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DISCUSSION GUIDES
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The Queen's Gambit: A NovelSummary: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Engaging and fast-paced, this gripping coming-of-age novel of chess, feminism, and addiction speeds to a conclusion as elegant and satisfying as a mate in four. Now a highly acclaimed, award-winning Netflix series.
Eight year-old orphan Beth Harmon is quiet, sullen, and by all appearances unremarkable. That is, until she plays her first game of chess. Her senses grow sharper, her thinking clearer, and for the first time in her life she feels herself fully in control. By the age of sixteen, she’s competing for the U.S. Open championship. But as Beth hones her skills on the professional circuit, the stakes get higher, her isolation grows more frightening, and the thought of escape becomes all the more tempting. - 202.
The King's MessengerSummary:New York Times, USA Today and international bestselling author Susanna Kearsley explores romance, court alliances, and the limits of one's duty in this rich story of an honorable man in service to a treacherous king, and the mission that brings him to love and his true calling.
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Black Butterflies: A novelSummary: A NEW YORK TIMES BEST HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR • SHORT-LISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION • A timeless story of strife and hope set during the conflict in the Balkans in the early '90s—a searing debut novel about a woman who faces the war on her doorstep with courage, fierceness, and an unshakable belief in the power of art.
“A reflective novel . . . that tells us life goes on, love stories develop, humanity remains in the most inhumane of times.” —Irish Independent
Sarajevo, spring 1992. Each night, nationalist gangs erect makeshift barricades, splitting the city into ethnic enclaves. Each morning, the people who live there—whether Muslim, Croat, or Serb—push the barriers aside.
When violence erupts and becomes, finally, unavoidable, Zora, an artist and teacher, sends her husband and elderly mother to safety in England. She stays behind, reluctant to believe that hostilities will last more than a few weeks. As the city falls under siege, everything she loves about her home is laid to waste, black ashes floating over the rooftops. Yet Zora and her friends find ways to rebuild themselves, over and over. Told with breathtaking immediacy, this is a story of disintegration, resilience, and hope—a stirring debut from a commanding new voice. - 204.
Detransition, Baby: A NovelSummary: The lives of three women—transgender and cisgender—collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires. - 205.
Eleanor & Park: A NovelSummary:A gorgeous first-ever-paperback edition featuring sprayed edges with a stenciled script design.
Bono met his wife in high school, Park says.
So did Jerry Lee Lewis, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be, she says, we're 16.
What about Romeo and Juliet?
Shallow, confused, then dead.
I love you, Park says.
Wherefore art thou, Eleanor answers.
I'm not kidding, he says.
You should be.
Set over the course of one school year in 1986, this is the story of two star-crossed misfits-smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try. When Eleanor meets Park, you'll remember your own first love—and just how hard it pulled you under. - 206.
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk: A NovelSummary:NOW A NATIONAL INDIE BESTSELLER
A love letter to city life in all its guts and grandeur, Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney paints a portrait of a remarkable woman across the canvas of a changing America: from the Jazz Age to the onset of the AIDS epidemic; the Great Depression to the birth of hip-hop.
“In my reckless and undiscouraged youth,” Lillian Boxfish writes, “I worked in a walnut-paneled office thirteen floors above West Thirty-Fifth Street…”
She took 1930s New York by storm, working her way up writing copy for R.H. Macy’s to become the highest paid advertising woman in the country. It was a job that, she says, “in some ways saved my life, and in other ways ruined it.”
Now it’s the last night of 1984 and Lillian, 85 years old but just as sharp and savvy as ever, is on her way to a party. It’s chilly enough out for her mink coat and Manhattan is grittier now—her son keeps warning her about a subway vigilante on the prowl—but the quick-tongued poetess has never been one to scare easily. On a walk that takes her over 10 miles around the city, she meets bartenders, bodega clerks, security guards, criminals, children, parents, and parents-to-be, while reviewing a life of excitement and adversity, passion and heartbreak, illuminating all the ways New York has changed—and has not.
Lillian figures she might as well take her time. For now, after all, the night is still young.
“Transporting…witty, poignant and sparkling.”
—People (People Picks Book of the Week) - 207.
The Block Party: A NovelSummary:Raves for the hottest thriller of 2023!
"This is wicked fun." --Publishers Weekly
“Absolutely amazing. Readers are going to flip!” —Lisa Gardner, New York Times bestselling author of ONE STEP TOO FAR
"Like a firecracker on a hot summer night . . . If you like my novels, you’ll love THE BLOCK PARTY.” ―Elin Hilderbrand, #1 Bestselling author of THE HOTEL NANTUCKET
This summer, meet your neighbors.
