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DISCUSSION GUIDES
- 1.Meet the Newmans: A Novel
From #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author Jennifer Niven, a novel about America’s favorite TV family, whose perfect façade cracks
"I LOVED Meet the Newmans!" —Judy Blume, #1 New York Times bestselling author
"[A] WITTY AND MOVING novel." —People
"Fans of LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY will love Meet the Newmans." —Woman's World
For two decades, Del and Dinah Newman and their sons, Guy and Shep, have ruled television as America’s Favorite Family. Millions of viewers tune in every week to watch them play flawless, black-and-white versions of themselves. But now it’s 1964, and the Newmans’ idealized apple-pie perfection suddenly feels woefully out of touch. Ratings are in free fall, as are the Newmans themselves. Del is keeping an explosive secret from his wife, and Dinah is slowly going numb—literally. Steady, stable Guy is hiding the truth about his love life, and the charmed luck of rock ‘n roll idol Shep may have finally run out.
When Del—the creative motor behind the show—is in a mysterious car accident, Dinah decides to take matters into her own hands. She hires Juliet Dunne, an outspoken, impassioned young reporter, to help her write the final episode. But Dinah and Juliet have wildly different perspectives about what it means to be a woman, and a family, in 1964. Can the Newmans hold it together to change television history? Or will they be canceled before they ever have the chance?
Funny, big-hearted, and deeply moving, Meet the Newmans is a rich family story about the dual lives we lead. Because even when our lives aren’t televised weekly, we all have a behind-the-scenes. - 2.Palaver: A Novel
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction
Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
“A heart-wrenchingly honest, often luminescent exploration of how to find and cultivate true connections, sometimes in the unlikeliest of places . . . [Palaver is] an unshakable triumph.” —The Washington Post
One of Time’s Must-Read Books of 2025 and Kirkus Reviews’ Best Fiction of 2025
One of The Washington Post’s Best Fiction Books of the Year
Named a Most Anticipated Book by The New York Times, New York, Time, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, People, Harper’s Bazaar, Bustle, and Town & Country
A life-affirming novel of family, mending, and how we learn to love, from the award-winning Bryan Washington.
In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor and drinks his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his mother in Houston, whose preference for the son’s oft-troubled homophobic brother, Chris, pushed him to leave home. Then, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, ten years since they last saw each other, the mother arrives uninvited on his doorstep.
With only the son’s cat, Taro, to mediate, the two of them bristle at each other immediately. The mother, wrestling with memories of her youth in Jamaica and her own complicated brother, works to reconcile her good intentions with her missteps. The son struggles to forgive. But as life steers them in unexpected directions—the mother to a tentative friendship with a local bistro owner and the son to a cautious acquaintance with a new patron of the bar—they begin to see each other more clearly. During meals and conversations and an eventful trip to Nara, mother and son try as best they can to determine where “home” really is—and whether they can even find it in one another.
Written with understated humor and an open heart, moving through past and present and across Houston, Jamaica, and Japan, Bryan Washington’s Palaver is an intricate story of family, love, and the beauty of a life among others. - 3.How to Dodge a Cannonball: A Novel
A New York Times Notable Book of 2025
An NPR Books We Love pick
A New York Times Editors’ Choice pick
How to Dodge a Cannonball is a razor-sharp satire that dives into the heart of the Civil War, hilariously questioning the essence of the fight, not just for territory, but for the soul of America.
How to Dodge a Cannonball is funnier than the Civil War should ever be. It follows Anders, a teenage idealist who enlists and reenlists to shape the American Future—as soon as he figures out what that is, who it includes, and why everyone wants him to die for it. Escaping his violently insane mother is a bonus.
Anders finds honor as a proud Union flag twirler—until he’s captured. Then he tries life as a diehard Confederate—until fate asks him to die hard for the Confederacy at Gettysburg. Barely alive, Anders limps into a Black Union regiment in a stolen uniform. While visibly white, he claims to be an octoroon, and they claim to believe him. Only then does his life get truly strange.
His new brothers are even stranger, including a science-fiction playwright, a Haitian double agent, and a former slave feuding with God. Despite his best efforts, Anders starts seeing the war through their eyes, sparking ill-timed questions about who gets to be American or exploit the theater of war. Dennard Dayle’s satire spares no one as doomed charges, draft riots, gleeful arms dealers, and native suppression campaigns test everyone’s definition of loyalty.
