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Featured Guide

Thao Thai, author of Banyan Moon

When Ann Tran gets the call that her fiercely beloved grandmother, Minh, has passed away, her life is already at a crossroads. In the years since she’s last seen Minh, Ann has built a seemingly perfect life, but it all crumbles with one positive pregnancy test. Now she returns home to Florida to face her estranged mother, Huơng. Huơng is simultaneously mourning her mother and resenting her for having the relationship with Ann that she never did. Then Ann and Huơng learn that Minh has left them both the Banyan House, the crumbling old manor that was Ann’s childhood home. Under the same roof for the first time in years, mother and daughter must face the simmering questions of their past and their uncertain futures, while trying to rebuild their relationship without the one person who’s always held them together.

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Kathleen Grissom, author of Crow Mary

In 1872, 16-year-old Goes First, a Crow Native woman, marries Abe Farwell, a white fur trader. He gives her the name Mary, and they set off on the long trip to his trading post in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan, Canada. Along the way, she finds a fast friend; makes a lifelong enemy; and, despite learning a dark secret of Farwell’s past, falls in love with her husband. Then, on the eve of their return to Montana, a group of drunken whiskey traders slaughters 40 Nakota. Mary sees the murderers take five Nakota women back to their fort. She begs Farwell to save them, and when he refuses, she takes two guns, creeps into the fort and saves the women from certain death. Thus, she sets off a whirlwind of colliding cultures that pushes the love between Farwell and Crow Mary to the breaking point.

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Kristin Harmel, author of The Paris Daughter

Paris, 1939: Young mothers Elise and Juliette become fast friends the day they meet in the beautiful Bois de Boulogne. Though there is a shadow of war creeping across Europe, neither woman suspects that their lives are about to irrevocably change. When Elise becomes a target of the German occupation, she entrusts Juliette with the most precious thing in her life --- her young daughter, playmate to Juliette’s own little girl. But nowhere is safe in war, not even a quiet little bookshop like Juliette’s Librairie des Rêves. When a bomb falls on their neighborhood, Juliette’s world is destroyed along with it. More than a year later, with the war finally ending, Elise returns to reunite with her daughter, only to find her friend’s bookstore reduced to rubble --- and Juliette nowhere to be found.

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Ashley Audrain, author of The Whispers

The Loverlys’ young son is in a coma after falling from his bedroom window in the middle of the night. His mother, Whitney, will not speak to anyone. Back home, their friends and neighbors are left in shock, each confronting their own role in the events that led up to what happened that terrible night: the Parks, the Loverlys' best friends; the Goldsmiths, who are struggling to start a family of their own; and the Portuguese couple who care for their adult son with a developmental disability and watch their neighbors go about their busy lives. The story spins out over the course of one week, in the alternating voices of the women in each family as they are forced to face the secrets within the walls of their own homes, and the uncomfortable truths that connect them all to one another.

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Fiona Davis, author of The Spectacular

New York City, 1956: When 19-year-old Marion Brooks comes across an opportunity to audition for the Radio City Rockettes, she jumps at the chance to exchange her predictable future for the dazzling life of a performer. Meanwhile, the city is reeling from a string of bombings orchestrated by a person the press has nicknamed the “Big Apple Bomber." With the public in an uproar, the police turn to Peter Griggs, a young doctor who espouses a radical new technique: psychological profiling. As both Marion and Peter find themselves unexpectedly pulled into the police search for the bomber, Marion realizes that if she hopes to catch the culprit, she’ll need to stand out and take a terrifying risk. In doing so, she may be forced to sacrifice everything she’s worked for, as well as the people she loves the most.

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Lisa See, author of Lady Tan's Circle of Women

According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine. Yunxian learns about women’s illnesses alongside a young midwife-in-training, Meiling. The two girls find fast friendship and a mutual purpose. No mud, no lotus, they tell themselves: from adversity beauty can bloom. But when Yunxian is sent into an arranged marriage, her mother-in-law forbids her from seeing Meiling and from helping the women in the household. Yunxian is to act like a proper wife --- embroider bound-foot slippers, pluck instruments, recite poetry, give birth to sons, and stay forever within the walls of the family compound, the Garden of Fragrant Delights.

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Luis Alberto Urrea, author of Good Night, Irene

In 1943, Irene Woodward abandons an abusive fiancé in New York to enlist with the Red Cross and head to Europe. She makes fast friends in training with Dorothy Dunford, a towering Midwesterner with a ferocious wit. Together they are part of an elite group of women, nicknamed Donut Dollies, who command military vehicles called Clubmobiles at the front line, providing camaraderie and a taste of home that may be the only solace before troops head into battle. After D-Day, these two intrepid friends join the Allied soldiers streaming into France. Through her friendship with Dorothy and a love affair with a courageous American fighter pilot named Hans, Irene learns to trust again. Her most fervent hope is for all three of them to survive the war intact.

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Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of Pieces of Blue

When Paul Hill drowns in a surfing accident, his broken-hearted wife, Lindsey, and their three children are left in huge financial trouble. Once Paul’s life insurance finally comes through, Lindsey impulsively uses the money to buy a charmingly ramshackle motel in Hawaii. Teenage Olivia quickly develops a crush on a handsome but monosyllabic skateboarder. Twelve-year-old Carlos reinvents himself as a popular kid named Carl. And Sena, the youngest, will do whatever it takes to protect her beloved motel chickens. But while the kids adjust, Lindsey is flailing. Then a handsome stranger rolls into the motel parking lot, and she’s surprised to feel a long-dormant part of herself stirring. She accepts his offer to help, unaware that he may have secrets of his own.

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Hernan Diaz, author of Trust

Even through the roar and effervescence of the 1920s, everyone in New York has heard of Benjamin and Helen Rask. He is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; she is the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top of a world of seemingly endless wealth --- all as a decade of excess and speculation draws to an end. But at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the center of Bonds, a successful 1937 novel that all of New York seems to have read. Yet there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. Hernan Diaz’s TRUST elegantly puts these competing narratives into conversation with one another --- and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction.

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Megan Abbott, author of Beware the Woman

Newly married and with a baby on the way, Jacy and her husband, Jed, embark on their first road trip together to visit his father, Dr. Ash. The moment they arrive at the cottage, snug within the lush woods, Jacy feels bathed in love by the warm and hospitable Dr. Ash. But their Edenic first days take a turn when Jacy has a health scare. Swiftly, vacation activities are scrapped, and all eyes are on Jacy’s condition. Suddenly, whispers about Jed’s long-dead mother seem to eerily impinge upon the present, and Jacy begins to feel trapped in the cottage. But are her fears founded? Or is it paranoia, or cabin fever, or --- as is suggested to her --- a stubborn refusal to take necessary precautions? The dense woods surrounding the cottage are full of dangers, but are the greater ones inside?

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