The residents of the exclusive cul-de-sac on Alton Road are entangled in a web of secrets and scandal utterly unknown to the outside world, and even to each other.
On the night of the annual Summer block party, there has been a murder.
But, who did it and why takes readers back one year earlier, as rivalries and betrayals unfold—discovering that the real danger lies within their own block and nothing—and no one—is ever as it seems. - 208.
The Lightkeeper's Daughters: A NovelSummary:“A remarkable achievement . . . a story of commitment, identity, and familial loyalty that will leave one in tears. Five out of five stars.”—New York Journal of Books
In her mesmerizing adult debut set on the shores of the Great Lakes, critically acclaimed children’s author Jean E. Pendziwol delivers an affecting story of family, identity, and art involving a decades-old mystery.
Elizabeth, whose failing eyes have confined her to a senior home, is reflecting on her life, looking to unravel the mysteries of her family, especially that of her beautiful, enigmatic twin sister Emily. Sixteen-year-old Morgan has lived in foster care since she was a young child, bouncing from home to home, searching for one where she belongs.
When the journals belonging to Elizabeth’s late father are discovered after a tragic accident, she enlists the help of Morgan, who is completing community service at the senior home, to decipher the faded words. With a shared love of art and music, this unlikely pair are drawn deep into a world far removed – to Porphyry Island on Lake Superior, where Elizabeth’s father and his wife served as lighthouse keepers and raised their young family during the First and Second World Wars.
As a complex web of secrets unravels, Elizabeth and Morgan realize that their fates are connected to each other and to the isolated island, in this vividly written novel about the lengths people will go for love.
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Oil and Marble: A Novel of Leonardo and MichelangeloSummary: Called “tremendously entertaining” (The New York Times) Stephanie Storey’s brilliant bestselling debut, brings early 16th-century Florence, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo Buonarroti alive for art lovers and readers of historical fiction.
With extraordinary empathy into the minds and souls of the two great Renaissance artists, Storey offers a stunning art history thriller. From 1501 to 1505, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti both lived and worked in Florence. Leonardo was a charming, handsome fifty year-old at the peak of his career. Michelangelo was a temperamental sculptor in his mid-twenties, desperate to make a name for himself.
Michelangelo is a virtual unknown when he returns to Florence and wins the commission to carve what will become one of the most famous sculptures of all time: David. Even though his impoverished family shuns him for being an artist, he is desperate to support them. Living at the foot of his misshapen block of marble, Michelangelo struggles until the stone finally begins to speak. Working against an impossible deadline, he begins his feverish carving.
Meanwhile, Leonardo's life is falling apart: he loses the hoped-for David commission; he can't seem to finish any project; he is obsessed with his ungainly flying machine; he almost dies in war; his engineering designs disastrously fail; and he is haunted by a woman he has seen in the market--a merchant's wife, whom he is finally commissioned to paint. Her name is Lisa, and she becomes his muse.
Leonardo despises Michelangelo for his youth and lack of sophistication. Michelangelo both loathes and worships Leonardo's genius.
Oil and Marble is the story of their nearly forgotten rivalry. - 210.
Caledonian Road: A NovelSummary:Campbell Flynn, art historian, professor, and fêted fixture of the literati, always knew that when his life came crashing down, it would happen in public--yet he never imagined that a single year in London would expose so much.
He's never taken other people half as seriously as they take themselves, which is the first of his mistakes. The second is a new project: opportunistic and precisely calibrated to rake in a fortune. Riding on the high of a best-selling biography of Vermeer and fielding more inquiries and requests than he has the time or patience to pursue, Campbell has nevertheless still not managed to shake the question of money. The fact of his quiet loan from a school friend now embroiled in scandal makes the ever-present worry feel even more pressing. His unflappable agent, Atticus; his steadfast wife, Elizabeth; his sister, Moira, crusading parliamentarian for the poor; his well-adjusted, well-off adult children, Angus and Kenzie; and all the outward trappings of success can't conceal that something in his life is off.
As Campbell becomes increasingly entangled with a brilliant student, convention-smashing and working class, like he used to be, he feels he's been given a second chance to embrace the change that frightens him, even as he sees trouble brewing for his family and friends. Campbell's personal quest takes him down darker roads than he could have imagined, and all his worlds--the art scene and academia, fashion and the English aristocracy, journalism and the internet--collide in spectacular fashion, culminating in one shocking night on Caledonian Road.