Downloadable Reading Group Guides
Dozens of title suggestions for your book clubs, all with helpful discussion guides that include questions, author essays, author Q&As and more!
The Art Forger
Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist.
The Atomic Weight of Love
In her sweeping debut novel, Elizabeth J. Church takes us from the World War II years in Chicago to the vast sun-parched canyons of New Mexico in the 1970s as we follow the journey of a driven, spirited young woman, Meridian Wallace, whose scientific ambitions are subverted by the expectations of her era.
Breakfast with Buddha
When his sister tricks him into taking her guru on a trip to their childhood home, Otto Ringling, a confirmed skeptic, is not amused.
The Daylight Marriage
With haunting intensity, a seamless balance of wit and heartbreak, and the emotional acuity that author Heidi Pitlor brings to every page, The Daylight Marriage mines the dark and delicate nature of a marriage.
A Friend of the Family
This riveting story of suburban tragedy charts a father’s fall from grace as he struggles to save his family, his reputation, and himself.
Guests on Earth
Author Lee Smith has created, through her artful blending of fiction and fact, a mesmerizing novel about a world apart—a time and a place where creativity and passion, theory and medicine, tragedy and transformation, are luminously intertwined.
The Girl Who Fell from the Sky
A searing and heartwrenching portrait of a young biracial girl dealing with society’s ideas of race.
Good Kings Bad Kings
Bellwether Award winner Susan Nussbaum’s powerful novel invites us into the lives of a group of typical teenagers—alienated, funny, yearning for autonomy—except that they live in an institution for juveniles with disabilities.
The Good Negress
Twenty years after its initial publication, The Good Negress continues to be an important part of the literary canon, as relevant and necessary as ever. Set in 1960s Detroit, the novel centers around Denise Palms and her journey from adolescence to womanhood as she navigates the tension between loyalty and independence, and between circumstance and desire. The Good Negress is simultaneously the portrait of a family and a glimpse into an era of twentieth-century America.
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez’s brilliant and buoyant first novel sets the García girls free to tell their most intimate stories about how they came to be at home—and not at home—in America.
In the Time of Butterflies
The voices of four sisters speak across the decades to tell their own stories and to describe the everyday horrors of life under Gen. Trujillo’s rule in the Dominican Republic.
Leave Me
With haunting intensity, a seamless balance of wit and heartbreak, and the emotional acuity that author Heidi Pitlor brings to every page, The Daylight Marriage mines the dark and delicate nature of a marriage.
Mudbound
A gripping and exquisitely rendered story of forbidden love, betrayal, and murder, set against the brutality of the Jim Crow South.
The Muralist
What happens when luminous talent collides with inexorable historical forces? Does great art have the power to change the world? And to what lengths should a person go to thwart evil?
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Ed Tarkington's spellbinding debut, draws you into a small-town American Gothic story of family fealty, scandal, and murder.
Orhan’s Inheritance
When Orhan’s brilliant and eccentric grandfather is found dead, Orhan inherits the decades-old business. But his grandfather has left the family estate to Seda, a stranger thousands of miles away. Over time, Orhan begins to unearth the story that eighty-seven-year-old Seda so closely guards–a story that, if it’s told, has the power to undo the legacy upon which Orhan’s family is built and could unravel Orhan’s own future.
Pictures of You
Two women running away from their marriages collide on a foggy highway, killing one of them. The survivor, Isabelle, is left to pick up the pieces, not only of her own life, but of the lives of the devastated husband and fragile son that the other woman, April, has left behind. Together, they try to solve the mystery of where April was running to, and why. As these three lives intersect, the book asks, How well do we really know those we love—and how do we forgive the unforgivable?
A Reliable Wife
When a successful businessman meets the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife," she is not the "simple, honest woman" he was looking for. Neither is their story.
The Remedy of Love
When the “Storm of the Century” threatens western Maine, two lost souls are forced to wait it out together in a cabin deep in the woods.
Silver Sparrow
With the opening line of Silver Sparrow, “My father, James Witherspoon, is a bigamist,” author Tayari Jones unveils a breathtaking story about a man’s deception, a family’s complicity, and the two teenage girls caught in the middle.
The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin’s enchanting novel is a love letter to the world of books—and booksellers—that changes our lives by giving us the stories that open our hearts and enlighten our minds.
The Third Son
Readers will cheer for a young boy with his head in the clouds who, against all odds, finds himself on the frontier of America’s space program.
This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
In This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! Jonathan Evison has crafted a bighearted novel with an endearing heroine at the helm. Through Harriet, he paints a bittersweet portrait of a postmodern everywoman, her story told with great warmth, humanity, and humor.
Water for Elephants
This runaway bestselling novel immerses readers in the atmospheric, gritty, and compelling story of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932.
