The Guest Book

Publisher's Summary

"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

Critic Reviews

"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)

Start at chapter 34

The writing is excellent, the story is just long without much plot. At the end, I was tired of the characters. Finishing this book took a great deal of effort and left me exhausted.

11 of 11 people found this review helpful

Reader mispronounced too many words

Dear Audible editors: It really threw me out of the story each time the reader mispronounced a word. These were not terribly difficult words. Skein. Inexorable. There were others. I know Orlagh Cassidy is a popular narrator for audiobooks and this is a product put out by Macmillan and not you, but someone should be paying attention.

10 of 11 people found this review helpful

Nice writing, unsurprising story

My main issue with the book is that all of the characters are such stereotypes, The book puts everyone in a box and the characters do exactly as expected. Overall I didn't love it.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Most boring book ever

Author drones on with setting but is really weak on character development I loathed it gave it one star as it is a book

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Must listen again.

A fourth star may follow a re-read, this time pausing to sketch out the multi-generational family tree, while maneuvering back and forth in time.

4 of 7 people found this review helpful

Hard to get into, but good once I figured it out

This is one that is probably do better reading rather than listening. I had trouble getting the characters figured out as it traversed between 3 generations. I found myself going backwards often, but once I got the characters figured out, I enjoyed the story. Although I felt some of the plot lines weren’t completed. Overall- 7 out of 10...

Better second part

I had trouble keeping track of the characters in part 1.. I found the second part much more enjoyable

Utter overly descriptive drowning

This story should be 10 pages long. Instead, it goes on and on in a wordy, choppy fashion for 500 pages. I could (and did) doze off and miss nothing. Horrible.

Horribly Boring

Can’t even finish listening to this book, it’s so boring. Total waste of one of my credits