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DISCUSSION GUIDES
- 1.Fun for the Whole Family: A Novel“An engaging, heartwarming tale with larger-than-life characters readers are sure to connect with” (USA Today), from the bestselling author of The Unsinkable Greta James.
“A glorious novel of love in all its forms—familial, romantic, lost, and found. Jennifer E. Smith is a ray of literary sunshine.”—Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street
The four Endicott siblings—Gemma, Connor, Roddy, and Jude—were once inseparable, a bond created by the absence of their dazzling, mercurial mother, who would return for a few weeks each summer to whisk them off on sprawling road trips around the country.
Decades later, the unthinkable has happened: the Endicotts haven’t spoken in years . . . until an out-of-the-blue text arrives from Jude, now a famous actress, summoning them to a small town in North Dakota. They’re each at a crossroads: Gemma, who put her own ambitions aside to raise the others, now isn’t sure if she wants to be a mother herself; Connor, a celebrated novelist, is floundering after his recent divorce and suffering from an epic case of writer’s block; and Roddy, at the tail end of a professional soccer career, is dangerously close to losing his future husband for the chance at one last season.
Jude is the only Endicott who seems to have it all together—but appearances can be deceiving. As the weekend unfolds, and the siblings wrestle with their shared past and uncertain futures, they’ll discover that Jude has been keeping three secrets . . . each of which could change everything.
A captivating journey and an ode to forgiveness that takes readers across all fifty states, Fun for the Whole Family brims with heart and resonates long after the final page. - 2.A Far-flung Life: A NovelFrom the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Light Between Oceans comes a breathtaking and epic novel set in the vast outback of Australia—about tragedy, family secrets, and the enduring power of love.
When we do something that can’t be undone or mended, how do we go on living? How do we find our North Star when there is no right answer? These are the questions at the center of M. L. Stedman’s unforgettable and magisterial new novel, A Far-flung Life. From the author of the beloved and bestselling The Light Between Oceans, this is a sweeping and epic story of a family, a tragedy, and the aftermath that reverberates for decades.
Remote Western Australia, 1958: here, for generations, the MacBrides have lived on a vast sheep station, Meredith Downs. It is a million acres, an ocean of arid land. On an ordinary day, on a lonely road, under the unending blue sky, patriarch Phil MacBride swerves to avoid a kangaroo. In seconds the lives of the entire MacBride family are shattered. And then, tragedy revisits when a twist of consequences claims the life of one sibling, and leads another to give up everything for the sake of an innocent child. Matt, the youngest MacBride, is plunged into a moral and emotional journey for which there is no map, no guide. The secrets at the heart of this gutting and beautiful story force him to choose between love and duty, sacrifice and happiness.
A Far-flung Life is a tale about family and belonging, fate and time. It is about people trying to do their best, and each, for private reasons, seeking shelter from the storm of life.
Can a fleeting moment unravel a whole life, mar it indelibly and irrevocably? Can compassion, resilience and forgiveness allow us to come to terms with our human imperfections? These are the questions Stedman asks in A Far-flung Life, her profoundly moving, uplifting, and luminous new novel about what the heart can endure for the sake of love. - 3.Life, and Death, and Giants: A Novel
A heart too big for this world. A life that changes everyone.
"Life, and Death, and Giants is an intriguing and alluring novel from beginning to end. The events are startling, sad, amusing, invigorating, and informative. Reading it is like meeting a family that you never knew existed and becoming close friends in a few weeks. Highly recommended." --Jane Smiley, author of Lucky and A Thousand Acres
Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world.
But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall. At seventeen, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach. What happens next transforms not only Gabriel’s life but the lives of everyone he meets.
Life, and Death, and Giants is a moving story of faith, family, buried secrets, and everyday miracles. - 4.Yesteryear: A GMA Book Club Pick: A NovelA traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
"A bold and biting satire, Yesteryear…will have you cackling and gasping right to the final page."
—Nita Prose, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Maid series
My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.
Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible.
A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood. - 5.The Eyes and the Impossible: (Newbery Medal Winner)NEWBERY MEDAL WINNER • #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
An enthralling novel for all ages by award-winning author Dave Eggers, told from the perspective of one uniquely endearing dog—featuring beautiful artwork from Caldecott honoree Shawn Harris.
“Johannes is a highly engaging narrator whose exuberance and good nature run like a bright thread through the novel’s pages.” —The New York Times
Johannes, a free dog, lives in an urban park by the sea. His job is to be the Eyes—to see everything that happens within the park and report back to the park’s elders, three ancient Bison. His friends—a seagull, a raccoon, a squirrel, and a pelican—work with him as the Assistant Eyes, observing the humans and other animals who share the park and making sure the Equilibrium is in balance.
But changes are afoot. More humans arrive in the park. A new building, containing mysterious and hypnotic rectangles, goes up. And then there are the goats—an actual boatload of goats—who appear, along with a shocking revelation that changes Johannes’s view of the world.
