A teenage suicide pact between a pregnant girl and her boyfriend, both children of wealthy New England families. He shoots her, but fails to shoot himself and is charged with murder. At the trial he explains what made them do it.

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under -- maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche...

"Seventeen-year-old Stevie is trapped. In her life. In her body. And now in an eating-disorder treatment center on the dusty outskirts of the New Mexico desert. Her dad has signed her up for sixty days of treatment. But what no one knows is that Stevie doesn't plan to stay that long. There are only twenty-seven days until the anniversary of her brother Josh's death--the death she caused. And if Stevie gets her way, there are only twenty-seven days...

Charles Benetto uses alcohol as a crutch to deal with his loneliness, isolation, and depression, until he is given the chance to spend one more day with his mother's ghost.

Meet Martin, JJ, Jess, and Maureen. Four people who come together on New Year's Eve: a former TV talk show host, a musician, a teenage girl, and a mother. Three are British, one is American. They encounter one another on the roof of Topper's House, a London destination famous as the last stop for those ready to end their lives. This is a tale of connections made and missed, punishing regrets, and the grace of second chances.

"Another of Coelho's spiritual journeys, this time by the 24-year-old protagonist who, after a failed suicide attempt, rediscovers in an insane asylum in Slovenia the preciousness and precariousness of life. Costa's translation is competent, but cannot save Coelho's novel from its by now familiar and conventionally inspirational tone and message"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

"Her name is Orange, she's a young girl in high school, coming of age in the heart of the city. And she has decided she has nothing to live for. Not her shallow friends. Not her parents. Not school. Not even the empty promise of love. Her head filled with morbid fantasies of suicide, Orange finds herself standing at the edge of her rooftop when the drunken, enigmatic young man, Dashu, enters her world, changing it forever" -- p. [4] of cover.

Only hours after boarding a train, Alice is lying in hospital in a coma after an accident that could have been a suicide attempt. With her life hanging in the balance her family sit by her side where long-buried tensions start to rise to the surface.

An HMO in Boulder, Colorado, refuses to pay for experimental treatment which might save a little girl with a heart ailment. When the HMO's director is murdered, suspicion falls on the girl's sister. Psychologist Alan Gregory investigates.