By Tony Kushner

A Pulitzer Price-winning play set in 1985 about gay men and AIDS.

By Karen Kingsbury
Series Angels Walking

When former national baseball star Tyler Ames suffers a career-ending injury, all he can think about is putting his life back together the way it was before. A series of small miracles leads Tyler to a maintenance job at a retirement home and a friendship with Virginia Hutcheson, an old woman with Alzheimer’s who strangely might have the answers he so desperately seeks.

By Eli Gottlieb

A middle-aged autistic resident of a therapeutic community where he was sent as a young child rebels against changes in his environment by attempting to return to a family home and younger sibling he only partially remembers.

By Ami McKay

The first daughter in five generations of her Nova Scotia family, Dora Rare becomes an apprentice to a gifted midwife and storyteller before their home is threatened by the arrival of a brash medical doctor who promises sterile and painless births.

By Diane Chamberlain

When fulfilling her father's dying wish leads to a chain of unexpected events, including her husband's suicide, Laura begins to discover secrets in her family's past.

By Margaret Dilloway
Recommended By Sonia Grgas, Reference Librarian

Thirty-six-year-old biology teacher Gal Garner's regimented life will never be the same after her estranged sister's teenage daughter Riley arrives one afternoon unannounced.

By Abraham Verghese
Recommended By Jean Buchholtz, Library Clerk

Twin brothers born from a secret love affair between an Indian nun and a British surgeon in Addis Ababa, Marion and Shiva Stone come of age in an Ethiopia on the brink of revolution, where their love for the same woman drives them apart.

By Ka Hancock

Deciding to marry in spite of respective health challenges, Mickey, a man with bipolar disorder, and Lucy, a woman with a ravaging family history of breast cancer, struggle through difficult challenges for 11 years before receiving a surprise that forces them to redefine everything they believe about love.

By Yan Lianke
Recommended By Jackie, Head of Readers' Services

A previously banned work based on a true scandal finds an impoverished village targeted by a blood-selling operation that leads to a catastrophic outbreak of AIDS and decimates an entire community.

By John Green
Recommended By Sharon Long, Assistant Library Director, Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Sixteen-year-old Hazel, a stage IV thyroid cancer patient, has accepted her terminal diagnosis until a chance meeting with a boy at cancer support group forces her to reexamine her perspective on love, loss, and life.

By Mary Beth Keane
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian, Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian, Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, April 8, 2014. 7:30 PM.

A fictionalized telling of the life of Typhoid Mary, an Irish immigrant who moved to New York at the turn of the century.

By Robin Cook

Investigating the suspicious death of a social worker, Chief New York City Medical Examiner Laurie Montgomery makes the controversial decision to use genealogic DNA databases to identify a mysterious killer.

By Audrey Blake

An unforgettable historical fiction novel about one woman who believed in scientific medicine before the world believed in her.

By Libba Bray

Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen year-old who, after being diagnosed with Creutzfeld Jakob's (aka mad cow) disease, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital in an attempt to find a cure.

By Chris Cleave
Recommended By Audrey Honigman, Library Clerk

Cyclists Zoe and Kate are friends and athletic rivals for Olympic gold, while Kate and her husband Jack, also a world-class cyclist, must contend with the recurrence of their young daughter's leukemia.

By Jodi Picoult
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

Jacob Hunt is a teenage boy with Asperger's Syndrome.  He's hopeless at reading social cues or expressing himself well to others, and Jacob has special focus on one subject - forensic analysis.

By Gayle Forman
Series If I Stay
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian

While in a coma following an automobile accident that killed her parents and younger brother, seventeen-year-old Mia, a gifted cellist, weights whether to live with her grief or join her family in death.

Became the movie: If I Stay.

By Lisa Genova

When a beloved Irish Catholic police officer is diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease, his grown children witness the progression of their father’s illness and consider whether they want to be tested to see if they have inherited the condition.

By John Grisham
Recommended By John Shea, Library Page

“Law firm partners Oscar Finley and Wally Figg see a chance for huge financial gain when they learn of a pending class action lawsuit against the makers of Krayoxx, a popular cholesterol-reducing drug suspected of causing heart attacks (From the Publisher).”

By Alice Lichtenstein

"On a cold January morning, Susan, a professor of biology, leaves her husband alone for a few minutes and returns to find him gone. Suffering from dementia, no longer able to dress or feed or wash himself without help, Christopher has wandered alone into a frigid landscape with no sense of home or direction. Lost (From the Publisher)."

By Lisa Genova

Two women meet by accident on a Nantucket beach and are drawn into a friendship. Olivia is a young mother whose eight-year-old severely autistic son has recently died. She comes to the island in a trial separation to try and make sense of the tragedy of her Anthony's short life. Beth, a stay-at-home mother of three, is also recently separated after discovering her husband's long-term infidelity.

By Chris Bohjalian
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

In the pastoral community of Reddington, Vermont, during the harsh winter of 1981, Sibyl Danforth makes a life-or-death decision based on fifteen years of experience as a respected midwife - a decision intended to save a child, a decision that will change her life forever.

By Sanjay Gupta

At Chelsea General, surgeons answer for bad outcomes at the Morbidity and Mortality conference, known as M & M. This peek behind the curtain into what is considered the most secretive meeting in all of medicine is the backdrop for this story.

By Lisa Scottoline
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

Using a sperm donor to conceive when she learns that her husband is infertile, a happily pregnant woman is shattered to learn that a man arrested for a series of brutal murders is the biological father of her baby.

