A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
What happens when you learn the inconvenient truth about your family? What happens when its secrets come out?
'Powerful and provocative' Paula McLain
'Beautiful, engrossing, heart-breaking' Rachel Rhys
'Monumental in a way that few novels dare' Washington Post
The Miltons are a powerful old New York family, the kind that runs the world. And in 1935, they do. For generations, Kitty and Ogden Milton revel in their own utopia, a small island they own off the coast of Maine, but it cannot last.
Across the generations, we see the Milton myth slowly unravel. In 1959, two strangers enter their circle, forcing each member to question what their family stands for. Then by the 21st century, the money has run dry, the island is up for sale, and their granddaughter is about to uncover disturbing evidence about her family's wealth.
Epic and sweeping, The Guest Book is a family saga that explores privilege and racism in America, and how choices made in the past can be felt in the present.
'Thought-provoking and propulsive...Welcome to old money, new heartbreak and big secrets' New York Times Book Review
Genre: Literary Fiction
What happens when you learn the inconvenient truth about your family? What happens when its secrets come out?
'Powerful and provocative' Paula McLain
'Beautiful, engrossing, heart-breaking' Rachel Rhys
'Monumental in a way that few novels dare' Washington Post
The Miltons are a powerful old New York family, the kind that runs the world. And in 1935, they do. For generations, Kitty and Ogden Milton revel in their own utopia, a small island they own off the coast of Maine, but it cannot last.
Across the generations, we see the Milton myth slowly unravel. In 1959, two strangers enter their circle, forcing each member to question what their family stands for. Then by the 21st century, the money has run dry, the island is up for sale, and their granddaughter is about to uncover disturbing evidence about her family's wealth.
Epic and sweeping, The Guest Book is a family saga that explores privilege and racism in America, and how choices made in the past can be felt in the present.
'Thought-provoking and propulsive...Welcome to old money, new heartbreak and big secrets' New York Times Book Review
Genre: Literary Fiction
Praise for this book
"Sarah Blake's powerful, beautifully written story portrays a couple's secret choices that come to haunt succeeding generations. The Guest Book is richly atmospheric and morally compelling in a way that stirs the mind long after the last page." - Nancy Horan
"Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer, but The Guest Book is particularly fascinating?an intergenerational exploration of memory, identity, love, and family loyalty?of what it costs to inherit a name, a place, and a difficult alignment with history. Powerful and provocative storytelling." - Paula McLain
"The Guest Book is not only an exploration of the past, but a prophecy of the future. It illuminates a lost world with a brilliance that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental as it leads its characters, as well as the reader, to new and disturbing discoveries about prejudice and privilege. Sarah Blake's understanding of private life at a certain time in America and within a certain class gives us an incisive history of manners and morals, with the understanding that the survival of the spirit, no matter the time, depends upon endurance, tolerance, and solitary grief." - Susanna Moore
"I was totally swept away by this beautiful, engrossing, ultimately heartbreaking family saga. Sarah Blake's unswervingly human characters show us, not so much that good people do bad things, but that sometimes the very worst thing you can do is to do nothing at all." - Rachel Rhys
"I loved The Guest Book. Sarah Blake has managed the extraordinary feat of writing both an intimate family saga and an ambitious excavation of the subterranean currents of race, class, and power that have shaped America. This is a vivid, transporting novel, written by a master conjuror of time and place." - Jessica Shattuck
"Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer, but The Guest Book is particularly fascinating?an intergenerational exploration of memory, identity, love, and family loyalty?of what it costs to inherit a name, a place, and a difficult alignment with history. Powerful and provocative storytelling." - Paula McLain
"The Guest Book is not only an exploration of the past, but a prophecy of the future. It illuminates a lost world with a brilliance that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental as it leads its characters, as well as the reader, to new and disturbing discoveries about prejudice and privilege. Sarah Blake's understanding of private life at a certain time in America and within a certain class gives us an incisive history of manners and morals, with the understanding that the survival of the spirit, no matter the time, depends upon endurance, tolerance, and solitary grief." - Susanna Moore
"I was totally swept away by this beautiful, engrossing, ultimately heartbreaking family saga. Sarah Blake's unswervingly human characters show us, not so much that good people do bad things, but that sometimes the very worst thing you can do is to do nothing at all." - Rachel Rhys
"I loved The Guest Book. Sarah Blake has managed the extraordinary feat of writing both an intimate family saga and an ambitious excavation of the subterranean currents of race, class, and power that have shaped America. This is a vivid, transporting novel, written by a master conjuror of time and place." - Jessica Shattuck
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