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November 28, 2023

Get ready! We have so much to share in this update. I think there is something for every book group here.

Announcing Our Special End-of-the-Year Contest!
For all of us at ReadingGroupGuides.com, the official start of the holiday season signals the launch of our year-end contest. Once again, we are asking you and your book group to help us compile our own “Best Books of the Year” list.

Amanda Peters, author of The Berry Pickers

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her --- and she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

Cesca Major, author of Maybe Next Time

It is an ordinary Monday, and harried literary agent Emma is flying out of the door. Preoccupied with work and her ever-growing to-do list, she fails to notice that her lovely husband Dan seems bereft, her son can barely meet her eye, and her daughter won’t go near her. As she rushes back through the door for dinner, Dan is still upset. They fight, and he walks out. Just as she realizes it is their anniversary, she hears the screech of brakes. Dan is dead. The next day Emma wakes up…and Dan is alive. It’s Monday again. And again. And again. Emma tries desperately to change the course of fate by doing different things each time she wakes up. But will she have the chance to find herself again, remember what she likes about her job, reconnect with her children and love her husband?

Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of A Very Inconvenient Scandal

Frankie Attleboro returns home to Cape Cod with thrilling news. She’s met the love of her life, and they’re getting married with a baby on the way. That’s the moment her widowed father makes his own jaw-dropping announcement. At 60, he’s getting married as well, to Frankie’s best friend, Ariel, who is also pregnant, and due soon. As Frankie and Ariel struggle to adjust to their new relationship, Ariel’s estranged mother, Carlotta, returns after a decade-long absence. She claims to be a changed woman. But is she really? And where has she been all these years? Frankie is suspicious, and as Carlotta’s unpredictable behavior intensifies, Frankie must untangle the threads of the past to protect Ariel’s future --- and her own.

Mary Kay Andrews, author of Bright Lights, Big Christmas

When fall rolls around, it’s time for Kerry Tolliver to leave her family’s Christmas tree farm in the mountains of North Carolina for the wilds of New York City to help her gruff older brother and his dog, Queenie, sell the trees at the family stand on a corner in Greenwich Village. In the weeks leading into Christmas, Kerry quickly becomes close with the charming neighbors who live near their stand. When an elderly neighbor goes missing, Kerry will need to combine her country know-how with her newly acquired New York knowledge to protect the new friends she’s come to think of as family. And complicating everything is Patrick, a single dad raising his son, Austin, on this quirky block. Kerry and Patrick’s chemistry is undeniable, but what chance does this holiday romance really have?

Editorial Content for America Fantastica

Teaser

The author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery sparks “a satirical romp through a country plagued by deceit” (Kirkus, starred review).

Promo

The author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery sparks “a satirical romp through a country plagued by deceit” (Kirkus, starred review).

About the Book

An American Master returns: the author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED delivers his first new novel in two decades, a brilliant and rollicking odyssey, in which a bank robbery sparks “a satirical romp through a country plagued by deceit” (Kirkus, starred review).

At 11:34 a.m. one Saturday in August 2019, Boyd Halverson strode into Community National Bank in Northern California.

“How much is on hand, would you say?” he asked the teller. “I’ll want it all.”

“You’re robbing me?”

He revealed a Temptation .38 Special.

The teller, a diminutive redhead named Angie Bing, collected $81,000.

Boyd stuffed the cash into a paper grocery bag.

“I’m sorry about this,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to take a ride with me.”

So begins the adventure of Boyd Halverson --- star journalist turned notorious online disinformation troll turned JCPenney manager --- and his irrepressible hostage, Angie Bing. Haunted by his past and weary of his present, Boyd has one goal before the authorities catch up with him: settle a score with the man who destroyed his life. By Monday, the pair reach Mexico; by winter, they are in a lakefront mansion in Minnesota. On their trail are hitmen, jealous lovers, ex-cons, an heiress, a billionaire shipping tycoon, a three-tour veteran of Iraq, and the ghosts of Boyd’s past. Everyone, it seems, except the police.

In the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, AMERICA FANTASTICA delivers a biting, witty and entertaining story about the causes and costs of outlandish fantasy, while also marking the triumphant return of an essential voice in American letters. And at the heart of the novel, amid a teeming cast of characters, readers will delight in the tug-of-war between two memorable and iconic human beings --- the exuberant savior-of-souls Angie Bing and the penitent but compulsive liar Boyd Halverson. Just as Tim O’Brien’s modern classic, THE THINGS THEY CARRIED, so brilliantly reflected the unromantic truth of war, AMERICA FANTASTICA puts a mirror to a nation and a time that has become dangerously unmoored from truth and greedy for delusion.

Editorial Content for How to Say Babylon: A Memoir

Teaser

With echoes of EDUCATED and BORN A CRIME, HOW TO SAY BABYLON is the stunning story of Safiya Sinclair’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Promo

With echoes of EDUCATED and BORN A CRIME, HOW TO SAY BABYLON is the stunning story of Safiya Sinclair’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

About the Book

With echoes of EDUCATED and BORN A CRIME, HOW TO SAY BABYLON is the stunning story of the author’s struggle to break free of her rigid Rastafarian upbringing, ruled by her father’s strict patriarchal views and repressive control of her childhood, to find her own voice as a woman and poet.

Throughout her childhood, Safiya Sinclair’s father, a volatile reggae musician and militant adherent to a strict sect of Rastafari, became obsessed with her purity, in particular, with the threat of what Rastas call Babylon, the immoral and corrupting influences of the Western world outside their home. He worried that womanhood would make Safiya and her sisters morally weak and impure, and believed a woman’s highest virtue was her obedience.

