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...

A terminally ill cancer patient is attended throughout his final days by his wife and daughter while the trio contemplates their relationships with an estranged son, a situation that stirs up painful memories for a new next-door neighbor who has recently lost her mother.

"What are you reading?"Thats the question Will Schwalbe asks his mother, Mary Anne, as they sit in the waiting room of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. In 2007, Mary Anne returned from a humanitarian trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan suffering from what her doctors believed was a rare type of hepatitis. Months later she was diagnosed with a form of advanced pancreatic cancer, which is almost always fatal, often in six months or less.This...

Having missed much of her children's lives while she built a home-furnishings empire, Olivia Grayson arranges a family vacation in the Mediterranean in the hopes of rekindling ties only to confront painful interpersonal dynamics and unexpected revelations.

A radical synthesis of science and personal experience that advocates a sea change in the way we understand and confront cancer.

Mother of a kindergartener, married to her police detective soulmate, Emma has a rewarding career as a doctor at the local hospital. When her son, Josh, is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, she is determined to save him. Emma makes the risky decision to sell opioids to fund the life-saving treatment Josh needs. When somebody ends up dead, a lethal game of cat and mouse ensues-- with her own husband leading the chase. With her son's life hanging...

The bestselling, beloved writer of romantic comedies like You've Got Mail tells her own late-in-life love story in her "resplendent memoir," complete with a tragic second act and joyous resolution. 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...

A world-class oncologist delivers a devastating and deeply personal examination of cancer, offering a searing account of how both medicine and society (mis)treats cancer, how people can do better, and why they must.

Flint left the West at the age of seventeen, leaving behind a rootless past and a bloody trail of violence. In the East he became one of the wealthiest financiers in America -- and one of the most feared and hated. Now, suffering from incurable cancer, he has come back to New Mexico to die alone. But when an all-out range war erupts, Flint chooses to help Nancy Kerrigan, a local rancher. A cold-eyed speculator is setting up the land swindle of a lifetime,...

There can be joy in the midst of suffering. Your dreams are never too big. There will always be laundry. We should celebrate the normal shit. These sentiments and so many others are what Ashli Brehm, the voice behind www.babyonthebrehm.com, collected as life lessons after receiving her breast cancer diagnosis at age 33. A mother of three little boys and a wife to her favorite guy, Brehm had been blogging for five plus years when a small lump...