PLAYLIST FOR THE DEAD

A boy tries to understand his best friend's suicide by listening to the playlist he left behind in this smart, voice-drive YA novel for fans of John Green, Mathew Quick, Jay Asher, and Stephen Chbosky.

Sam and Hayden have always been Sam and Hayden. Outcasts. Best friends. But then there was a party. There was a fight. The next morning, Hayden was dead.

All he left Sam was a playlist - and a note: "For Sam. Listen, and you'll understand."

But Sam does not understand. To figure out what happened, he has to rely on the playlist and his own memory. But the more he listens, the more he realizes that his memory is not as reliable as he thought. Especially when someone claiming to be Hayden begins sending him messages, and a series of violent attacks begin on the bullies who made Hayden's life hell.

As Sam loses himself in grief and rage, he knows he has to face up to what happened the night Hayden killed himself. But it is not as simple as he thinks. Each song on the playlist offers a clue, but it is only by taking out his earbuds and opening his eyes to the people around him - including Astrid, a quirky, artistic girl with secrets of her own - that Sam will finally be able to piece together his best friend's story.

And maybe have a chance to change his own.

Michelle Falkoff's fiction and reviews have been published in ZYZZYVA, DoubleTake, and the Harvard Review, among other places. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently serves as Director of Communication and Legal Reasoning at Northwestern University School of law. Playlist for the Dead is her first novel.