Hamazkayin “Nigol Aghbalian” San Francisco Chapter’s “Nor Seround” Young Armenian Professionals Committee and Armenian National Committee Of America- San Francisco Chapter cordially invite you to Chris Bohjalian’s book presenation and signing of his new book, The Guest Room.
Admission is FREE and refreshments will be served.
Synopsis:
From the New York Times bestselling author of Midwives and The Sandcastle Girls comes the spellbinding tale of a party gone horribly wrong: two men lie dead in a suburban living room, two women are on the run from police, and a marriage is ripping apart at the seams.
When Kristin Chapman agrees to let her husband, Richard, host his brother’s bachelor party, she expects a certain amount of debauchery. She brings their young daughter to Manhattan for the evening, leaving her Westchester home to the men and their hired entertainment. What she does not expect is this: bacchanalian drunkenness, her husband sharing a dangerously intimate moment in the guest room, and two women stabbing and killing their Russian bodyguards before driving off into the night.
Those women? Two 19-year-olds from Armenia, abducted as teenagers, held captive as sex slaves in Russia throughout their adolescence, and then brought to New York City where the captors know their value as sexual assets will soar.
In the aftermath, Kristin and Richard’s life rapidly spirals into nightmare. The police throw them out of their home, now a crime scene, Richard’s investment banking firm puts him on indefinite leave, and Kristin is unsure if she can forgive her husband for the moment he shared with a dark-haired girl in the guest room. But the dark-haired girl, Alexandra, faces a much graver danger. In one breathless, violent night, she is free, running to escape the police who she fears will arrest her and the gangsters who she knows will kill her.
The novel follows her story as she tries to stay in alive in Times Square and Manhattan with neither credit cards nor a passport — with, essentially, no identity — as well as the entire Chapman family’s saga in Westchester: Richard, Kristin, and 9-year-old Melissa.
A captivating, chilling story about shame and scandal, The Guest Room is a riveting novel from one of our greatest storytellers.
Read a new short story Chris wrote in December about one of the main characters: http://www.chrisbohjalian.com/the-guest-room
Reviews of the Book:
“Heartbreaking. . .I won’t give away of the surprising twists and turns that The Guest Room takes on the path to Bohjalian’s daring conclusion; I’ll only note that much of the pleasure that comes from reading any well-constructed narrative lies in trying to anticipate how the author will write himself out of seemingly inescapable corners. But here, for a change, we also have a novelist who seems more concerned with examining and dramatizing a much more universal question: whether, in the end, any amount of love or compassion, retreat or nobility or forgiveness, can overcome the remorseless workings of evil.”
— Skip Horack, The San Francisco Chronicle
“The Guest Room has an edge-of-the-seat momentum that propels the reader straight to the last page…For those who value the well-researched novel, the author’s 18th book will please.”
— Anita Shreve, The Washington Post
“Bohjalian catches a key social moment with a book that’s fresh and different. . .a tale of scandal, shame, and escalating suspense.”
– Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal