The guest book / Sarah Blake.

This story follows three generations of a powerful American family, a family that "used to run the world." When the story 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 occurs, Ogden tries to bring Kitty back to life by buying an island in Maine. It is there that Kitty makes a refusal that will haunt her for the rest of her life. 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 her husband brings back disturbing evidence about her grandfather's 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.