Uproariously funny and revelatory, How to Dodge a Cannonball asks if America is worth fighting for. And then answers loudly. Read it while it’s still legal. - 4.Park Avenue: A Novel
The HIGHLY ANTICIPATED adult debut novel from #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING author Renée Ahdieh
“Pulse-racing…Fans of The White Lotus and Crazy Rich Asians shouldn’t miss this.” —People
“I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun reading a book!” —Nicola Yoon, #1 NYT BESTSELLING author
Jia Song has always been destined for greatness. As the daughter of Korean bodega owners, she promised herself that she would have every Fifth Avenue luxury when she grew up, and it is all finally within reach. She has just made junior partner at her prestigious Manhattan law firm, she can count on her two best friends to have her back, and she is about to score the ultraluxe gold-on-gold Birkin bag of her dreams. So when her boss asks her to sit in on the hush-hush family implosion of a high-level client, she accepts without hesitation—only to find out that it is one of the most famous Korean families in the world.
The Park family’s net worth is estimated at a billion dollars, and their megasuccessful Korean beauty brand has shaped the culture for the past two decades. But the patriarch is filing for divorce while his wife is dying, and their three children can’t stop snapping at one another. With both the family fortune and legacy under threat from the worst kind of scandal, it’s up to Jia to set things right—and she only has a month to do it.
As Jia sorts through the lies and subterfuge, chasing the truth across the globe on private jets, she finds herself falling for this broken, badly-behaving family in ways she can’t quite explain. But it is also becoming clear that the Parks are hiding dark secrets. Can she find the truth in time to protect the Parks’ fortune and secure her success at the firm? And can she hold on to what’s most important, even if it means admitting that what she's always wanted isn’t what she actually needs? - 5.What Kind of Paradise: A NovelNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A teenage girl breaks free from her father’s world of isolation to discover that her whole life is a lie in this “absorbing and well-crafted” (The Washington Post) novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Pretty Things and Watch Me Disappear.
“A mesmerizing blend of coming-of-age and psychological suspense, set against the birth of the internet age.”—People
The first thing you have to understand is that my father was my entire world.
Growing up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s, Jane knows only the world that she and her father live in: the woodstove that heats their home, the vegetable garden where they try to eke out a subsistence, the books of nineteenth-century philosophy that her father gives her to read in lieu of going to school. Her father is elusive about their pasts, giving Jane little beyond the facts that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident, the crash propelling him to move Jane off the grid to raise her in a Waldenesque utopia.
As Jane becomes a teenager she starts pushing against the boundaries of her restricted world. She begs to accompany her father on his occasional trips away from the cabin. But when Jane realizes that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime, she flees Montana to the only place she knows to look for answers about her mysterious past, and her mother’s death: San Francisco. It is a city in the midst of a seismic change, where her quest to understand herself will force her to reckon with both the possibilities and the perils of the fledgling internet, and where she will come to question everything she values.
In this sweeping, suspenseful novel from bestselling author Janelle Brown, we see a young woman on a quest to understand how we come to know ourselves. It is a bold and unforgettable story about parents and children; nature and technology; innocence and knowledge; the losses of our past and our dreams for the future. - 6.A Week in Winter#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Circle of Friends • In a small town on the west coast of Ireland, an unlikely cast of characters come together at a newly opened inn. This "delightful [novel that] radiates the warmth and charm that fans will recognize and cherish" (USA Today).
Stoneybridge is a small town on the west coast of Ireland where all the families know one another. When Chicky Starr decides to take an old, decaying mansion set high on the cliffs overlooking the windswept Atlantic Ocean and turn it into a restful place for a holiday by the sea, everyone thinks she is crazy. Helped by Rigger (a bad boy turned good who is handy around the house) and Orla, her niece (a whiz at business), Chicky is finally ready to welcome the first guests to Stone House’s big warm kitchen, log fires, and understated elegant bedrooms. John, the American movie star, thinks he has arrived incognito; Winnie and Lillian are forced into taking a holiday together; Nicola and Henry, husband and wife, have been shaken by seeing too much death practicing medicine; Anders hates his father’s business, but has a real talent for music; Miss Nell Howe, a retired schoolteacher, criticizes everything and leaves a day early, much to everyone’s relief; the Walls are disappointed to have won this second-prize holiday in a contest where first prize was Paris; and Freda, the librarian, is afraid of her own psychic visions.
