Travel Bug Book Group

Yesteryear
by Caro Claire Burke
buy from us online: Book Audiobook

“An absolutely unhinged (in a good way) novel about a lifestyle influencer. . . . When I tell you the ending is off the rails, I am telling you the ending is off the rails.”
—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

“Wickedly funny, beautifully written, and frighteningly perceptive. Caro Claire Burke doesn't just expose the underbelly of a tradwife's immaculate Instagram, but ideals of motherhood, marriage, and America. It's unforgettable. (How the hell could you forget Natalie?)”
—Abigail Dean, author of GIRL A and THE DEATH OF US

My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive.
Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it.

Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan?

A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

Available at Travel Bug or purchase online from us: https://bookshop.org/shop/TravelBug

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

buy from us online: Book Audiobook

American Hagwon
by Min Jin Lee
buy from us online: book audiobook

“When I read it and when I put it down, what I thought was ok this is like Brothers Karamazov, except it’s all Koreans and the brothers are nice to each other and God may not be dead. It had that Brothers Karamazov feel that everything is incredibly intense and everything is at stake all of the time. And that these are remarkable individual characters who have these remarkable relationships. But at the same time your writing is obviously very different. There’s a humility and there’s a distance and there’s a willingness to let things happen on their own. So an epic in disguise is sort of how I felt about this book. And when I say Brothers Karamazov I am being completely serious because Brothers Karamazov is one of the few novels that when I read it and I felt, ok it’s hitting me, I’m being hit in the gut, I’m literally crying, things are happening to me inside, psysiologically in this novel, and I felt this same way about your book.”
—Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century” in conversation with Min Jin Lee.

“Min Jin Lee brings grand ambition, fierce heart, and the tenderest hope to a novel I didn't want to end."
—Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

From the author of the critically lauded modern classic Pachinko comes a kaleidoscopic epic set across Korea, Australia and the United States as the Koh family strive to live worthwhile lives amidst tumult and uncertainty.

John and Helen Koh and their three children – Bo, DH, and Mido – are building new lives in Korea when they find their worlds upended, first by a shocking betrayal by John’s oldest friend, and then by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Striving to regain their footing, the Koh’s set their sights on doing whatever it takes to provide for their children’s futures. They leave Seoul for Sydney and then eventually settle in California, where new opportunities open for the children as their parents, strangers in a strange land, adjust to a new existence in which their qualifications mean little. The Kohs, their friends, relatives and even their foes move in and out of each other’s lives as they navigate love, work, fortune and fulfilment across the years. But with each new sacrifice and each fresh horizon, larger questions begin to open up before the children: What are we willing to give up to secure the happiness of the ones we love?

Through masterfully controlled storytelling, Lee patiently explores how her characters' fortunes are shaped by forces from without and within: the powerful lure of sex, the sucking vacuum of greed, the insidiousness of racism, the obligations between parents and children. In American Hagwon, Min Jin Lee has crafted a transcendent novel where the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions.

Available at Travel Bug or purchase online from us: https://bookshop.org/shop/TravelBug

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

buy from us online: book audiobook

Exit Party
by Emily St. John Mandel
buy from us online: book audiobook

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The award-winning, bestselling author of Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility returns with a breathtaking novel of doubles, shadow worlds, and fractured timelines as a man disappears from a glittering Los Angeles party, and a woman—a gunrunner, an art collector, an operative of the State—searches for answers.

“The only world-builder more efficient than Mandel may be God. . . . Exit Party is the kind of novel you’ll be desperate to talk about.”
—Ron Charles

"EXIT PARTY raises important questions about who people are when not just personal but societal circumstances change."
—The New York Times

Los Angeles, 2031: The first spring after the collapse of the United States, peacekeeping troops withdraw from the city, the Jacaranda trees blossom, and the curfew is finally lifted. Ari Waker and her roommate pass the gauntlet of bomb-sniffing dogs, the shanty towns, and the Red Cross tents as they walk across Silverlake to a party. The mood is ecstatic inside the apartment, people drink and dance, a woman wears a silver dress, pleated like tinfoil. And then: A shift. A bewildered twin, an uncanny doppelganger stumbles through the crowd and out into the night, and Kareem, the party’s host, vanishes into thin air.

As Ari Waker unravels the mystery of this inexplicable night, Emily St. John Mandel unfurls a story that takes us from a future America splintered by civil war to the seaside cliffs of Greece where weapons dealers hide in an elegant resort, and from the domed city of Paris to a colony on the moon. An unforgettable literary feat, Exit Party is a novel about the price of safety, the perils of the surveillance state, a requiem for a world not unlike our own, and a breathtaking story of resilience in the face of cataclysmic change. As the narrator pointedly asks near the novel’s close, “Who will you be at the end of the world?”

Available at Travel Bug or purchase online from us: https://bookshop.org/shop/TravelBug

Discussion group is hosted in Travel Bug the first Wednesday of the month by Aimee Gwynne Franklyn, an independent curator, art historian and producer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

buy from us online: book audiobook