Vintage Books has designed Reading Group Guides to enhance a group's reading and discussion of a book. They include a description of each book, questions, discussion topics, and author biographies. From fiction to memoir, award winners to bestsellers, we've got books and reading group guides for every interest!
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FEATURED GUIDE
- Dear Exile by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery
A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time.
ALPHABETICAL LISTING
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The story of Thomas Sutpen, an enigmatic stranger who came to Jefferson in the early 1830s to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness.
- All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg
The moving and powerful memoir by Rick Bragg, who grew up dirt-poor in rural Alabama, seemingly destined for either the cotton mills or the state penitentiary, and instead became a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times.
- All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy
National Book Award Winner
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
Volume I in the Border Trilogy
Cormac McCarthy tells the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself the last of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With his best friend, he sets off for Mexico on a journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood. Read an excerpt.
- Altered States by Anita Brookner
Anita Brookner explores the conflicting needs of men and women and the lack of understanding that divides them. Following the remarriage of his mother, Alan reluctantly becomes engaged to fragile, needy Angela. When Sarah, the object of a previous, destructive affair, reenters his life, Alan embarks on an act of betrayal which will change his life forever.
- American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Pulitzer Prize Winner
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is at once the story of a father and a duaghter and an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss.
- Anywhere But Here by Mona Simpson
Simpson's ambitious first novel traces the difficult childhood and coming-of-age of Ann August, the daughter of a woman whose quest for the American dream moves the two of them from Wisconsin to California and from one odd situation to another.
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Faulkner lets each family member--including Addie--and others along the way tell their private responses to Addie's life.
- Asylum by Patrick McGrath
The master of the psychological thriller delivers a nerve-racking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness.
- Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt
By the author of Possession
A woman's bitter and public divorce from her husband is mirrored by the obscenity trial of the author of a radical fable known as Babbletower.
- Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
#1 International Bestseller
Spanning three generations, this intensely romantic yet stunningly realistic novel traces the life of young Englishman Stephen Wraysford as he passes through a tempestuous love affair with a married woman and enters the dark, surreal world beneath the trenches of No Man's Land.
- The Body Project by Joan Jacobs Brumberg
A fascinating history of the shift from the Victorian concern with inner beauty to our modern focus on outward appearance, in which the body--dieted, sculpted, pierced, and frequently agonized over--is now a girl's main project.
- Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from her impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York, to be reunited with a mother she barely remembers. There she discovers secrets that no child should ever know, and a legacy of shame that can be healed only when she returns to Haiti--to the women who first reared her. Read a Q & A with the author.
- A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr
#1 National Bestseller
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner for Nonfiction
A handful of working class parents whose children are dying of leukemia challenges two of the largest corporations in America in this overpowering courtroom drama.
- The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte
#1 International Bestseller
Rare-book sleuth Lucas Corso is hired to authenticate a manuscript chapter of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, only to find himself in unexpectedly dangerous waters as he becomes the target of devil worshipers and unscrupulous bibliophiles.
- Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
National Book Award Winner
National Bestseller
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished America in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.
- Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
A story of love, friendship and music unfolds on the magical Greek island of Cepphalonia during the time of its occupation by Mussolini's army.
- The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy
Volume II in the Border Trilogy
In this mesmerizing novel, Cormac McCarthy lays bare the mythic skeleton of the American West, telling the story of a ruinous quest for a dubious grail, undertaken by a hero who only guesses what he is looking for and is cruelly diminished by what he finds.
Read an excerpt.
- Daisy Bates in the Desert by Julia Blackburn
Daisy Bates, an eccentric and passionate Englishwoman, leaves her family to live among the Australian aborigines for almost thirty years.
- Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus
Andre Dubus shows readers ordinary men and women coming to terms with injury and loneliness, the lack of love and the terror of actually finding it, in tales that are every bit as poignant and mysterious as those of Raymond Carver and Flannery O'Connor.
- Dead Man Walking by Sister Helen Prejean
Sister Helen Prejean recounts her correspondence and friendship with Patrick Sonnier, a death row inmate and killer of two teenagers and brings up questions about the death penalty.
- Dear Exile by Hilary Liftin and Kate Montgomery
A funny and moving story told through the letters of two women nurturing a friendship as they are separated by distance, experience, and time.
- Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons
National Bestseller
In this extraordinary self-portrait, a young girl survives eleven years of threats and abuse from her drunken father only to be orphaned, yet she never gives up her hope of finding a place for herself in the world. Read an excerpt.
- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
#1 New York Times Bestseller
Booker Prize Winner
In an abandoned Tuscan villa during the last days of war in 1945, four people are brought together and held in place by the riddle of the hideously burned man known only as "the English patient."
- First Comes Love by Marion Winik
Marion Winik recounts her marriage to a gay man: their enduring love and devotion, their two beautiful sons, and finally his death from AIDS in this eloquent and unflinchingly honest memoir.
- The First Man by Albert Camus
Camus's incomplete and brilliant manuscript, found in the wreckage of his fatal car crash, is both a compelling novel of childhood and an epic narrative of his beloved homeland Algeria.
- Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
When seven-year-old Jakob Beer's family is taken from him by the Nazis, he flees and is miraculously rescued by a Greek geologist, who smuggles Jakob to his native island of Zakynthos to start him on a new life.
- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
In a book that is both provocative and humorous, Susanna Kaysen recounts her two years' sojourn in a Boston psychiatric hospital, challenging the conventional distinction between "madness" and "sanity."
- God: A Biography by Jack Miles
Pulitzer Prize Winner
In a book that has been praised for its audacity as wells as its erudtion, former Jesuit Jack Miles sets out to interpret the unimaginably powerful and disturbingly contradictory figure of God as portrayed in the Hebrew Bible.
- Hitler's Willing Executioners by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
National Bestseller
A groundbreaking work challenges one of the most persistent myths about the Holocaust: that most Germans were either ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews or participated in it reluctantly.
- Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner
Booker Prize Winner
An astute and idealistic English romance novelist goes to a quiet Swiss hotel to escape a failed love affair and to reflect on her life.
- I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn
National Bestseller
Jane Mendelsohn continues the story of Amelia Earhart's legendary final flight in a brilliantly imagined novel that is a tour de force of narrative ventriloquism--gripping, poetic, and romantic in the best sense of the word.
Read an excerpt.
- Independence Day by Richard Ford
Pulitzer Prize Winner
A middle-aged divorced man on a weekend trip with his son embarks on a transforming spiritual journey to take a fresh view on life.
- The Information by Martin Amis
In this blackly comic story, a fortyish unsuccessful writer is consumed with jealousy over his friend's success and is desperate to "get even"--whether it be by career sabotage, sexual betrayal, or violence.
- The Inn at Lake Devine by Elinor Lipman
Wonderfully readable, refreshing, and witty, this is the perfect intelligent romantic comedy--from an author beloved by readers, booksellers, and critics.
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
In a pioneering work of African American fiction, Ralph Ellison sends his naive hero through almost every social stratum to address the complex components of racism in America.
- Jack Maggs by Peter Carey
London, 1837. Jack Maggs, a foundling trained as a thief, betrayed and deported to a penal colony in Australia, has reversed his fortunes. Under threat of execution he returns to London after twenty years of exile to seek vengeance and reconciliation.
- The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara by David Kertzer
The fascinating story of a Jewish boy whose kidnapping had powerful consequences for the future of both the Italian nation and the Catholic Church.
- The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
In this nightmarish and exhilirating novel, deputy sheriff Lou Ford experiences a recurrence of "the sickness" that triggered a crime in his youth. But this time the sickness is worse, resulting in a series of sadistic murders.
- Ladder of Years by Anne Tyler
Sad, tired, fortyish Delia Grinstead's mundane existence is upset one day by a romantic interlude with a handsome young stranger. Reassessing her life, she impulsively takes off to start a new life with a new identity, discovering much about herself in the process.
- Last Orders by Graham Swift
Booker Prize Winner
Four friends traveling through England together on a trip to scatter the ashes of one man's late father reveal over the course of their journey their connective web of love, animosities, secrets, and lies.
- A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines
National Bestseller
National Book Critic Circle Award Winner
In this poignant novel, Ernest J. Gaines demonstrates the ways in which people stubbornly declare the value of their lives in a time and place where those lives seemingly count for nothing, and where the imprisoned may find freedom even in the moment of their death. Read an excerpt.
- Life Estates by Shelby Hearon
Best friends Sarah and Harriet, who have always believed that they live parallel lives, are forced to reexamine their relationship when they start heading in drastically different directions after the deaths of their husbands.
