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  • The Guest Book

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Sarah Blake
  • Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy
  • Length: 17 hrs and 14 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (11 ratings)

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The Guest Book

Written by: Sarah Blake
Narrated by: Orlagh Cassidy
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Publisher's Summary

2019 Amazon.com Best Books of the Year

"Orlagh Cassidy narrates Blake's beautifully written multigenerational story of love and lies with consummate skill. Elegant and clear, distant yet passionate, she helps listeners discover the quirks in characters' personalities and explore their motives, both evident and hidden." —AudioFile Magazine, Earphones Award winner

This program includes a bonus conversation with the author.

“Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer." (Paula McLain, New York Times best-selling author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin)

The thought-provoking new audiobook by New York Times best-selling author Sarah Blake

A lifetime of secrets. A history untold.

No. It is a simple word, uttered on a summer porch in 1936. And it will haunt Kitty Milton for the rest of her life. Kitty and her husband, Ogden, are both from families considered the backbone of the country. But this refusal will come to be Kitty’s defining moment, and its consequences will ripple through the Milton family for generations. For while they summer on their island in Maine, anchored as they are to the way things have always been, the winds of change are beginning to stir.

In 1959 New York City, two strangers enter the Miltons’ circle. One captures the attention of Kitty’s daughter while the other makes each of them question what the family stands for. This new generation insists the times are changing. And in one night, everything does.

So much so that in the present day, the third generation of Miltons doesn’t have enough money to keep the island in Maine. Evie Milton’s mother has just died, and as Evie digs into her mother’s and grandparents’ history, what she finds is a story as unsettling as it is inescapable, the story that threatens the foundation of the Milton family myth.

Moving through three generations and back and forth in time, The Guest Book asks how we remember and what we choose to forget. It shows the untold secrets we inherit and pass on, unknowingly echoing our parents and grandparents. Sarah Blake’s triumphant novel tells the story of a family and a country that buries its past in quiet, until the present calls forth a reckoning.

©2019 Sarah Blake (P)2019 Macmillan Audio

What the critics say

"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 conjurer of time and place.” (Jessica Shattuck, New York Times best-selling author of The Women in the Castle)

What listeners say about The Guest Book

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Very thought provoking family saga

This story following three family generations makes one think about so many issues in our history and in life today -- the Holocaust, how we treat "different" in our culture whether it be colour, religion or sexual preference, and the the sub-plots in all family life. I wanted to slow down my reading as I absorbed it all.

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