By Kate Manning

A tale based on the life of a controversial Victorian New York City midwife features plucky orphan Axie Muldoon, who recounts her apprenticeship and establishment of a thriving practice that is threatened by a censorious zealot.

By Kim Alkemade
Recommended By Pam Strudler, Programming & Arts Librarian, Isabel Zinman, Readers' Services Librarian
With Lisa Jones, Readers' Services Librarian

Tuesday, October 18, 2016. 7:30 PM.

When hospice nurse Rachel realizes that her new patient is the doctor that spent years subjecting her to tortuous medical experiments at a Jewish orphanage, she is forced to confront her memories of the time and their lasting effect.

By Ellen Marie Wiseman
Recommended By Evelyn Hershkowitz, Readers' Services Librarian

In the fall of 1918, thirteen-year-old German immigrant Pia Lange longs to be far from Philadelphia's overcrowded streets and slums, and from the anti-German sentiment that compelled her father to enlist in the U.S. Army, hoping to prove his loyalty. But an even more urgent threat has arrived. Spanish influenza is spreading through the city. Soon, dead and dying are everywhere. With no food at home, Pia must venture out in search of supplies, leaving her infant twin brothers alone... Since her baby died days ago, Bernice Groves has been lost in grief and bitterness. If doctors hadn't been so busy tending to hordes of immigrants, perhaps they could have saved her son. When Bernice sees Pia leaving her tenement across the way, she is buoyed by a shocking, life-altering decision that leads her on a sinister mission: to transform the city's orphans and immigrant children into what she feels are "true Americans." As Pia navigates the city's somber neighborhoods, she cannot know that her brothers won't be home when she returns. And it will be a long and arduous journey to learn what happened even as Bernice plots to keep the truth hidden at any cost. Only with persistence, and the courage to face her own shame and fear, will Pia put the pieces together and find the strength to risk everything to see justice at last.

By Robin Cook

As a deadly plague strikes America, epidemiologist Marissa Blumenthal uncovers the plot behind its spread. Murder and intrigue reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country. Dr. Marissa Blumenthal of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control investigates--and soon uncovers the medical world's deadliest secret.

By Christopher Davis

When Andrew Beckett is fired from a prestigious Philadelphia law firm because he has AIDS, he convinces Joe Miller, a small-time personal injuries lawyer, to represent him against his former employees.

By Priscille Sibley

After an accident leaves his wife Elle brain dead, Matt Beaulieu, resolving to take her off life support, changes his mind when the doctors discover that she is pregnant, a decision that results in a controversial legal battle with Elle's family.

By Carrie Brown

At her tenth birthday party, Alice, a motherless young girl protected by her father and five older brothers, encounters two people who will change her life - Theo, a mixed-race New York City boy, and Kenneth, an artist suffering from the ravages of AIDS.

By Michael Palmer

Possessing a brilliant mind for medicine in spite of her inability to comprehend the dynamics of traditional medicine, Asperger's patient and doctor Thea Sperelakis is baffled when her siblings refuse care to their hit-and-run victim father.

By Lisa Genova
Recommended By Betty Petreshock, Reference Librarian

“Fifty-year-old Alice Howland, a highly respected linguistics professor, suddenly begins feeling disoriented and confused. Her diagnosis-early-onset Alzheimer's-irrevocably changes her life as well as the lives of her husband and three grown children (Library Journal).”

By Herman Koch

Concealing the medical mistake that caused the death of a famous actor, Dr. Marc Schlosser gradually reveals the personal reasons why he sought the victim's death, including an assault on the doctor's daughter.

By Barbara Delinsky
Recommended By Marie McLaughlin, Head of Circulation

“Two childhood friends reunite at a summer retreat, each harboring a horrible secret that would test the bounds of their longtime relationship if revealed (From the Publisher).”

By Paul Cleave

Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, a famous crime writer struggles to differentiate between his own reality and the frightening plotlines he has created for his books.

By Alice LaPlante
Recommended By Brenda Cherry, Reference Librarian

Implicated in the murder of her best friend, Jennifer White, a brilliant retired surgeon with dementia, struggles with fractured memories of their complex relationship and wonders if she actually committed the crime.

By Roopa Farooki

“Orphaned in early adulthood, the three Murphy siblings struggle with challenges related to the eldest's autism and the resentment and heightened responsibilities of the younger two, a situation that threatens to tear them apart (From the Publisher).”

By James Patterson

Frannie O'Neill, a dedicated young veterinarian, makes an astonishing discovery in the woods after her husband's murder.

By Barbara Delinsky
Recommended By Rosemarie Germaine, Senior Library Clerk

“Molly has always lived in her sister’s shadow and her feelings for her sister have run the gamut. But when her sister, a world-class runner, suffers a heart attack and does not regain consciousness, Molly must make the tough decisions in a role that will destroy some of her most cherished beliefs about the sister she thought she knew (From the Publisher).”

By Samatha Harvey

With his memories slowly eroding from Alzheimer's, sixty-five-year-old Jake Jameson struggles to preserve his sense of identity by building stories about his feelings and the events of his life, unaware that even his clearest recollections may not be true.

By Michelle Wildgen

Hoping to revitalize her lackluster existence by taking a job as a caregiver for a married woman with ALS, college student Bec finds herself profoundly moved by her relationship with her employer, with whom she experiences unanticipated life changes.