Content | ReadingGroupGuides.com

Lisa Ridzen Book Group Signup

Links to https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Fi8pj9C1RLWdglbjkrWVeQ.

Amy Jo Burns, author of Wait for Me

Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess in 1973, with two wildly beloved albums to her name and a hidden history of impossible heartbreak. When she sets foot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage, Elle gives the biggest performance of her life. Then she vanishes. Almost two decades later, 18-year-old Marijohn Shaw is spending her summer pumping gas, writing songs on her broken mandolin, and longing for a mother. Her father, Abe, has always sworn he was the last person to see Elle Harlow alive. But when a meteor strikes the woods of their sleepy Pennsylvania town and a piece of Elle’s past emerges from the wreckage, the truth of her disappearance sets fire to everything Marijohn believes about herself, her music, and her ability to love with abandon.

March 14, 2026

Ever feel like you do not have time to read all the books that you want to read? Even with reading advance copies and print books, and listening on audio whenever I can, I cannot stay on top of all the books that I want to read. I filled bookshelves with books from last year that I was not able to get to. And already this year, I feel like I am prepping for finals but have barely read the syllabus.

Rachel Hochhauser, author of Lady Tremaine

Twice-widowed, Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley is solely responsible for her two children, a priggish stepdaughter, a razor-taloned peregrine falcon, and a crumbling manor. Fierce and determined, Ethel clings to the respectability her deceased husband’s title affords her, hoping it will secure her daughters’ future through marriage. When a royal ball offers the chance to change everything, Ethel risks her pride in pursuit of an invitation for all three of her daughters --- only to see her hopes fulfilled by the wrong one. As an engagement to the future king unfolds, Ethel discovers a sordid secret hidden in the depths of the royal family, forcing her to choose between the security she craves and the well-being of the stepdaughter who has rebuffed her at every turn.

Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, author of Lake Effect

It’s 1977, and an air of restlessness has settled on the residents of Cambridge Road in Rochester, New York. When Nina Larkin is given a copy of THE JOY OF SEX by her newly divorced friend, she no longer can dismiss the nearly nonexistent intimacy of her marriage. Just as her oldest child, Clara, is falling in love for the first time, Nina finds herself longing for the forbidden: a midlife awakening. An intoxicating fling with a prominent neighbor brings Nina a freedom she never thought possible --- but also risks the reputations of both families and unravels Clara’s world. Years later, Clara, now a successful food stylist in New York City, has never been able to move past the long-ago scandal. Drawn back home by the pull of a family wedding and wrestling with her own demons, she makes a pivotal decision that turns her life upside down.

Patricia Finn, author of The Golden Boy

After an involuntary retirement from his high-flying Hollywood career, Stafford Hopkins has retreated to a luxury estate on Maui, along with his wife Agnes, both grimly resigned to life in a paradise where neither feels fully at home. Stafford is ready to retreat into himself, too, when a letter arrives with shocking news. He has been named guardian of four children he didn’t know existed: the grandchildren of his late childhood friend, Bobby Shepherd, whose ghost he can no longer ignore. Returning to both the hardscrabble farming town and the dark secret he’d tried to forget for decades, Stafford is forced to confront his past in order to rebuild his future --- and to redirect the fates of his family and the four young people suddenly in his care.

Allison Pataki, author of It Girl

At the dawn of the 20th century, New York’s streets teem with change: electricity, automobiles, the brash young President Teddy Roosevelt --- and the It Girls. As artists’ muses and working models, these independent young women soar to stardom because of their talent, charisma and irresistible beauty. While working as a shopgirl, the young Evelyn Talbot is recruited as a studio model and soon catches the eye of the preeminent artists of the age. When Broadway comes calling, Evelyn solidifies her status as the first self-made American female celebrity: the iconic Gibson Girl. When Evelyn finds herself at the center of a murder of passion declared “the Crime of the Century,” she is blamed for the acts of the men in her life. In the media frenzy that spirals around her, Evelyn realizes that to survive, she will have to write her own ending.

Rebecca Serle, author of Once and Again

The women of the Novak family were each born with a gift: they can, just once, turn back time. Lauren has known since she was 15 that her mother, Marcella, saved Lauren’s father from a deadly car accident. Dave is alive and happy, and out on the Malibu waves. But ever since, Marcella has lived in fear of what she won’t be able to reverse. One summer, Lauren’s husband takes a job in New York, and she moves back into her childhood home. Lauren looks forward to surfing with her dad again and perhaps repairing an unspoken fracture in her relationship with her mother. What she doesn’t expect is for the boy next door to return home as well: Stone, who broke her heart nearly a decade before. As Lauren falls into familiar patterns, she finds herself thinking about all the choices that have brought her to this moment. And wondering, finally, if one of them should be undone.

Book

Best Boy

Teaser

A gripping psychological thriller, BEST BOY teeters on the knife-edge of memory and identity when the arrival of a shocking letter threatens the carefully constructed life of a woman desperate to outrun her past.

Promo

About the Book

Viveca Stevenson has it all: a handsome and successful husband, an adorable 10-year-old son, and a coastal dream house in Greenwich, Connecticut. She has a solid group of girlfriends and is content with the afterglow of the film career she’s left behind. But when a threatening letter arrives --- from a man she does not remember --- it cracks open a part of her past she thought was buried for good.

A terrifying chain of events is set in motion, forcing Viveca to confront what happened on a shattering Halloween night in high school when she had a different name, a different face and a different voice. Who is the man contacting her now, and was he really the best boy on her most famous film, Misty? Why can’t she remember him --- or that night?

A taut psychological thriller, BEST BOY explores identity, memory and the dangerous power of forgetting.

Editorial Content for Kin

Book

Kin

Teaser

Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Promo

About the Book

A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE. Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at 18 for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration and inequality.

Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, KIN is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.

You are here:

Book

Teaser

Promo

About the Book

Book

Teaser

Promo

About the Book