DISCUSSION GUIDES

A riveting memoir about one woman's journey into Syria under the Baathist regime and an unexpected love story between two strangers searching for meaning.

When Stephanie Saldaña arrives in Damascus, she is running away from a broken heart and a haunted family history that she has crossed the world to escape. Yet as she moves into a tumbling Ottoman house in the heart of the Old City, she is unprepared for the complex world that awaits her: an ancient capital where Sunni and Shia Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Kurds, and Palestinian and Iraqi refugees share a fragile co-existence.

Soon she is stumbling through the Arabic language, fielding interviews from the secret police, and struggling to make the city her own. But as the political climate darkens and the war in neighboring Iraq threatens to spill over, she flees to an ancient Christian monastery carved into the desert cliffs, where she is forced to confront the life she left behind. Soon she will meet a series of improbable teachers: an iconoclastic Italian priest, a famous female Muslim sheikh, a wounded Iraqi refugee, and Frédéric, a young French novice monk who becomes her best friend.

What follows is a tender story of a woman falling in love: with God, with her own life, with a country on the brink of chaos, and with a man she knows she can never have. Wise, funny, and heartbreaking, The Bread of Angels celebrates the hope that appears even in war, the surprising places we can call home, and the possibility of true love.

A LibraryReads pick! An Indie Next pick!

A heart-wrenching standalone novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, We Burned So Bright follows an elder gay couple on an end-of-the-world road-trip.

The road stretched out before them. No other cars, just the headlights on the blacktop. Above, the cracked moon in a kaleidoscope sky….

Husbands Don and Rodney have lived a good long life. Together they’ve experienced the highest highs of love and family, and lows so low that they felt like the end of the world.

Now, the world is ending for real. A rogue black hole is coming for Earth and in a month everything and everyone they’ve ever known will be gone.

Suddenly, after 40 years together, Don and Rodney are out of time. They’re in a race against the clock to make it from Maine to Washington State to take care of some unfinished business before it’s all over.

On the road they meet those who refuse to believe death is coming and those who rush to meet it. But there are also people living their final days as best they know how—impromptu weddings, bright burning bonfires, shared meals, and new friends.

And as the black hole draws near, among ball lightning and under a cracked moon in a kaleidoscope sky, Don and Rodney will look back on their lives and ask if their best was good enough.

Is it enough to burn bright if nothing comes from the ashes?

Brutally honest, darkly funny, and deeply empathetic, No Lost Causes Club is a guide to the process of sobering up when it feels like the party's just getting started, from the voice of the popular Instagram @brutalrecovery.

When she was told that her life expectancy could be as low as twenty-five if she did not stop drinking, Lauren McQuistin felt absolutely nothing--then despair and disbelief. How was she here? Surely, sobriety was for middle-aged divorcées who'd lost everything, not young, struggling singers who didn't have anything to lose in the first place? Besides, when alcohol is the only medicine that makes the world feel bearable, how can you possibly stop taking it?

Six years later, Lauren has found her way to an intricate answer. Entwining practical, empathetic suggestions with intimate memoir, No Lost Causes Club is an intrinsically vulnerable and brutally honest exploration of what it looks like to live a full life after getting clean. From delving into the social complexities that often leave people hopelessly dependent on alcohol to centering the struggles of those newly navigating sobriety, this book is a soothing balm for anyone wondering how to carve out a beautiful life in a world that never made sense before.

The Devil Wears Prada meets The White Lotus in a story of colliding egos and shocking betrayal, as intoxicatingly ice cold as the pink prosecco that flows all weekend.

Everything needs to be just right for bestselling mystery writer Faye Wader's first-ever fan weekend. Her sales might be slipping--only a little!--but her readers still love her enough to pony up for three days and two nights on Great Misery Island. The retreat is precisely planned, from the small-batch artisanal doughnuts to the perimenopausal Mermaid Meditation, by Faye and her beleaguered assistant, Jade--an aspiring author who can't seem to finish her own novel.

Faye's longtime agent and editor will be there, as well as Faye's number one fan, Peggy Mercer, who has been first in line at every one of Faye's events. When news comes that the weekend will be crashed by glamorous, charismatic rival novelist Abby Schuss, Faye thinks things can't get worse ... until one of the attendees is found dead in her room, setting off an unexpectedly murderous chain of events that makes prepub anxiety seem like a day at the beach. How far is Faye willing to go to get exactly what she wants from her Author Weekend?

The Author Weekend is a thrilling and hilarious dive into the dark heart of envy, and a glorious exploration of a woman of a certain age desperate to survive the dog-eat-dog world of publishing and control her own narrative.

Disrupt and push back against capitalism and white supremacy as Tricia Hersey, aka The Nap Bishop, encourages us to connect to the liberating power of rest, daydreaming, and naps as a foundation for healing and justice.

What would it be like to live in a well-rested world? Far too many of us have claimed productivity as the cornerstone of success. Brainwashed by capitalism, we subject our bodies and minds to work at an unrealistic, damaging, and machine-level pace--feeding into the same engine that enslaved millions into brutal labor for its own relentless benefit.

In Rest Is Resistance, Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, casts an illuminating light on our troubled relationship with rest and how to imagine and dream our way to a future where rest is exalted. Our worth does not reside in how much we produce, especially not for a system that exploits and dehumanizes us. Rest, in its simplest form, becomes an act of resistance and a reclaiming of power because it asserts our most basic humanity. We are enough. The systems cannot have us.

Rest Is Resistance is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism. With captivating storytelling and practical advice, all delivered in Hersey's lyrical voice and informed by her deep experience in theology, activism, and performance art, Rest Is Resistance is a call to action, a battle cry, a field guide, and a manifesto for all of us who are sleep deprived, searching for justice, and longing to be liberated from the oppressive grip of Grind Culture.