DISCUSSION GUIDES

#1 New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts presents Legacy, a new novel of a mother and a daughter, of ambition and romance, and of a traumatic past reawakened by a terrifying threat...

Adrian Rizzo was seven when she met her father for the first time. That was the day he nearly killed her--before her mother, Lina, stepped in.

Soon after, Adrian was dropped off at her grandparents' house in Maryland, where she spent a long summer drinking lemonade, playing with dogs, making a new best friend--and developing the stirrings of a crush on her friend's ten-year-old brother. Lina, meanwhile, traveled the country promoting her fitness brand and turning it into a billion-dollar business. There was no point in dwelling on the past.

A decade later, Adrian has created her own line of yoga and workout videos, following in Lina's footsteps but intent on maintaining creative control. And she's just as cool-headed and ambitious as her mother. They aren't close, but they're cordial--as long as neither crosses the other.

But while Lina dismisses the death threats that Adrian starts getting as a routine part of her daughter's growing celebrity, Adrian can't help but find the vicious rhymes unsettling. Year after year, they keep arriving--the postmarks changing, but the menacing tone the same. They continue after she returns to Maryland and becomes reacquainted with Raylan, her childhood crush, all grown up and as gorgeously green-eyed as ever. Sometimes it even seems like the terrifying messages are indeed routine, like nothing will come of them. Until the murders start, and the escalation begins...

A Best Novel of Summer (New York Times Book Review)

 

From the acclaimed author of Mr. Dickens and His Carol, a richly-imagined reckoning with the life of another cherished literary legend: Mary Wollstonecraft - arguably the world's first feminist

August, 1797. Midwife Parthenia Blenkinsop has delivered countless babies, but nothing prepares her for the experience that unfolds when she arrives at Mary Wollstonecraft's door. Over the eleven harrowing days that follow, as Mrs. Blenkinsop fights for the survival of both mother and newborn, Wollstonecraft recounts the life she dared to live amidst the impossible constraints and prejudices of the late 18th century, rejecting the tyranny of men and marriage, risking everything to demand equality for herself and all women. She weaves her riveting tale to give her fragile daughter a reason to live, even as her own strength wanes. Wollstonecraft's urgent story of loss and triumph forms the heartbreakingly brief intersection between the lives of a mother and daughter who will change the arc of history and thought.

 

In radiant prose, Samantha Silva delivers an ode to the dazzling life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the world's most influential thinkers and mother of the famous novelist Mary Shelley. But at its heart, Love and Fury is a story about the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative to pass on to her daughter, and all daughters, for generations to come.

Willy Cherrymill and his stepdaughter, Lacey, are deeply bruised by a past brimming with unanswered questions. It's been thirty years since May DuBerry, Willy's young wife and Lacey's mother, abandoned them both, leaving Willy to raise Lacey alone.

Lacey Cherrymill is smart, stubborn, and focused. She's also single mother to a young daughter recently diagnosed with a devastating illness. The last thing she needs to think about right now is the betrayal that rocked her childhood. Reluctantly, she has returned to her rural beginnings, a former dairy farm in the Maryland countryside, and to Willy, a man steeped in his own disappointments and all the guilt that goes with them.

Together they will pool their wobbly emotional resources to take care of Lacey's daughter, Tasha, all the while trying to skirt the issue of May's mysterious disappearance. But try as she might, Lacey can't leave it alone. Just where is May DuBerry Cherrymill and why did she leave them, and how is it that they have never talked about the wreckage she left behind?

A Hand to Hold in Deep Water is a deeply felt narrative about mothers and daughters, the legacy of secrets, the way we make a family, and the love of those who walk us through our deepest pain. It is about the way we are tethered to one another and how we choose to wear those bindings. These are characters you won't soon forget and, more so, won't want to leave behind when you turn the last page.

In this gripping novel, an Iraq war veteran decides that he and his daughter, Bella, must live outside of the corruptions of the modern world. After they settle in a cave in the Cascade Mountains, Bella begins to sense the presence of others from the past. Both intertwining narratives explore humanity’s struggle not only to survive but also to find meaning, even in times of isolation. The result is an epic, moving story about the love between parent and child and the power of human connection.

Ashley C. Ford, one of the most prominent voices of her generation, debuts with an extraordinarily powerful audiobook memoir: the story of a childhood defined by the looming absence of her incarcerated father.

Lil and Frank married young, started a family, and have recently retired to North Carolina. Determined to leave a history behind for their grown kids, Lil sifts through letters and diary entries, uncovering family stories—and revealing more secrets than Frank wants their children to know. Empathetic and profound, this novel from master storyteller Jill McCorkle deconstructs and reconstructs what it means to be a father or a mother, and to be a child trying to know your parents, trying to make sense of the hieroglyphics of history and memory.

In post-Katrina New Orleans, a single mother jeopardizes the safety of her friends and family as she fights crooked businessmen, her corrupt law firm, and a white supremacist group in a collision of race and greed.

From Anthony Doerr--the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning author of Cloud Cuckoo Land--the beautiful Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

From the USA Today bestselling author of The Long Flight Home...Recruited from Churchill’s typing pool to become an undercover spy in German-occupied France, a young woman from London bravely endures daring missions, audacious escapes, and harrowing imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp, risking everything for the country—and the man—she loves.

The unforgettable, haunting story of a young woman’s perilous fight for freedom and justice for her brother, the first novel published in English by a female Kurdish writer.