Central Skagit Library District

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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...

"The Williams family returns to Eulalia, Georgia, for the funeral of their beloved patriarch. When a secret is revealed during the eulogy, the family is left reeling: If their grandparents perfect marriage was anything but, what hope do they have of finding love?"-- When Gerry, the beloved Williams patriarch, dies suddenly, his grandchildren flock from across the country to the family home in Eulalia, Georgia. But when Gerry's best friend steps up...

"A young man journeys into Sri Lanka's formerly war-torn north, and into a country's soul, in this searing novel of love and the legacy of war from the award-winning author of The Story of a Brief Marriage. "The closest we seem to get to the present are those brief moments we stop to consider the spaces our bodies are occupying, the warmth of the sheets in which we wake, the scratched surface of the window on a train taking us somewhere else..." A...

"When tragedy strikes, Tess drops out of school and moves in with her funeral director dad, forcing her to examine life, death, and the boy she thought she knew and loved in a brand new light"--

The Balinese cremation ceremony, or ngaben, has primarily been known in the West as either a major tourist attraction that dazzles visitors with the splendor, intricacy, and drama of its performance, or as fodder for long-standing anthropological arguments about personhood and emotion on the island that debated whether or not Balinese people expressed, or even experienced, grief. According to Balinese Hindu beliefs, cremation is one of the most important...

"From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before. 1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artifacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to...

A British man falls for an American woman, who he meets at the first of a long series of weddings.

Soon after his mother's death, Matt takes a job at a funeral home in his tough Brooklyn neighborhood and, while attending and assisting with funerals, begins to accept her death and his responsibilities as a man.

The Language You Cry In tells an amazing scholarly detective story that searches for -and finds- meaningful links between African Americans and their ancestral past. It bridges hundreds of years and thousands of miles from the Gullah people of present-day Georgia back to 18th century Sierra Leone. It recounts the even more remarkable saga of how African Americans have retained links with their African past through the horrors of the middle passage,...