- Light Years by James Salter
James Salter traces the marriage of an affluent couple through times of contentment, disillusionment, and divorce and, as Viri and Nedra Berland set out in very different directions, offers a unique and compassionate aesthetic of life and relationships.
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
When the aging émigré Humbert Humbert falls in love with the precocious twelve-year-old nymphet Dolores Haze, all the rules--of desire, decency, and literature--are broken.
- The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler
Detective Philip Marlowe takes on a case involving a war scarred drunk and his promiscuous wife in this sixth novel inthe Philip Marlowe series.
- The Lost Father by Mona Simpson
Simpson continues the story of Ann August, now a twenty-eight-year-old medical student, as she gives in to her lifelong desire to find her father, feeling that her life can't continue meaningfully until she discovers why he left her without a word.
- Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom
National Book Award finalist Amy Bloom delivers a sharp and funny tale of growing up, demonstrating how profoundly the forces of love shape our lives.
- The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett
The Game Of Kings, Queens' Play, The Disorderly Knight, A Pawn in Frankincense, The Ringed Castle, Checkmate.
Set throughout sixteenth-century Europe and the Near East, the series has as its hero Francis Crawford of Lymond, a nobleman and soldier of fortune possessed of a scholar's erudition, an elastic sense of morals, and the tongue of a poet. In the course of six novels, Dorothy Dunnett takes this compelling figure on a perilous and colorful tour through the glittering courts and power centers of sixteenth-century Europe, revealing the narrative mastery, in-depth human portraiture, and uncanny ability to reanimate the past that have earned her the unofficial title of the world's "finest living writer of historical fiction." Read an excerpt from The Game of Kings.
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
Sam Spade, a slightly shop-worn private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, stars in Hammett's masterpiece, a novel that has haunted two generations of readers.
- Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Set in turn-of-the-century New York City, Steven Millhauser's quintessentially American tale of ambition, talent, and luck traces the life of Martin Dressler, a cigar maker's son with the ability--and audacity--to make his wildest dreams come true.
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
National Bestseller
Sayuri's story begins in 1929, when she is taken from her home in a fishing village and sold into slavery, becoming servant and apprentice to a renowned geisha house. But when World War II erupts, the geisha houses are forced to close, and Sayuri must reinvent herself all over again to find a rare kind of freedom on her own terms.
- Midwives by Chris Bohjalian
On an icy winter night in an isolated house in rural Vermont, a seasoned midwife named Sibyl Danforth takes desperate measures to save a baby's life. She performs an emergency cesarean section on a mother she believes has died of a stroke. But what if Sibyl's patient wasn't dead--and Sibyl inadvertently killed her?
- The Moor's Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie gives a fabulous and philosophic vision of his native India, a panorama condensed within the story of one brilliant, ruined family and its last surviving member.
- My Ántonia by Willa Cather
A young Nebraskan tells the story of his unconsummated love affair with the fascinating Ántonia, a Bohemian immigrant to his small prairie town.
- My Own Country by Abraham Verghese
A young Indian doctor tells the story of the four years he spent working as a specialist in infectious diseases in a small, sheltered Southern town that was forced, to the disbelief of the community, to learn to deal with the growing presence of AIDS among its inhabitants.
- My Life, Starring Dara Falcon by Ann Beattie
Ann Beattie explores the obsessive side of female friendship and traces the events that impel one woman out of the cocoon of her marriage and into independence, but also into a web of moral uncertainty and self-questioning.
- Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
Russo makes a serious exploration of the ties between fathers and sons, giving us a bittersweet homage to America's small towns and a ruefully wise take on what earlier writers called predestination, but what Russo's characters experience as plain dumb luck.
- Open Secrets by Alice Munro
In these powerful short stories, Alice Munro follows the lives of eight dynamic women, examining the culture and values of her world while weaving complex, luminous, and poetic insights of the milieu she has made so intensely her own.
- Our Guys by Bernard Lefkowitz
Part compelling courtroom drama, part sociological study, part true-crime mystery, Our Guys is the story of a town that most people would call perfect--and a horrific event that stripped away those illusions to reveal questions that most residents were unwilling to face. Read a Q & A with the author.
- Paradise by Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Early one morning in 1976, nine men from Ruby, Oklahoma (pop. 360) assault the nearby Convent and the women in it in defense of "the one all-black town worth the pain." From the town's ancestral origins in 1890 to the fateful day of the assault, Paradise tells the story of a people trying to preserve their community and coming to terms with themselves in the process.
