Author Talk: Sarah Blake
on The Guest Book
The Guest Book follows 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 appear to have everything―perfect 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 Ogden’s bank and earn the admiration of Ogden and one of his daughters, but the scorn of everyone else. Len’s best friend, Reg Pauling, has always been the only black man in the room―at 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 doesn’t have the money to keep. When Kitty’s granddaughter hears that she and her cousins might be forced to sell it, and when her husband brings back disturbing evidence about her grandfather’s past, she realizes she is on the verge of finally understanding the silences that have hovered just below the surface of her family all her life.
An ambitious novel that weaves the American past with its present, The Guest Book looks at racism and power that has been systemically embedded in the U.S. for generations.

Sarah Blake is the author of the novels, Grange House and the internationally best-selling The Postmistress; a chapbook of poems, Full Turn; and Runaway Girls, an artist book in collaboration with the artist, Robin Kahn. She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, the poet Joshua Weiner, and their two sons.