Dear Edward

Dear Edward (2020) is Ann Napolitano's moving novel about survival, grief, and the slow work of learning to live again.

Twelve-year-old Edward Adler boards a flight from New York to Los Angeles with his parents and older brother. Hours later the plane goes down, and Edward is the sole survivor of the 192 people aboard. Sent to live with his aunt and uncle, and instantly famous as "the boy who lived," he must find a way to carry the impossible weight of what he has lost.

Napolitano braids two timelines: the final hours in the air, told through the passengers whose lives converge on that doomed flight, and the years that follow as Edward — helped by a fierce next-door friend named Shay and a trove of letters from strangers — inches toward a reason to go on. Tender and quietly hopeful, it is a story about the people who save us and the meaning we make out of catastrophe.