GRIEF IS LIKE THIS . . .

Falling in love with your best friend, only to lose her to a mysterious death.

Working for decades to achieve a dream, and just when it's within reach, watching it threaten to go up in flames.

Longing for your deceased father to celebrate with you when your first novel sells.

Spending the first sleepless months in the throes of new motherhood alone, as your husband struggles to save his career.

Befriending the woman who should be your enemy, because you are that lonely . . .

Annie, Jesse, Noah, and Juliette are tied together by their experiences of grief; they are separated by their own versions of the truth of what happened on a single night twelve years ago, when Juliette, a college freshman grieving her mother, and Noah, a high school senior fighting for a place in a world that told him he didn't matter, found each other. Spanning decades, this complex, captivating story pulls back the curtains of cancel culture to explore ambition, empathy, art, desire, consent, motherhood, and what it really means to lose everything.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
--Sally Hepworth, author of Darling Girls

Dear Ava, I loved your book. --Award-winning actress Emma Watson

For fans of Kathleen Glasgow and Amber Smith, Ava Dellaira writes about grief, love, and family with a haunting and often heartbreaking beauty in this emotionally stirring, critically acclaimed debut novel, Love Letters to the Dead.

It begins as an assignment for English class: Write a letter to a dead person. Laurel chooses Kurt Cobain because her sister, May, loved him. And he died young, just like May did.

Soon, Laurel has a notebook full of letters to people like Janis Joplin, Amy Winehouse, Amelia Earhart, Heath Ledger, and more--though she never gives a single one of them to her teacher. She writes about starting high school, navigating new friendships, falling in love for the first time, learning to live with her splintering family. And, finally, about the abuse she suffered while May was supposed to be looking out for her.

Only then, once Laurel has written down the truth about what happened to herself, can she truly begin to accept what happened to May. And only when Laurel has begun to see her sister as the person she was--lovely and amazing and deeply flawed--can she begin to discover her own path.

Ava Dellaira's In Search of Us is a sweeping multi-generational love story.

To seventeen-year-old Angie, who is mixed-race, Marilyn is her hardworking, devoted white single mother. But Marilyn was once young, too.

When Marilyn was seventeen, she fell in love with Angie's father, James, who was African-American. But Angie's never met him, and Marilyn has always told her he died before she was born. When Angie discovers evidence of an uncle she's never met she starts to wonder: What if her dad is still alive, too?

So she sets off on a journey to find him, hitching a ride to LA from her home in New Mexico with her ex-boyfriend, Sam. Along the way, she uncovers some hard truths about herself, her mother, and what truly happened to her father.

A rare and special book. Part mother-daughter love story, part road trip journey, part compelling mystery, and one hundred percent beautiful, spellbinding tearjerker. I'm in love with every page. --Jennifer Niven, New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places and Holding Up the Universe

GRIEF IS LIKE THIS . . .

Falling in love with your best friend, only to lose her to a mysterious death.

Working for decades to achieve a dream, and just when it's within reach, watching it threaten to go up in flames.

Longing for your deceased father to celebrate with you when your first novel sells.

Spending the first sleepless months in the throes of new motherhood alone, as your husband struggles to save his career.

Befriending the woman who should be your enemy, because you are that lonely . . .

Annie, Jesse, Noah, and Juliette are tied together by their experiences of grief; they are separated by their own versions of the truth of what happened on a single night twelve years ago, when Juliette, a college freshman grieving her mother, and Noah, a high school senior fighting for a place in a world that told him he didn't matter, found each other. Spanning decades, this complex, captivating story pulls back the curtains of cancel culture to explore ambition, empathy, art, desire, consent, motherhood, and what it really means to lose everything.

I will be thinking about this book for a long time.
--Sally Hepworth, author of Darling Girls