Minor Black Figures
by Brandon Taylor

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It's challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist's block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make—in art and in life.

Seascraper
by Benjamin Wood

Twenty-year-old Thomas Flett lives a slow, deliberate life with his mother in Longferry, Northern England, working his grandpa's trade as a shanker. He rises early to take his horse and cart to the drizzly shore to scrape for shrimp, and spends the afternoon selling his wares, trying to wash away the salt and sea-scum, pining for his neighbor, Joan Wyeth, and playing songs on his guitar. At heart, he is a folk musician, but this remains a private dream. Then a mysterious American arrives in town, and enlists Thomas's help in finding a perfect location for his next movie. Though skeptical at first, soon Thomas starts to trust the stranger, Edgar, and, shaken from the drudgery of his days by the promise of Hollywood glamour, begins to see a different future for himself. But how much of what Edgar claims is true, and how far can his inspiration carry Thomas?

Wolf Bells
by Leni Zumas

On a bluff above a river rises The House, where elderly and disabled residents live alongside young people who help out in exchange for free rent. The community is led by a former punk singer who never wanted to be responsible for anyone yet now finds herself the caretaker of this precarious collection of lives. It's not a family, exactly, but it's got the complicated, sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious, dynamics of kinship. When two kids—Nola and her little cousin James—show up on The House's back porch in need of refuge, the whole experiment is thrown into question. All are welcome here, or that was the idea. But the authorities are looking for these children, and The House's finances are teetering on the edge.

Before I Forget
by Tory Henwood Hoen

Despite working at a zeitgeisty wellness company, 26-year-old Cricket Campbell feels anything but well. Still adrift after a tragedy that upended her world a decade ago, she has entered early adulthood under the weight of a new burden: her father's Alzheimer's diagnosis. When Cricket's older sister Nina announces it is time to move Arthur from his beloved Adirondack lake house into a memory-care facility, Cricket has a better idea. In returning home to become her father's caretaker, she hopes to repair their strained relationship and shake herself out of her perma-funk. But even deeply familiar places can hold surprises. As Cricket settles back into the family house at Catwood Pond—a place she once loved, but hasn't visited since she was a teenager—she discovers that her father possesses a rare gift: as he loses his grasp of the past, he is increasingly able to predict the future.

The Irish Goodbye
by Heather Aimee O'Neill

After years apart, all three Ryan sisters gather for Thanksgiving at their parents' home on the East End of Long Island. Though each brings her own current issues, it’s the tragic deaths of two young people in the past that cast shadows over all the Ryans. This debut novel and Read with Jenna pick features complex characters who have all sorts of secrets. Read-alikes: J. Courtney Sullivan’s Maine; Christina Clancy’s The Second Home.

The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans

In 2012 Maryland, we meet 73-year-old Sybil Van Antwerp, a mother, grandmother, and retired lawyer, who spends time each week writing to family, friends, and authors she admires. Detailing her past, present, future, and favorite books, this moving epistolary tale and accomplished debut covers nearly a decade of an intriguing life. For fans of: Elizabeth Strout's Olive Kitteridge; Beth Morrey's The Love Story of Missy Carmichael.

The Heir Apparent: Reese's Book Club Pick
by Rebecca Armitage

It's New Year's Day in Tasmania and the life Lexi Villiers has carefully built is working out nicely: she's in the second year of her medical residency, she lives on a beautiful farm with her two best friends Finn and Jack—and she's about to finally become more-than-friendly with Jack—when a helicopter abruptly lands. Out steps her grandmother's right-hand-man, with the tragic news that her father and older brother have been killed in a skiing accident. Lexi's grandmother happens to be the Queen of England, and in addition to the shock and grief, Lexi must now accept the reality that she is suddenly next in line for the throne—a role she has publicly disavowed.

The Hitch
by Sara Levine

As an antiracist, Jewish secular feminist eco-warrior, Rose Cutler knows the right way to do everything, including parent her six-year-old nephew Nathan. But while she's looking after him in his parents' absence, things veer disastrously off course-Rose's Newfoundland attacks and kills a corgi at the park, and Nathan starts acting strangely: barking, overeating, talking to himself. Rose mistakes this for repressed grief over the corgi's death, but Nathan insists he isn't grieving, and the corgi isn't dead. Her soul leaped into his body, and she's living inside him. Now, Rose must banish the corgi from her nephew before his parents return.

Flesh: A Novel
by David Szalay

2025 Booker Prize Winner. Teenaged Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbor—a married woman close to his mother's age, whom he begrudgingly helps with errands—as his only companion. But as these periodical encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, his life soon spirals out of control, ending in a violent accident that leaves a man dead. What follows is a rocky trajectory that sees Istvan emigrate from Hungary to London, where he moves from job to job before finding steady work as a driver for London's billionaire class. At each juncture, his life is affected by the goodwill or self-interest of strangers.

The Rest of Our Lives
by Ben Markovits

2025 Booker Prize Finalist. When Tom Layward's wife had an affair twelve years ago, he resolved to leave her as soon as his youngest child left the nest. Now, while driving his college-bound daughter to Pittsburgh, he remembers his promise to himself. He is also on the run from his own health issues and a forced leave from work. So, rather than returning to his wife in Westchester, Tom keeps driving west, with the vague plan of visiting people from his past—an old college friend, his ex-girlfriend, his brother, his son—en route, maybe, to California. He's moving towards a future he hasn't even envisioned yet while he considers his past and the choices he's made that have brought him to this particular present.

Palaver
by Bryan Washington

In the weeks before Christmas, a mother arrives unannounced in Japan to visit her estranged son, who isn’t happy to see her. They speak infrequently and haven’t seen each other in years, but can they come to an understanding with each other before it’s too late? Readers who appreciate spare yet evocative tales or stories that center gay men and family in all its forms will enjoy Bryan Washington’s novels.

Our next discussion
Tuesday, February 17, 6:30 pm
Library Meeting Room on Lower Level
If you're a regular reader of contemporary and historical fiction, consider joining our Fiction Book Club! The club usually meets on the third Tuesday of the month at 6:30, but we do recommend confirming details on our events calendar in case of changes. Copies of our next book are on reserve at the Circulation Desk. We hope to see you there!

Off Season
by Anne Rivers Siddons

Acclaimed novelist Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel is a stunning tale of love and loss. For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly—happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life. Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past—to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety—to try to figure out her future. It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage.

Our next meeting:
Tuesday, February 10, 6:30 pm
Library Conference Room on the Lower Level
If you're a fan of poetry, consider joining our Poetry Readers Discussion Group! The club usually meets on the second Tuesday of the month at 6:30, but we do recommend confirming details on our events calendar in case of changes. We hope to see you there!

Delights & Shadows
by Ted Kooser

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In Delights and Shadows, Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman's trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world. Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska.