Gerry

When we first meet 14-year-old Susie Salmon, she is already in heaven. In the sweet, untroubled voice of a precocious teenage girl, Susie relates the awful events of her death and her own adjustment to the strange new place where she finds herself. With love, longing, and a growing understanding, Susie watches her family as they cope with their grief. This story of seemingly unbearable tragedy is transformed into a suspenseful and touching narrative about family, memory, love, heaven, and living.

She charmed America with her smart, likable, down-to-earth personality as she campaigned for her husband, then vice-presidential candidate John Edwards. She inspired millions as she valiantly fought advanced breast cancer after being diagnosed only days before the 2004 election. She touched hundreds of similarly grieving families when her own son, Wade, died tragically at age 16 in 1996.

In one year Julia Sweeney got a divorce (amicable), bought a small bungalow in Hollywood, and looked forward to a life that said, "Here dwells a happily single young woman!" But then the axe fell. Her younger brother, Mike, was diagnosed with terminal cancer and moved in with her. Her parents came to be with Mike and moved in with her, too. Julia was now on seriously intimate terms with the people she had spent half a lifetime growing up away from.

She is a housewife: young, healthy, blissfully happy. He is an actor: charismatic and ambitious. The spacious, sun-filled apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side is their dream home, a dream that turns into an unspeakable nightmare. Enter the chilling world of Ira Levin, where terror is as near as your new neighbors and where evil wears the most innocent face of all.

When he was a kid singing in his church choir, Clay Aiken never dreamed of becoming a pop music star. His ambition was to be a teacher, maybe even a high school principal. But the music that was Clay's joy in life was destined to lead him to unexpected triumphs.