In an effort to keep Babylon outside the gate, he forbade almost everything. In place of pants, the women in her family were made to wear long skirts and dresses to cover their arms and legs, head wraps to cover their hair, no make-up, no jewelry, no opinions, no friends. Safiya’s mother, while loyal to her father, nonetheless gave Safiya and her siblings the gift of books, including poetry, to which Safiya latched on for dear life. And as Safiya watched her mother struggle voicelessly for years under housework and the rigidity of her father’s beliefs, she increasingly used her education as a sharp tool with which to find her voice and break free. Inevitably, with her rebellion comes clashes with her father, whose rage and paranoia explodes in increasing violence. As Safiya’s voice grows, lyrically and poetically, a collision course is set between them.

HOW TO SAY BABYLON is Sinclair’s reckoning with the culture that initially nourished but ultimately sought to silence her; it is her reckoning with patriarchy and tradition, and the legacy of colonialism in Jamaica. Rich in lyricism and language only a poet could evoke, HOW TO SAY BABYLON is both a universal story of a woman finding her own power and a unique glimpse into a rarefied world we may know how to name, Rastafari, but one we know little about.

Editorial Content for Let Us Descend

Teaser

From Jesmyn Ward --- the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow --- comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

Promo

From Jesmyn Ward --- the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow --- comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

About the Book

From Jesmyn Ward --- the two-time National Book Award winner, youngest winner of the Library of Congress Prize for Fiction, and MacArthur Fellow --- comes a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic, about an enslaved girl in the years before the Civil War.

LET US DESCEND is a reimagining of American slavery, as beautifully rendered as it is heart-wrenching. Searching, harrowing and replete with transcendent love, the novel is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.

From one of the most singularly brilliant and beloved writers of her generation, this miracle of a novel inscribes Black American grief and joy into the very land --- the rich but unforgiving forests, swamps and rivers of the American South. LET US DESCEND is Jesmyn Ward’s most magnificent novel yet, a masterwork for the ages.

Editorial Content for My Darling Girl

Teaser

The New York Times bestselling author of THE DROWNING KIND and THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL returns with a spine-tingling psychological thriller about a woman who, after taking in her dying, alcoholic mother, begins to suspect that demonic possession is haunting her family.

Promo

The New York Times bestselling author of THE DROWNING KIND and THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL returns with a spine-tingling psychological thriller about a woman who, after taking in her dying, alcoholic mother, begins to suspect that demonic possession is haunting her family.

About the Book

The New York Times bestselling author of the “otherworldly treat” (People) THE DROWNING KIND and THE CHILDREN ON THE HILL returns with a spine-tingling psychological thriller about a woman who, after taking in her dying, alcoholic mother, begins to suspect that demonic possession is haunting her family.

Alison has never been a fan of Christmas. But with it right around the corner and her husband busily decorating their cozy Vermont home, she has no choice but to face it. Then she gets the call.

Mavis, Alison’s estranged mother, has been diagnosed with cancer and has only weeks to live. She wants to spend her remaining days with her daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters. But Alison grew up with her mother’s alcoholism and violent abuse and is reluctant to unearth these traumatic memories. Still, she eventually agrees to take in Mavis, hoping that she and her mother could finally heal and have the relationship she’s always dreamed of.

But when mysterious and otherworldly things start happening upon Mavis’ arrival, Alison begins to suspect that her mother is not quite who she seems. And as the holiday festivities turn into a nightmare, she must confront just how far she is willing to go to protect her family.

Editorial Content for The Sisterhood: The Secret History of Women at the CIA

Teaser

The acclaimed author of CODE GIRLS returns with a “rip-roaring” (Steve Coll) history of three generations at the CIA, “electric with revelations” (Booklist) about the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spycraft and tracked down Osama bin Laden.

Promo

The acclaimed author of CODE GIRLS returns with a “rip-roaring” (Steve Coll) history of three generations at the CIA, “electric with revelations” (Booklist) about the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spycraft and tracked down Osama bin Laden.

About the Book

The acclaimed author of CODE GIRLS returns with a “rip-roaring” (Steve Coll) history of three generations at the CIA, “electric with revelations” (Booklist) about the women who fought to become operatives, transformed spycraft and tracked down Osama bin Laden.

Created in the aftermath of World War II, the Central Intelligence Agency relied on women even as it attempted to channel their talents and keep them down. Women sent cables, made dead drops and maintained the agency’s secrets. Despite discrimination --- even because of it --- women who started as clerks, secretaries or unpaid spouses rose to become some of the CIA’s shrewdest operatives.

They were unlikely spies --- and that’s exactly what made them perfect for the role. Because women were seen as unimportant, pioneering female intelligence officers moved unnoticed around Bonn, Geneva and Moscow, stealing secrets from under the noses of their KGB adversaries. Back at headquarters, women built the CIA’s critical archives --- first by hand, then by computer. And they noticed things that the men at the top didn’t see. As the CIA faced an identity crisis after the Cold War, it was a close-knit network of female analysts who spotted the rising threat of al-Qaeda --- though their warnings were repeatedly brushed aside.

After the 9/11 attacks, more women joined the agency as a new job, targeter, came to prominence. They showed that data analysis would be crucial to the post-9/11 national security landscape --- an effort that culminated spectacularly in the CIA’s successful effort to track down bin Laden in his Pakistani compound.

Propelled by the same meticulous reporting and vivid storytelling that infused CODE GIRLS, THE SISTERHOOD offers a riveting new perspective on history, revealing how women at the CIA ushered in the modern intelligence age, and how their silencing made the world more dangerous.