Sharing a week with these characters is pure joy, full of Maeve’s trademark warmth and humor. Once again, she embraces us with her grand storytelling. - 7.Luckiest Girl Alive: A Novel*NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING MILA KUNIS*
Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train will thrill at this “perfect page-turner” (People)—that Reese Witherspoon describes as “one of those reads you just can’t put down!” This instant New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling novel follows an unforgettable young woman striving to create the perfect life—until a violent incident from her past threatens to unravel everything and expose her most shocking secret.
HER PERFECT LIFE IS A PERFECT LIE
As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome blue blood fiancé, she’s this close to living the perfect life she’s worked so hard to achieve.
But Ani has a secret.
There’s something else buried in her past that still haunts her, something private and painful that threatens to bubble to the surface and destroy everything.
With a singular voice and twists you won’t see coming, Luckiest Girl Alive explores the unbearable pressure that so many women feel to “have it all” and introduces a heroine whose sharp edges and cutthroat ambition have been protecting a scandalous truth, and a heart that's bigger than it first appears.
The question remains: will breaking her silence destroy all that she has worked for—or, will it at long last, set Ani free? - 8.Before I Go to Sleep: A Novel
New York Times Bestseller
“An exceptional thriller. It left my nerves jangling for hours after I finished the last page.” –Dennis Lehane, New York Times bestselling author of Shutter Island
“Imagine drifting off every night knowing that your memories will be wiped away by morning. That’s the fate of Christine Lucas, whose bewildering internal world is rendered with chilling intimacy in this debut literary thriller. . . . You’ll stay up late reading until you know.” — People (4 stars)
Memories define us. So what if you lost yours every time you went to sleep? Your name, your identity, your past, even the people you love–all forgotten overnight. And the one person you trust may be telling you only half the story. Welcome to Christine's life. Every morning, she awakens beside a stranger in an unfamiliar bed. She sees a middle-aged face in the bathroom mirror that she does not recognize. And every morning, the man patiently explains that he is Ben, her husband, that she is forty-seven-years-old, and that an accident long ago damaged her ability to remember.
In place of memories Christine has a handful of pictures, a whiteboard in the kitchen, and a journal, hidden in a closet. She knows about the journal because Dr. Ed Nash, a neurologist who claims to be treating her without Ben’s knowledge, reminds her about it each day. Inside its pages, the damaged woman has begun meticulously recording her daily events—sessions with Dr. Nash, snippets of information that Ben shares, flashes of her former self that briefly, miraculously appear.
But as the pages accumulate, inconsistencies begin to emerge, raising disturbing questions that Christine is determined to find answers to. And the more she pieces together the shards of her broken life, the closer she gets to the truth . . . and the more terrifying and deadly it is.
- 9.A Well-Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts
The New York Times and USA Today bestseller
The New York Times bestselling author of Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald returns with a riveting novel of iron-willed Alva Vanderbilt and her illustrious family as they rule Gilded-Age New York.
Alva Smith, her southern family destitute after the Civil War, married into one of America’s great Gilded Age dynasties: the newly wealthy but socially shunned Vanderbilts. Ignored by New York’s old-money circles and determined to win respect, she designed and built nine mansions, hosted grand balls, and arranged for her daughter to marry a duke. But Alva also defied convention for women of her time, asserting power within her marriage and becoming a leader in the women's suffrage movement.
With a nod to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton and for fans of HBO's hit show The Gilded Age, A Well-Behaved Woman depicts a glittering world of enormous wealth contrasted against desperate poverty, of social ambition and social scorn, of friendship and betrayal, and an unforgettable story of a remarkable woman. Meet Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, living proof that history is made by those who know the rules—and how to break them. - 10.A Great Country: A Novel
#1 International Bestseller
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize & New American Voices Award
Amazon Top 10 Editors Pick
Named a Best Book of the Year by Elle, Cosmo, Real Simple, Glamour, Conde Nast, Readers Digest, & more
"A premise that would (and should) translate well to a prestige television series."—Elle
"The best...book I read this year was Gowda's timely and touching A Great Country."—San Diego Union-Tribune
Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of their pursuit of the American dream. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.
For the most part, these differences among the five members of the Shah family are minor irritants, arguments between parents and children, older and younger siblings. But one Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event in this gripping family saga will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?
For readers of The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, this powerful work of literary fiction explores themes of immigration, generational conflict, social class and privilege as it reconsiders the myth of the model minority and questions the price of the American dream.