DISCUSSION GUIDES

Summary: A heartbreaking and uplifting mother-daughter drama with a steamy romantic backstory.

Summary: “A twisty, fast-paced” (The Sunday Times, London) debut thriller, as electrifying as the #1 New York Times bestseller The Girl on the Train, about impending motherhood, unreliable friendship, and the high price of keeping secrets.

In this “gloriously tangled game of cat and mouse that kept the twists coming until the very last moment” (Ruth Ware, #1 New York Times bestselling author), Helen’s idyllic life—handsome architect husband, gorgeous Victorian house, and cherished baby on the way—begins to change the day she attends her first prenatal class.

There, she meets Rachel, an unpredictable single mother-to-be who doesn’t seem very maternal: she smokes, drinks, and professes little interest in parenthood. Still, Helen is drawn to her. Maybe Rachel just needs a friend. And to be honest, Helen’s a bit lonely herself. At least Rachel is fun to be with. She makes Helen laugh, invites her confidences, and distracts her from her fears.

But her increasingly erratic behavior is unsettling. And Helen’s not the only one who’s noticed. Her friends and family begin to suspect that her strange new friend may be linked to their shared history in unexpected ways. When Rachel threatens to expose a past crime that could destroy all of their lives, it becomes clear that there are more than a few secrets laying beneath the broad-leaved trees and warm lamplight of Greenwich Park.

Summary: A gripping mystery about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.

Summary: Award-winning memoirist Meg Stafford has an adventurous spirit, and this time she takes us along for the ride. When her daughters venture into terra incognita—one of them meditating in the Himalayas and the other negotiating with the Colombian military—Stafford decides to go too. In the process, she reflects on her own lifetime of wanderlust and what it means for a parent to love and to let go. Generous, insightful, and deeply funny, Stafford is the ideal tour guide for a journey as big as the world and as intimate as the human heart.

Summary: The Red Kitchen is the story of Barbara and her mother, who, like many women, surrender to society’s expectation to be one thing while yearning to be another. Both women—in very different ways—come of age, find the loving parts of their mother-daughter relationship, and start living their best lives.

Summary: "A "well rounded and entertaining" (New York Times) Hollywood biography about the passionate, turbulent marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh.

Summary: An inventive, page-turning crime thriller with "palpable emotional depth" (New York Times Book Review) in which the Red Scare never ended.

Summary: It’s 1937. Jane’s on the run. She’s left her pregnant mother with a man she hates and left her father for dead in an irrigation ditch. To survive on her own, Jane remakes herself as a man. Everything’s getting better, until her father turns up on the newspaper’s front page, in a picture that threatens to destroy the life she’s making.