DISCUSSION GUIDES

“Riveting, fearless, and vividly original” (Emily St. John Mandel, New York Times bestselling author), this instant New York Times bestseller explores the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.

The Hotel Nantucket appears to be a blissful paradise but the staff, the guests, and even the ghost have complicated pasts. Can new general manager Lizbet Keaton overcome the odds with her local expertise and charismatic staff to win the favor of their new London billionaire owner, Xavier Darling, as well as that of Shelly Carpenter, the wildly popular Instagram tastemaker who can help put them back on the map?

Bestselling author Louis Bayard is back with a brilliantly wrought, witty, and sensitive novel about the young Jacqueline Bouvier before she became that Jackie—and about a marriage that almost never happened.

How often have you heard someone say, “I hate change?” That’s because most people do. The reality is, whether you like it or not, life puts us all through changes—some challenging, and many joyful—that shape our day-to-day experiences. Sometimes , though, in the blink of an eye, the unthinkable can happen. This begs the question: when the unexpected occurs, how do successfully navigate change so you land butter side up when life turns the tables?

In Ames Sheldon’s third award-winning historical novel, graduate student Cassie Lyman travels to her sister’s shotgun wedding in 1977. On her way Cassie discovers suffrage cartoons, diaries, and letters of Kate Easton, the founder of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts, and then she discovers that she and Kate are closely related, even though Cassie had never heard of Kate before then.

The first adult novel by the Newbery award-winning author of The Girl Who Drank the Moon is a rollicking feminist tale set in 1950s America where thousands of women have spontaneously transformed into dragons, exploding notions of a woman’s place in the world and expanding minds about accepting others for who they really are.

For fans of A Man Called Ove, a charming, witty and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

A stunning novel about love, work, and marriage that asks how far one family and one community will go to protect their future.

From Alison Espach, author of the New York Times Editor’s Choice novel The Adults, comes a breathtaking love story about two broken people who find themselves drawn to each other again and again across their lives, and a funny, uncommonly wise coming-of-age tale set in the early 90s that brims with unexpected moments of joy.

To Julie Metz, her mother, Eve, was the quintessential New Yorker. Eve rarely spoke about her childhood and it was difficult to imagine her living anywhere else except Manhattan. After her mother died, Julie Metz discovered a keepsake book filled with farewell notes from friends and relatives addressed to a ten-year-old girl named Eva. This long-hidden memento was the first clue to the secret pain that Julie’s mother had carried as a refugee and immigrant from Nazi-occupied Vienna, shining a light on a family that had to persevere at every turn to escape the antisemitism and xenophobia that threatened their survival.