a mysterious main business and a lack of social interaction. Due to an accident, he began to introduce her to delicious food every night, describing each dish's preparation in an enticing voice, and also wiped her dry one by one. One day, he asked her, "Do you miss me?" "I want to..." "Do you want to see me often?" "Um... but you're busy and there's nothing you can do." "Do you want to find me anytime?" Of course I want to "Do you want to sleep in our bed even if I'm not here at night, waiting for me to come back at dawn?" Does his meaning mean His voice softened and he had a somewhat hoarse and seductive texture. "Do you want to hear my voice every day... no matter how late it is, I will make you fall asleep?" "I want to..." She finally surrendered. He smiled and said, "Just think about it." So, this is considered "So, from now on, it will only be you and me, and I will only cook for my wife." This is clearly the most obvious sound temptation, just like when the story goes back to the beginning, she seduced him with her voice, and he also used his voice to make her no longer see anyone else in her eyes