The 16th Annual Book Group Festival with Steven Rowley

Rakestraw Books is thrilled to announce our most eagerly anticipated event of the season: our 16th Annual Book Group Festival. This year's event will take place on Thursday, 21 May 2026 at 6 PM. This year's author guest of honor is bestselling novelist (and Rakestraw favorite!) Steven Rowley. We will celebrating the publication of his new novel, Take Me With You. We are also delighted that our Penguin publisher rep Tom Benton will be joining us to recommend some book group favorites from his list. We hope you will be to join us for this wonderful evening. Tickets are $20 (details below).

More about the festival:

This year's Book Group Festival is our 16th annual celebration of books, book groups, and writing. As always it is inspired by the powerful belief that sharing stories with each other is incredibly important. These discussions also allow us to nurture relationships with friends and fellow readers. It's powerful stuff!

Every great book group needs great books to discuss and that's where we come in! During the course of this year's presentations, our team of book nerds will present a terrific array -- some new and some not-so-new -- of books worth reading and worth discussing. We promise your group will go away fired up to read beyond the bestseller list and TikTok!

This year's event will be presented on Thursday, 21 May 2026 at 6 PM here at the bookstore.

Tickets for this special event are $20. Each ticket will include three coupons (one for $10 and two for $5) towards purchases made in-store or at rakestrawbooks.com.

We have a great group of books to share this year, so please join us for a great evening with Steven Rowley and the Rakestraw staff. Tickets are for sale by clicking HERE.

More about Steven Rowley and Take Me With You:

College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband Norman wake up one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were longing for something. But had Norman been so stuck that his only option was to leave Jesse behind?
As Jesse struggles to understand Norman’s disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you’ve always been one half of a whole?
When Norman’s sister Lally lands on Jesse’s doorstep with an urgent request, Norman’s absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse’s grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a stranger following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman’s disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.
In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story – an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.

Steven Rowley is the New York Times bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, a Washington Post Notable Book of 2016, The Editor, named by NPR as one of the Best Books of 2019, The Guncle, a Goodreads Choice Awards finalist for 2021 Novel of the Year and winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, The Celebrants, a TODAY Show Read With Jenna Book Club pick, and the instant USA Today Bestsellers The Guncle Abroad andThe Dogs of Venice. His fiction has been published in twenty languages.

Originally from Portland, Maine, he is a graduate of Emerson College and currently resides in Palm Springs with his husband, the writer Byron Lane, and two rescue dogs.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Rakestraw Books "The Bookstore in Danville"