Raincoast Books

What Will You Read Next?

Love Letters to the Dead

A Novel

9780374346676

Farrar Straus & Giroux
Available: 04/01/14
5.78 x 8.48 · 336 pages
Ages 12-18 years
9780374346676
CDN $19.99 · cl
With dust jacket

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Ava Dellaira

"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 is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and received her undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago. Love Letters to the Deadis her debut novel. She currently lives in Santa Monica