This summer, trade the Boeing 747 for armchair travel and journey to China, Mexico, Europe, and beyond with our authors. Our wide variety of titles include essays, memoirs and novels.
Visit broadwaybooks.com/abroad to watch videos, view photographs, and read blog posts featuring the books.
In The Unlikely Lavender Queen, journalist Jeannie Ralston shares the story of how she went from being a single, driven New York City career woman to a married lavender farmer living in rural Texas. Describing her transition from city mouse to country mouse, and recalling the hilarity and poignancy it brought, Ralston touches upon many themes including self-worth, identity, reconciling big-city dreams with small-town ideals, and the competing interests that sometimes complicate a marriage.
The book opens with two quotations, one from Henri Matisse and the other from Alice Walker. Discuss what each means in the context of Jeannie Ralston’s story. Why do you think she chose these particular quotes?
In the Prologue, Ralston describes her maiden morning as a farmer, and juxtaposes it with a memory of her life in New York: “I recalled one of the last times I was out at this hour, years earlier. It was on the other side of sleep, right after a New Year’s Eve party, as I was stumbling through SoHo with my then-fiancé.” Have you ever had moments when your current life seems at odds with your past? How does it make you feel? Do you long for the past, or have you “moved on?”
Before reading The Unlikely Lavender Queen, did you know anything about botanical farming? What did you learn? Do you think you could be a farmer like Ralston?
The author of the bestselling Leonardo’s Swans traverses the centuries into the hearts of two extraordinary women to reveal the passions, ambitions, and controversies surrounding the Elgin Marbles.
Exhilarating, addictive, and superbly accomplished, All We Ever Wanted Was Everything crackles with energy and intelligence and marks the debut of a knowing and very funny novelist, wise beyond her years. It’s our hope that this guide will help spark a lively conversation that will continue long after you’ve turned the last page.
Discuss the epigraph by J. M. Barrie and its meaning in the novel. How are the notions of failure, success, and personal fulfillment examined in the book and are they complicated by the expectations of family, culture, and society?
This novel is centered on three very different women. Explore the concepts of femininity and feminism in the novel and the ways in which Janice, Margaret, and Lizzie reinforce and challenge those models.
Filled with evocative descriptions of Cambridge, past and present, of seventeenth-century glassmaking, alchemy, the Great Plague, and Newton’s scientific innovations, Ghostwalk centers on a real historical mystery that Rebecca Stott has uncovered, involving Newton’s alchemy. A riveting literary thriller, Ghostwalk is a rare debut that will change the way most of us think about scientific innovation, our perception of time, and the force of history.
Before her death, Elizabeth tells Lydia, “Cambridge is just a palimpsest”–a word meaning a parchment that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. What does she mean by this? How does that metaphor figure in the construction of the novel? Could the metaphor of the palimpsest represent anything else in the novel other than the city?
At Elizabeth’s memorial service, Cameron reads lines from the Wallace Stevens poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:
When the blackbird flew out of sight
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
How are these lines relevant to Elizabeth’s death? What edges of circles, or intersecting lives and stories, does Elizabeth now mark even though she has disappeared from sight?
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