DISCUSSION GUIDES

Janice is a collector of stories. She can’t recall what started her collection, but somehow, as she cleaned their houses, her clients began telling her their stories. When Janice starts cleaning for shrewd, elderly Mrs. B, she finally meets someone who wants to hear her story. But Janice is clear: she is the keeper of stories, she doesn’t have a story to tell. At least, not one she can share. A charming, uplifting debut novel, full of humor and depth. Available January 24, 2023.

Adam Craig, a forty year-old stock trader in Chicago, finds his marriage teetering on the rocks and his life at a standstill. Desperate and on the edge of personal collapse, Adam takes the advice of a therapist and travels to his childhood family compound on Black Bear Lake with hopes of making peace with his past. Stepping onto the northern Wisconsin property, he relives the painful memories of the summer of 1983, his last summer at the lake.

She’s brilliant, beautiful…and tired of being the only Black woman in the room. After being plucked from reception and placed into the boardroom in the name of diversity, Kennedy and her best friend founded Token, a boutique PR agency that helps “diversity-challenged” companies and celebrities. She quickly discovers some messes aren’t easy fixes and there’s a lot of on-the-job learning.

A young Black woman's dream fashion internship is cut short when she overhears the owner's daughter plotting to kill him; when he actually turns up dead, she's framed for his murder and must race to seek justice before it's too late…

International Bestseller and the basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.

"This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid's Tale." --Margaret Atwood, on Twitter

"Scorching . . . a wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." --New York Times Book Review, Editors' Choice

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women--all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in--have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they've ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the "minutes" of the women's all-female symposium, Toews's masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

An “extraordinary” (Laurie Halse Anderson) young poet traces the lives of her foremothers in West Tennessee, from those enslaved centuries ago to her grandmother, her mother, and finally herself, in this stunning debut celebrating Black girlhood and womanhood throughout American history.

The Secret History meets Ninth House in this sinister, atmospheric novel following a circle of researchers as they uncover a mysterious deck of tarot cards and shocking secrets in New York’s famed Met Cloisters.In the end, was it fate that decided what happened to these characters or the choices they made?

Perfection has a cost . . . With transporting prose and meticulous detail, set in an era that remains shockingly relevant today, Winterland tells a story of glory, loss, hope, and determination, and of finding light where none exists.

Icky is a quirky girl whose ADHD impulses have her fully convinced she’s mismatched with her family. Willing to risk everything to prove it, she embarks on a one-night adventure on a magical boat.

Have you ever thought of how you speak to yourself? The words you choose? The tone of voice? Just as you use different voices when speaking to a child, parent, or lover, have you noticed you use a different voice when you speak to yourself? If you wouldn’t say it to a friend or loved one, why is it okay to say it to yourself?