The Glimpse Library Collection

A Heart’s Second Chance

True story — the reason Glimpse exists

In November 2024, Rob LiPuma’s heart stopped for thirty minutes on his sister-in-law’s kitchen floor. His wife Laurie did CPR on her own husband. First responders shocked him five times. He lived — and wrote down what happened, told mostly through the eyes of the people who fought for him.

The person this book finds is the one keeping vigil: the spouse in the surgical waiting room, the family outside the ICU. It says the thing they most need to hear — the worst hour is not always the last one — from someone who has proof. The second half walks honestly through recovery: the fear of your own heartbeat, the caregiver’s hidden trauma, and a nurse’s four words that reset everything: “Now, you live.” It also quietly convinces every reader to learn CPR, because someone’s second chance may pass through their hands.

Where it belongs: Hospital chapels, ICU and cardiac waiting areas, cardiac rehab centers, comfort care homes.

“Proof, in a waiting room, that love and quick hands can win.”

Everything True Has Always Been Simple

What dying taught me about living

After the cardiac arrest, Rob wrote down the truths that survived those thirty minutes — as a letter to his sons, in eighteen short chapters a person can read in five minutes each, in any order. The book tells you on page one: open to the chapter you need today.

This is the book for anyone whose life just got interrupted — a diagnosis, a loss, a long wait — and who is quietly taking stock. And it holds one page unlike anything else in our Collection: a chapter written directly to people who have watched someone die, telling them, from the only side that knows, that the suffering they witnessed may not have been their loved one’s experience at all. His wife said hearing it helped her more than anything. Hospice families say the same.

Where it belongs: Everywhere the Library goes — hospice family rooms first.

“A book with a page written specifically for people who have watched someone die.”

The Memory of the Tail

A novel for the grieving — praised by Kirkus Reviews

A little girl survives a fever and starts hearing four cats — funny, wise, impossible teachers who stay with her through the hardest thing a child can face: her mother’s death. They don’t explain it. They can’t fix it. They do the one thing that actually helps: they stay.

That’s why this book is in the Collection. It shows a grieving reader, through a story warm enough to laugh with, what real comfort looks like — presence without fixing, love without a timeline — and later, gently, how to keep loving someone who is gone without the ache swallowing you. For grievers who love animals, no other book we place reaches as deep. It asks a bit more time than our shorter titles, which makes it right for the long vigil rather than the quick wait.

Where it belongs: Comfort care homes, hospice family rooms, public libraries.

“For the person learning that love doesn’t end — it just changes what it can hold.”

The Still Point Guides

Four short guides: Grief · When Your Mind Won’t Stop · Identity · Change

Four slim self-help guides that share one method and one voice. Each opens the same way: Rob telling the reader, in two paragraphs, that his heart stopped on his kitchen floor and his wife brought him back — so he isn’t writing “from above the thing.” Then five small steps, the same every time: name it, find where it lives, see its shape, do one small thing, come back to yourself. Every chapter stands alone, takes minutes, and was built to work “tonight, while you’re tired and hurting and short on patience” — a precise description of a person in a waiting room.

The one that anchors our placements is The Grief No One Lets You Name. It’s about the losses that don’t come with casseroles: the friendship that faded, the parent with dementia you’re grieving while they’re still alive, the child who was never born, the pet who was family. Hospice waiting rooms are full of exactly these griefs — the ones sitting next to the official one.

Worth telling a facility director: these guides are responsibly built. Every one states plainly that it’s a companion, not a substitute for professional care, and puts crisis-line information in the front pages. That’s the detail that makes a chaplain or social worker comfortable leaving them out.

Where it belongs: Grief guide in every hospice and comfort-care placement; the full set in libraries, hospital waiting areas, and caregiver rooms.

“Five small steps an exhausted person can actually take, tonight, from an author who has been where they’re sitting.”

The Chair Trilogy

Quiet Miracles · The Chair Remembers · The Last Quiet Miracle

Three short novels about an old barbershop and the chair in its window — built by a father in 1940 for a son who went off to war, and kept for decades by a barber who understands his real work was never haircuts. The sign on the door says everything: All welcome. Especially the broken ones.

Every chapter is someone walking in carrying something heavy and walking out lighter. A nine-year-old girl asking for a haircut like her late father used to give her. A man getting cleaned up for a funeral. A widower who cared for his dying wife for years and admits he doesn’t feel relief — just empty. These are the exact people sitting in hospice waiting rooms and caregiver corners right now, and this is the rare book written about them — the ones who hold everyone else up.

A practical note that matters for waiting rooms: between every chapter is a one-page reflection. A visitor with five minutes gets something whole; a family keeping a long vigil gets a story that ends in a homecoming gentle enough to be read as Heaven.

Where it belongs: Comfort care homes, caregiver and family rooms, public libraries.

“The book that tells your community’s caregivers someone sees what they carry.”

A Trilogy of Parables

The Book of Faith · The Book of Hope · The Book of Love

Every chapter follows the same quiet pattern: a stranger with a worn leather book sits down beside someone at the worst moment of their life — a bullied boy, a girl in a treatment facility who can’t look in a mirror, a man who stopped believing his work mattered — and tells them a story. A short parable. Then he’s gone, and the person takes one small step they couldn’t take before.

Each chapter stands completely on its own — about fifteen minutes, readable in any order, which is exactly what a waiting room asks of a book. The parables are spiritual without being churchy: no doctrine, no sermon. The final parable of Hope speaks straight to the grieving: a gardener learns that “endings aren’t the opposite of life — they’re how life makes room for more life.” A hospice chaplain could hand that single chapter to a family and have done a day’s good work.

And the trilogy’s closing truth is the program’s own: the Stranger was never one person. He’s anyone willing to sit down beside someone who’s hurting. A sponsor who puts these books in a room becomes him.

Where it belongs: Hospital chapels, hospice waiting rooms, quiet corners everywhere.

“A stranger who shows up at the worst moment with exactly the right story — which is precisely what a Glimpse Library shelf is.”

The Glimpse First Readers

The Little Seed That Believed · The Little Balloon That Rose Again · The Red Thread

Three picture books for the youngest readers — ages two to eight — each a first introduction to one word: faith, hope, love. In The Little Seed That Believed, a seed is tested by wind, rain, heavy earth, and long nights, and after every trial the same refrain returns: the seed believed. Then, on the darkest pages, the refrain disappears — no sound, no light — before the turn: “But deep down, roots reached. The dark held room to grow.” Children start saying the refrain aloud before the page turns. That’s the design working.

Every detail is built for reading aloud in a hard place: five minutes cover to cover, warm mosaic-style art, and a genuinely substantial grown-ups’ guide in the back — how to read it, what to ask, what to say when a child connects the dark pages to something real. There’s even a page addressed straight to the adult: you are the seed too — believing in healing, in change, in tomorrow, when there’s no evidence yet. In a hospital waiting room, the parent reading aloud needs that page as much as the child needs the story.

Where it belongs: Hospital and pediatric waiting areas, hospice family rooms, rural libraries, Little Free Libraries — wherever a lap and a restless child meet.

“A five-minute read-aloud that teaches a frightened child — and quietly reminds the adult holding them — how to believe in the dark.”