DISCUSSION GUIDES

Summary: #1 best seller on Amazon for biographies/memoirs! Little Sister is the captivating and beautifully written memoir of a young woman who is reared in a religious cult in Massachusetts during the 1950s and 1960’s and how she managed to leave and become a successful businesswoman – a story of resilience and hope.

Summary: Raised by his grandmother in Chicago’s South Side, young Claude McKay Love hopes going away to college in Missouri will help him escape the havoc of his life there, but he discovers in this coming-of-age story that it’s not so easy to leave your past behind—or find a safe place to land.

Summary: In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman discovers remarkable parallels between her own life and her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife whose hidden notes inspire her to discover what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society.

Summary: Olive, Again is a novel-in-stories by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge. A New York Times Bestseller. Prickly, wry, resistant to change yet ruthlessly honest and deeply empathetic, Olive Kitteridge is “a compelling life force” (San Francisco Chronicle). The iconic Olive struggles to understand not only herself and her own life but the lives of those around her in the town of Crosby, Maine. The unforgettable Olive will continue to startle us, to move us, and to inspire us—in Elizabeth Strout’s words—“to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”

Summary: It is 1320, 25 years since Beatrice lived in Montaillou, but the past she has tried to forget is about to catch up with her when she is summoned by the terrifying Inquisitor, Bishop Jacques Fournier. Based on Bishop Fournier's actual interrogation records kept in the Vatican for nearly 700 years, this is the story of the noblewoman, Beatrice de Planisolles and the last Cathars of the Languedoc. Love, lust, betrayal and religious persecution are at the heart of this historical novel.

Summary: The Real Education of TJ Crowley puts the themes of "To Kill a Mockingbird" in overdrive in an unflinching look at racism in the late 1960s.

Summary: A beautifully written and absorbing novel about civil rights; architecture and place; the wrenching experience of becoming an adult; first love; and ordinary people making extraordinary choices.

Summary: An acclaimed comic novel about literary creation, mass incarceration, and settling a few scores. Called “one of the smartest—and best—novels of the year” by NPR, this debut is set in an upstate New York prison where a largescale riot grows to epic proportions.

Summary: A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both.

Summary: Philomena meets The Orphan Train in this suspenseful, provocative novel — the story of a young unwed mother who is forcibly separated from her daughter at birth and the lengths to which they go to find each other.