Funeral Songs for Dying Girls

After inadvertently starting rumors of a haunted cemetery, a teen befriends a ghost in this young adult novel exploring grief and belonging by the critically acclaimed and bestselling author of The Marrow Thieves series, now available in paperback.

Winifred has lived in the apartment above the cemetery office with her father, who works in the crematorium, all her life, close to her mother’s grave. With her sixteenth birthday only days away, Winifred has settled into a lazy summer schedule, lugging her obese Chihuahua around the grounds in a squeaky red wagon to visit the neglected gravesides and nursing a serious crush on her best friend, Jack.

Her habit of wandering the graveyard at all hours has started a rumor that Winterson Cemetery might be haunted. It’s welcome news since the crematorium is on the verge of closure and her father’s job is being outsourced. Now that the ghost tours have started, Winifred just might be able to save her father’s job and the only home she’s ever known, not to mention being able to stay close to where her mother is buried. All she has to do is get help from her con-artist cousin to keep up the ruse and somehow manage to stop her father from believing his wife has returned from the grave. But when Phil, an actual ghost of a teen girl who lived and died in the ravine next to the cemetery, starts showing up, Winifred begins to question everything she believes about life, love and death. Especially love.

CHERIE DIMALINE is an author from the Georgian Bay Métis Community. Her book The Marrow Thieves won the prestigious Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature, the Burt Award for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Young Adult Literature, and the Governor General’s Literary Award, among others. TIME named it one of the 100 Best YA Books of All Time. Its sequel, Hunting by Stars, was published in 2021 to great acclaim, and was selected as Book of the Year by NPR, Indigo, and Kobo, and was a Good Morning America Buzz Pick, as well as a Cityline Book Club Pick for December 2021.