High school All-American Neely Crenshaw was probably the best quarterback ever to play for the legendary Messina Spartans. Fifteen years later Neely has returned to Messina for the funeral of Coach Eddie Rake, the man who molded the Spartans into an unbeatable football dynasty. 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 old glories, and try to decide...

The End of Days, by acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, consists essentially of five "books," each leading to a different death of an unnamed woman protagonist. How could it all have gone differently? the narrator asks in the intermezzos between. The first chapter begins with the death of a baby in the early twentieth-century Hapsburg Empire. In the next chapter, the same girl grows up in Vienna, but her strange relationship with a boy leads...

In 1816, Mordecai Lewis, a veteran of Andrew Jackson's Indian campaigns and battles against the British, moves his family into the western Tennessee canebrakes. But Mordecai, a born wanderer, is not satisfied with farming, and with his sons Michael and Andrew and some other backwoodsmen, he leads a foray into Spanish-held Texas to hunt wild horses and return the mustang herd to sell in Tennessee. Crossing the Sabine River, Mordecai's party encounters...

After her mother dies, sixteen-year-old Rose works through her grief by finding meaning in a survival kit that her mother left behind.

A trip to Florida that is meant to heal the rift between her father and her grandmother forces both fifteen-year-old Miranda and her father to face feelings they have long suppressed.

In Seattle in 1937 two seventeen-year-olds, Henry, who is white, and Flora, who is African-American, become the unwitting pawns in a game played by two immortal figures, Love and Death, where they must choose each other at the end, or one of them will die.

During her solitary convalescence from a crippling accident, twelve-year-old Charley finds a wild dog, and the arduous process of training him leads her to explore her feelings about her mother's death two years earlier.

Sisters Verónica and Victória Mendoza, dealing with problems with love, find their lives getting more confusing after their mother dies and they uncover letters from their father which reveal the man's hidden agenda and facts about their time in America.

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys-best friends-are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills...