Books: Paperback Release! Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club

Join J. Ryan Stradal as he celebrates Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club now in paperback, in conversation with Sarah Langan.

About the Book
From the New York Times bestselling author J. Ryan Stradal, a story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them

Mariel Prager needs a break. Her husband Ned is having an identity crisis, her spunky, beloved restaurant is bleeding money by the day, and her mother Florence is stubbornly refusing to leave the church where she’s been holed up for more than a week. The Lakeside Supper Club has been in her family for decades, and while Mariel’s grandmother embraced the business, seeing it as a saving grace, Florence never took to it. When Mariel inherited the restaurant, skipping Florence, it created a rift between mother and daughter that never quite healed.

Ned is also an heir—to a chain of home-style diners—and while he doesn’t have a head for business, he knows his family’s chain could provide a better future than his wife’s fading restaurant. In the aftermath of a devastating tragedy, Ned and Mariel lose almost everything they hold dear, and the hard-won victories of each family hang in the balance. With their dreams dashed, can one fractured family find a way to rebuild despite their losses, and will the Lakeside Supper Club be their salvation?

In this colorful, vanishing world of relish trays and brandy Old Fashioneds, J. Ryan Stradal has once again given us a story full of his signature honest, lovable yet fallible Midwestern characters as they grapple with love, loss, and marriage; what we hold onto and what we leave behind; and what our legacy will be when we are gone.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. Ryan Stradal is the author of New York Times bestseller Kitchens of the Great Midwest, which won the American Booksellers Association Indie’s Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year, and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for the year’s top novel. His second novel, the national bestseller The Lager Queen of Minnesota, won the WILLA Literary Award and was a finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award. His third and newest novel is Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, also a Heartland Award finalist, and a national bestseller the first week of its release. His shorter writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Granta, and The Guardian, among other places. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives with his family in California.

ABOUT THE INTERLOCUTOR

Sarah Langan is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Her most recent novels are A BETTER WORLD (April, 2024) and GOOD NEIGHBORS (February, 2021), which Gabino Iglesias at NPR called, “One of the creepiest, most unnerving deconstructions of American suburbia I’ve ever read.” She’s won three Bram Stoker Awards for her fiction. Her previous novels are THE KEEPER, THE MISSING, and AUDREY’s DOOR. She has an MFA from Columbia University, an MS in Environmental Health Science/ Toxicology from NYU, and lives in Los Angeles with her husband, the writer/director JT Petty, their two daughters, and two maniac rabbits.