Wednesday Book Club - Home of the American Circus

* *Note: $5 registration fee can be used as a credit toward a purchase in-store. The credit expires the night of book club.**

Sidetrack Bookshop is a mission-driven bookstore, which means (in part) that we are committed to providing a welcoming and inclusive space for people of all identities. In order to maintain our welcoming and inclusive space in the context of what we hope will be a lively and productive book club discussion, we have developed the following house rules.

By attending a book club meeting, you agree to the following:

1. Share the floor: Be sure to let everyone talk and express their thoughts on the book. If you feel like you're talking a lot, you probably are! Invite others to speak.
2. Be respectful: We'll no doubt have differing opinions. Seek to understand first, then to be understood. Check your privilege, and take special care with others who have lived experience differing from your own.
3. Comments or behavior that demean a specific person, identity, or culture will not be tolerated.

Book club hosts will keep these house rules in mind and will redirect you or the conversation as a whole if we feel they aren't being honored. We also reserve the right to ask an attendee to leave if we feel they're contributing to an unwelcome space.

The acclaimed author of the “lyrical coming-of-age novel” (Good Morning America) The People We Keep returns with a luminous contemporary women’s fiction story about strong female characters, family estrangement, found family, and the transformative power of redemption.
It’s been ten years since Freya Arnalds left a goodbye note on her parents’ kitchen table and fled her hometown of Somers, New York, driving up the coast to disappear into a lackluster life as a bartender in Maine. But, on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday, when an emergency leaves her short on rent, Freya returns to Somers to live in the derelict house she inherited after her parents’ untimely death, and soon discovers that her fifteen-year-old niece, Aubrey, is secretly living there.
Despite all attempts to lay low in her old town, Freya reunites with childhood friends, encounters familial enemies, and stokes old flames while she fights to stay afloat and give her niece a better life than the one she’s had. As they reconnect, Freya and Aubrey learn to lean on each other, working to restore the house and come to terms with the devastating events that pulled them apart years ago.
Set in the birthplace of the American circus, this deeply moving novel examines the mythology of a broken family, the weight of the past, and the complicated journey of finding home.

Allison Larkin is the internationally bestselling author of the novels The People We Keep, Stay, Why Can’t I Be You, and Swimming for Sunlight. Her short fiction has been published in The Summerset Review and Slice, and nonfiction in Author in Progress, a how-to guide from Writer’s Digest Books, and the dog anthology I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband, Jeremy, and their rescue dog, Roxy.

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