Paperback | 512 pages

The instantNew York Timesbestseller now in paperbackThe Hoursmeets the Forsyte Saga, about a love affair between the daughter of a great American family and an upstart trying to break into polite society.

A novel about past mistakes and betrayals that ripple throughout generations,The Guest Bookexamines not just a privileged American family but a privileged America. It is a literary triumph.

The Guest Bookfollows three generations of a powerful American family, a family that used to run the world.

And when the novel begins in 1935, they still do. Kitty and Ogden Milton appearto have everythingperfect children,good looks, a love everyone envies. But after a tragedy befalls them, Ogden tries to bring Kitty back to life by purchasing an island in Maine. That island, and its house, come to define and burnish the Milton family, year after year after year. And it is there that Kitty issues a refusal that will haunt her till the day she dies.

In 1959 a young Jewish man, Len Levy, will get a job in Ogdens bank and earn the admiration of Ogden and one of his daughters, but the scorn of everyone else. Lens best friend, Reg Pauling, has always been the only black man in the roomat Harvard, at work, and finally at the Miltons island in Maine.

An island that, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, this last generation doesnt have the money to keep. When Kittys granddaughter hears that she and her cousins might be forced to sell it, and when her husband brings back disturbing evidence about her grandfathers past, she realizes she is on the verge of finally understanding the silences that seemed to hover just below the surface of her family all her life.

An ambitious novel that weaves the American past with its present,The Guest Booklooks at the racism and power that has been systemically embedded in the US for generations.