It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra Fuller is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel.

And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at twenty-one years old, dies in his sleep.

No stranger to loss – young siblings, a parent, a home country – Alexandra is nonetheless levelled. At the same time, she is painfully aware that she cannot succumb and abandon her two surviving daughters as her mother before her had done. From a sheep wagon deep in the mountains of Wyoming to a grief sanctuary in New Mexico to a silent meditation retreat in Alberta, Canada, Alexandra journeys up and down the spine of the Rocky Mountains in an attempt to find how to grieve herself whole. There is no answer, and there are countless answers – in poetry, in rituals and routines, in nature and in the indigenous wisdom she absorbed as a child in Zimbabwe. By turns disarming, devastating and unexpectedly, blessedly funny, Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.

A hair-raising account about the ins and outs of practising forensic pathology in Africa As a medical detective of the modern world, forensic pathologist Ryan Blumenthal's chief goal is to bring perpetrators to justice. He has performed thousands of autopsies, which have helped bring numerous criminals to book. In Autopsy he covers the hard lessons learnt as a rookie pathologist, as well as some of the most unusual cases he's encountered. During his career, for example, he has dealt with high-profile deaths, mass disasters, death by lightning and people killed by African wildlife. Blumenthal takes the reader behind the scenes at the mortuary, describing a typical autopsy and the instruments of the trade. He also shares a few trade secrets, like how to establish when a suicide is more likely to be a homicide. Even though they cannot speak, the dead have a lot to say - and Blumenthal is there to listen.

Everyone in the neighborhood was getting ready for the party.
Everyone knew somebody on the guest list. . . .
This was the day the dead returned.

There's a party tonight, but Cala doesn't want to go. While her family prepares for the celebration, Cala grieves her grandfather and tries to pretend she's not afraid.

But when she is separated from her family at the cemetery, Cala encounters four mysterious riders who will show her she is actually quite brave after all.

Brimming with magic and humor, The Invisible Parade is the first picture-book collaboration between award-winner John Picacio and New York Times bestselling Leigh Bardugo. Set on the night of Día de Muertos, Cala's story is one of love, loss, and the courage that can be found in unexpected places.

The main purpose of this booklet is twofold: to help Humanists who are thinking of becoming officiants on a regular basis; and to help families and friends who are faced with the need to organize a ceremony themselves at short notice. A third group who may find parts of it useful are funeral directors coping with funerals where there is no officiant and the family has no wish to play an active role.
The booklet aims to set out clearly the basic format of a Humanist ceremony, to suggest possible readings and turns of phrase, and to state simply the various practical measures that need to be taken. In short, it is a straightforward working manual.
" It was] the first funeral I had attended where I felt comfortable, and comforted
by the words spoken."
" . . . it gave me a sense of great peace."
"To hear others publicly proclaim their love, respect and admiration for my
husband made the funeral an uplifting experience. Afterwards so many who had
attended told me that it was the most interesting, most moving, most relevant
and best funeral that they had ever been to. Their remarks gave me a great
deal of comfort and I knew that I had treated my husband's atheism with the
respect and dignity that it deserved."
"A large number of those present, from a wide range of beliefs and backgrounds,
later expressed what we can only call enthusiasm for an experience that was
new to them, and in many cases compared very favourable with the often awkward
and impersonal alternatives with which they were familiar."
"Bearing in mind that this is a form of ceremony which has not yet gained wide
acceptance, we consider ourselves fortunate . . . to have received such expert and
personal attention."

A basic motivation for social and cultural life is the problem of death. By analysing the experiences of dying and bereaved people, as well as institutional responses to death, Clive Seale shows its importance for understanding the place of embodiment in social life. He draws on a comprehensive review of sociological, anthropological and historical studies, including his own research, to demonstrate the great variability that exists in human social constructions for managing mortality. Far from living in a 'death denying' society, dying and bereaved people in contemporary culture are often able to assert membership of an imagined community, through the narrative reconstruction of personal biography, drawing on a variety of cultural scripts emanating from medicine, psychology, the media and other sources. These insights are used to argue that the maintenance of the human social bond in the face of death is a continual resurrective practice, permeating everyday life.

The academic study of death rose to prominence during the 1960s. Courses on some aspect of death and dying can now be found at most institutions of higher learning. These courses tend to stress the psycho-social aspects of grief and bereavement, however, ignoring the religious elements inherent to the subject. This collection is the first to address the teaching of courses on death and dying from a religious-studies perspective.
The book is divided into seven sections. The hope is that this volume will not only assist teachers in religious studies departments to prepare to teach unfamiliar and emotionally charged material, but also help to unify a field that is now widely scattered across several disciplines.

Establishing a new set of international perspectives from around the world on and experiences of death, disposition and remembrance in urban environments, this book brings deathscapes - material, embodied and emotional places associated with dying and death - to life. It pushes the boundaries of established empirical and conceptual understandings of death in urban spaces through anthropological, geographical and ethnographic insights. Chapters reveal how urban deathscapes are experienced, used, managed and described in specific locales in varied settings; how their norms and values intersect and at times conflict with the norms of dominant and assumed practices; and how they are influenced by the dynamic practices, politics and demographics typical of urban spaces. Case studies from across Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America highlight the differences between deathscapes, but also show their clear commonality in being as much a part of the world of the living as they are of the dead. With a people- and space-centred approach, this book will be an interesting read for human geography, death studies and urban studies scholars, as well as social and cultural anthropologists and sociologists. Its international and interdisciplinary nature will also make this a beneficial book for planning and landscape architecture, religious studies and courses on death practices.

* PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY TODAY * The compelling and moving memoir of forensic psychiatrist Dr Duncan Harding

Karl Marx is buried in London, John Keats in Rome and Leon Trotsky in Mexico. Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris is today known for the graves of Jim Morrison, Victor Hugo and Oscar Wilde, but when it opened in the early 19th century the owners felt that they needed some star names to make it a desired burial site - and so they had Moliere's body transferred there. Arranged thematically into 75 entries, Graves of the Great and Famous tours the world exploring the resting places of leading artists, thinkers, scientists, sportspeople, revolutionaries, politicians and pioneers. Some, such as communist leaders Ho Chi Minh and Vladimir Lenin, are interred in great mausoleums, where they are visited by millions each year; others are buried in little-known country graveyards. From lives cut short through assassinations - Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln - to those who suffered terrible accidents (Princess Diana), from mobsters such as Benjamin 'Bugsy' Siegel and John Gotti to Napoleon and his mistress Marie Walewska, from Nelson Mandela to Eva Peron, Graceland to Highgate Cemetery, the book provides a guide to some of the most famous and unusual graves of the great and the good. Featuring 150 photographs of graves, cemeteries, graveyards and mausoleums, Graves of the Great and Famous is a compact guide to the final resting place of the famous - and infamous.