Lushly illustrated with old world paintings and new artwork from Caldecott honoree Shawn Harris, this story about friendship, beauty, liberation (and running very, very fast), will make readers of all ages see the world around them in a wholly new way. - 6.The Lost Girls: A Gripping Dual Narrative Thriller of Tragic Secrets at a Remote Minnesota Lake House
“The delicacy of [Young’s] writing elevates the drama and gives her two central characters depth and backbone… For all the beauty of Young’s writing, her novel is a dark one...And the murder mystery that drives it is as shocking as anything you’re likely to read for a good long while.”
— New York Times Book ReviewA stunning novel that examines the price of loyalty, the burden of regret, the meaning of salvation, and the sacrifices we make for those we love, told in the voices of two unforgettable women linked by a decades-old family mystery at a picturesque lake house.
In 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family—her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child.
Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine. For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability—a way to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning. The house is cold and dilapidated. The dark, silent lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he’s telling.
Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.
- 7.On the Calculation of Volume (Book I)
A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2024
A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF 2024
SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE
Tara Selter, the heroine of On the Calculation of Volume, has involuntarily stepped off the train of time: in her world, November eighteenth repeats itself endlessly. We meet Tara on her 122nd November 18th: she no longer experiences the changes of days, weeks, months, or seasons. She finds herself in a lonely new reality without being able to explain why: how is it that she wakes every morning into the same day, knowing to the exact second when the blackbird will burst into song and when the rain will begin? Will she ever be able to share her new life with her beloved and now chronically befuddled husband? And on top of her profound isolation and confusion, Tara takes in with pain how slight a difference she makes in the world. (As she puts it: "That's how little the activities of one person matter on the eighteenth of November.")
Balle is hypnotic and masterful in her remixing of the endless recursive day, creating curious little folds of time and foreshadowings: her flashbacks light up inside the text like old flash bulbs.
The first volume's gravitational pull--a force inverse to its constriction--has the effect of a strong tranquilizer, but a drug under which your powers of observation only grow sharper and more acute. Give in to the book's logic (its minute movements, its thrilling shifts, its slant wit, its slowing of time) and its spell is utterly intoxicating.
Solvej Balle's seven-volume novel wrings enthralling and magical new dimensions from time and its hapless, mortal subjects. As one Danish reviewer beautifully put it, Balle's fiction consists of writing that listens. "Reading her is like being caressed by language itself."
- 8.A Constellation of Vital Phenomena: A Novel
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • A searing debut about the transcendent power of love in wartime, hailed as “an absolute masterpiece” (Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly)—from the renowned author of Mercury Pictures Presents
“Extraordinary . . . a twenty-first century War and Peace.”—The New York Times Book Review
NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE JOHN LEONARD AWARD WINNER • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal
In the final days of December 2004, in a small rural village in Chechnya, eight-year-old Havaa hides in the woods when her father is abducted by Russian forces. Fearing for her life, she flees with their neighbor Akhmed—a failed physician—to the bombed-out hospital, where Sonja, the one remaining doctor, treats a steady stream of wounded rebels and refugees and mourns her missing sister. Over the course of five dramatic days, Akhmed and Sonja reach back into their pasts to unravel the intricate mystery of coincidence, betrayal, and forgiveness that unexpectedly binds them and decides their fate.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times Book Review, Chicago Tribune, NPR, Kansas City Star, San Francisco Chronicle, The Christian Science Monitor, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Kirkus Reviews - 9.The Weekend: A Novel
The #1 International Bestseller from the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Stone Yard Devotional and The Natural Way of Things
“The Big Chill with a dash of Big Little Lies . . . Knife-sharp and deeply alive.” —The Guardian (London)
“An insightful, poignant, and fiercely honest novel about female friendship and female aging.” —Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award–winning author of The Friend
“Friendship, ambition, love, sexual politics and death: it’s all here in one sharp, funny, heartbreaking, and gorgeously written package. I loved it.” —Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train
Three women in their seventies reunite for one last, life-changing weekend in the beach house of their late friend.
Four older women have a lifelong friendship of the best kind: loving, practical, frank, and steadfast. But when Sylvie dies, the ground shifts dangerously for the remaining three.
They are Jude, a once-famous restaurateur; Wendy, an acclaimed public intellectual; and Adele, a renowned actress now mostly out of work. Struggling to recall exactly why they’ve remained close all these years, the grieving women gather at Sylvie’s old beach house—not for festivities this time, but to clean it out before it is sold. Can they survive together without her?
Without Sylvie to maintain the group’s delicate equilibrium, frustrations build and painful memories press in. Fraying tempers, an elderly dog, unwelcome guests, and too much wine collide in a storm that brings long-buried hurts to the surface—and threatens to sweep away their friendship for good.
The Weekend explores growing old and growing up, and what happens when we’re forced to uncover the lies we tell ourselves. Sharply observed and excruciatingly funny, this is a jewel of a book: a celebration of tenderness and friendship from an award-winning writer. - 10.When We Cease to Understand the WorldOne of The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2021
Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize and the 2021 National Book Award for Translated Literature A fictional examination of the lives of real-life scientists and thinkers whose discoveries resulted in moral consequences beyond their imagining. When We Cease to Understand the World is a book about the complicated links between scientific and mathematical discovery, madness, and destruction. Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger--these are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjamín Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear. At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.