Reading Group Guide for Saddled by Susan Richards Introduction One day, at the age of thirty-one, Susan Richards realized that she was an alcoholic. She wrote it down in her journal, struck by the fact that it had taken nine years of waking up hung-over to name her illness. What had changed? Susan had a [...]
Archive of posts tagged adult
The Calling by Inger Ash Wolfe
Reading Group Guide Introduction Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef has lived all her days in the small town of Port Dundas, Ontario, and is now making her way toward retirement with something less than grace. Hobbled by a bad back and a dependence on painkillers, and feeling blindsided by divorce after nearly four decades of marriage, [...]
An American Requiem by James Carroll
Downloadable Guide for Group Discussion and Classroom Use “Told with integrity and style, this is a moving account of the generational strains of the Vietnam era, and the timeless agonies of fathers and sons.” —The New Yorker In this dramatic, intimate, and tragic memoir, James Carroll recovers a time when parents could no longer [...]
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
About The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter When The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers’s literary debut, was first published by Houghton Mifflin, on June 4, 1940, the twenty-three-year-old author became a literary sensation virtually overnight. The novel is considered McCullers’s finest work, an enduring masterpiece that was chosen by the Modern Library [...]
Homestead by Rosina Lippi
Downloadable Guide for Group Discussion and Classroom use “By the time you finish the first of these linked stories, you can hardly bear to have it end.” — The New Yorker High in the alpine Bregenz Forest of westernmost Austria, guarded by the majestic Three Sisters and the Praying Hands, the small village of [...]
The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
About The Namesake Major National Bestseller Best Book of the Year: New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Newsday, San Jose Mercury News New York Magazine Book of the Year “Dazzling . . . An intimate, closely observed family portrait. — New York Times “Lahiri handles issues of assimilation and belonging with her trademark [...]
An Unfinished Season by Ward Just
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, winner of the Heartland Prize for Fiction, a New York Times Notable Book, and a Book Sense recommended title About the Book In An Unfinished Season, Ward Just brings us into the secret, shadow life that inhabits family, love, business, and politics in 1950s Chicago. In the small town [...]
The Gate of Angels by Penelope Fitzgerald
Downloadable Guide for Group Discussion and Classroom use “Delights, amuses, disturbs and provokes reflection, in equal measure. —Allan Massie, Scotsman Cambridge University in 1912 is on the threshold of world-changing discoveries in physics. Young, rational Fred Fairly, a country clergyman’s only son, is a junior fellow at the university’s smallest college, St. Angelicus, closed [...]
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
Downloadable Guide for Group Discussion and Classroom use “A masterpiece. How does she do it?” — A. S. Byatt Friedrich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg (1772—1801), was born in Oberwiederstadt, Germany, studied law, philosophy, and history, worked as a government auditor at Weissenfels, and—under the pseudonym Novalis became known as the “prophet of Romanticism.” Best [...]
