“Sarah Blake is such a beautiful writer she can make any world shimmer, but The Guest Book is particularly fascinating?an intergenerational exploration of memory, identity, love, and family loyalty?of what it costs to inherit a name, a place, and a difficult alignment with history. Powerful and provocative storytelling.

I was totally swept away by this beautiful, engrossing, ultimately heartbreaking family saga. Sarah Blake’s unswervingly human characters show us, not so much that good people do bad things, but that sometimes the very worst thing you can do is to do nothing at all.

The Guest Book is not only an exploration of the past, but a prophecy of the future. It illuminates a lost world with a brilliance that is neither nostalgic nor sentimental as it leads its characters, as well as the reader, to new and disturbing discoveries about prejudice and privilege. Sarah Blake’s understanding of private life at a certain time in America and within a certain class gives us an incisive history of manners and morals, with the understanding that the survival of the spirit, no matter the time, depends upon endurance, tolerance, and solitary grief.

I loved The Guest Book. 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 conjuror of time and place.

Sarah Blake’s powerful, beautifully written story portrays a couple’s secret choices that come to haunt succeeding generations. The Guest Book is richly atmospheric and morally compelling in a way that stirs the mind long after the last page.