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DISCUSSION GUIDES
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Counting Backwards: A NovelSummary:Erin Brockovich meets Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate, Counting Backwards has the tight pace of a thriller with the personal, emotional themes of a women's fiction novel.
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Leeta Simtar: A Life on Two PlanetsSummary:A coming-of-age story that explores the meaning of birth family and found family, Leeta Simtar shows readers how breaking out of the past can help us figure out where we're going next.
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The Lunatic: A NovelSummary:For fans of Patrick Dewitt and Henry David Thoreau comes The Lunatic--the debut literary novel from the author of two previous non-fiction books, Michelle B. Slater, PhD.
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Brooklyn MottoSummary:Fans of Richard Price, Charlie Huston, and Jonathan Lethem will love this coming-of-age New York-centric detective noir debut from esteemed filmmaker and screenwriter Alex R. Johnson.
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One of Us: A NovelSummary:A playfully macabre and utterly thrilling tale about orphaned twins on the run from their murderous uncle who find refuge in a bizarre traveling carnival, from master of literary horror Dan Chaon
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Ink Ribbon Red: A NovelSummary:A wickedly plotted new thriller, in which a group of friends play a deadly game that unwraps a motive for murder, from Alex Pavesi, the author of The Eighth Detective
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The Hounding: A NovelSummary:The Crucible meets The Virgin Suicides in this haunting debut about five sisters in a small village in eighteenth-century England whose neighbors are convinced they’re turning into dogs.
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The Cold Millions: A NovelSummary:“One of the most captivating novels of the year.” – Washington Post
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A Library Reads Pick • An Indie Next Pick
A Best Book of the Year: Bloomberg | Boston Globe | Chicago Public Library | Chicago Tribune | Esquire | Kirkus | New York Public Library | New York Times Book Review (Historical Fiction) | NPR's Fresh Air | O Magazine | Washington Post | Publishers Weekly | Seattle Times | USA Today
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins comes another “literary miracle” (NPR)—a propulsive, richly entertaining novel about two brothers swept up in the turbulent class warfare of the early twentieth century.
An intimate story of brotherhood, love, sacrifice, and betrayal set against the panoramic backdrop of an early twentieth-century America that eerily echoes our own time, The Cold Millions offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of a nation grappling with the chasm between rich and poor, between harsh realities and simple dreams.
The Dolans live by their wits, jumping freight trains and lining up for day work at crooked job agencies. While sixteen-year-old Rye yearns for a steady job and a home, his older brother, Gig, dreams of a better world, fighting alongside other union men for fair pay and decent treatment. Enter Ursula the Great, a vaudeville singer who performs with a live cougar and introduces the brothers to a far more dangerous creature: a mining magnate determined to keep his wealth and his hold on Ursula.
Dubious of Gig’s idealism, Rye finds himself drawn to a fearless nineteen-year-old activist and feminist named Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. But a storm is coming, threatening to overwhelm them all, and Rye will be forced to decide where he stands. Is it enough to win the occasional battle, even if you cannot win the war?
Featuring an unforgettable cast of cops and tramps, suffragists and socialists, madams and murderers, The Cold Millions is a tour de force from a “writer who has planted himself firmly in the first rank of American authors” (Boston Globe).
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Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and LoveSummary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the acclaimed author of Signal Fires and host of the hit podcast Family Secrets: a memoir about the staggering family secret uncovered by a genealogy test, an exploration of the urgent ethical questions surrounding fertility treatments and DNA testing, and a profound inquiry of paternity, identity, and love.
“Memoir gold: a profound and exquisitely rendered exploration of identity and the true meaning of family.” —People
In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had casually submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.
Inheritance is a book about secrets. It is the story of a woman's urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It is a book about the extraordinary moment we live in, a moment in which science and technology have outpaced not only medical ethics but also the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Dani Shapiro’s memoir unfolds at a breakneck pace—part mystery, part real-time investigation, part rumination on the ineffable combination of memory, history, biology, and experience that makes us who we are. Inheritance is a devastating and haunting interrogation of the meaning of kinship and identity, written with stunning intensity and precision.