- Personal History by Katharine Graham
National Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Winner
In her critically acclaimed memoir, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the crises of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate tells her story--one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for its courage, candor, and dignity. Read an excerpt.
- Possession by A. S. Byatt
Booker Prize Winner
Two young literary scholars search to discover the secret relationship between the two Victorian poets on whom each is an authority, and in so doing, become figures of romance themselves.
- The Professor's House by Willa Cather
A professor who achieves academic success in middle age begins to realize that what meaning remains in his life lies in the past, forcing him to reevaluate his relationships and his place in the world.
- Push by Sapphire
Precious Jones, 16 years old and pregnant by her father with her second child, meets a determined and highly radical teacher who takes her on a journey of transformation and redemption.
- The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
A story of love and secrets, crime and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany, The Reader is a deeply moving novel about a young boy's erotic awakening.
- Reading in the Dark by Seamus Deane
Set in postwar Northern Ireland, Seamus Deane's first novel is the transfixing story of a boy trying to uncover the secrets of the grown-up world.
- A Regular Guy by Mona Simpson
In her latest novel, Mona Simpson traces budding relationship between Tom Owens, a brilliant barefoot entrepreneur, and his illegitimate daughter, Jane, the raggedy, preternaturally observant ten-year-old suddenly dispatched into his care.
- Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
In the 1840s a young English castaway who has been living among the Australian aborigines for sixteen years returns to civilization and causes fear and suspicion in his countrymen with his strange mix of black and white.
- The Road from Coorain by Jill Ker Conway
National Bestseller
Conway sets the story of her youth in Australia against the coming of age of her homeland itself as the British Empire begins to disintegrate.
- Shadow Man by Mary Gordon
The author examines and reconstructs her idealized memories of the father who died when she was seven years old.
- Sleeping at the Starlite Motel and Other Adventures on the Way Back Home by Bailey White
National Bestseller
White gives us an amusing and penetrating collection of sketches of unforgettable incidents and characters in her small hometown in southern Georgia.
- Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
National Bestseller
Pen/Faulkner Award Winner
The local community on a remote island off the coast of Washington is rife with racial tension as a Japanese American is put on trial for the murder of a white man.
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling," the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers--the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin and the monstrous Jason.
- Straight Man by Richard Russo
The author of Nobody's Fool performs yet another high-wire walk between hilarity and heartache as he tells the story of Hank Devereaux, a once-promising novelist on the brink of a mid-life crisis. Side-splitting and true-to-life, Straight Man is witty, compassionate, and impossible to put down.
- The Sunflower by Simon Wiesenthal
While imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp, Simon Wiesenthal was taken to the bedside of a dying member of the SS. Haunted by the crimes in which he had participated, the soldier wanted to confess to--and obtain absolution from--a Jew. This unusual encounter and the moral dilemma it posed raise fundamental questions about the limits and possibilities of forgiveness.
- To the Wedding by John Berger
In this beautiful and inspiring story of the ties of family and love, a young woman's fiancé refuses to leave her when she discovers shortly before her wedding that she has contracted HIV from a brief encounter several years earlier.
- Tracks by Robyn Davidson
Thomas Cook Travel Award Winner
Testing her physical and emotional resources to the limit, the inexperienced young Davidson crosses half of Australia on foot, in the process coming to know the desert, the rhythms of traditional Aboriginal society, and herself.
- True North by Jill Ker Conway
In the second volume of her autobiography, Conway relates the story of her higher education and her vocation as a historian, her marriage, her teaching, and her strong interest in and dedication to the female intellectual and activist community.
- The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro
By the author of Remains of the Day
The greatest pianist alive comes to a Kafka-esque city for what could be the most important performance of his life, only to be left confused and frantic by large gaps in his memory and by the many demands made of him by everyone he comes across.
- An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison
National Bestseller
The professor of medicine and international authority on manic-depressive illness recounts her own intense struggle with the disease.
- When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago
Santiago recounts her own coming of age in 1960s Puerto Rico and her family's move to the alien and frightening world of New York City.
- Women's Memoirs
Our Women's Memoirs Reading Group Guide highlights Mary Gordon's The Shadow Man and Marion Winik's First Comes Love--two great choices for themed book discussion.
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