DISCUSSION GUIDES

A heartbreaking and uplifting mother-daughter drama with a steamy romantic backstory.

Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans--though no one calls them that anymore.

His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the "Transition." Now, eating human meat--"special meat"--is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he's given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he's aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost--and what might still be saved.

A gripping mystery about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.

Award-winning memoirist Meg Stafford has an adventurous spirit, and this time she takes us along for the ride. When her daughters venture into terra incognita—one of them meditating in the Himalayas and the other negotiating with the Colombian military—Stafford decides to go too. In the process, she reflects on her own lifetime of wanderlust and what it means for a parent to love and to let go. Generous, insightful, and deeply funny, Stafford is the ideal tour guide for a journey as big as the world and as intimate as the human heart.

The Red Kitchen is the story of Barbara and her mother, who, like many women, surrender to society’s expectation to be one thing while yearning to be another. Both women—in very different ways—come of age, find the loving parts of their mother-daughter relationship, and start living their best lives.

The bestselling historical fiction from Kim Michele Richardson, this is a novel following Cussy Mary, a packhorse librarian and her quest to bring books to the Appalachian community she loves, perfect for readers of Lee Smith and Lisa Wingate.

"A "well rounded and entertaining" (New York Times) Hollywood biography about the passionate, turbulent marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

An inventive, page-turning crime thriller with "palpable emotional depth" (New York Times Book Review) in which the Red Scare never ended.

The new novel from the New York Times bestselling author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek!

It’s 1937. Jane’s on the run. She’s left her pregnant mother with a man she hates and left her father for dead in an irrigation ditch. To survive on her own, Jane remakes herself as a man. Everything’s getting better, until her father turns up on the newspaper’s front page, in a picture that threatens to destroy the life she’s making.