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What Book Clubs are reading this month! |
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Discussion January 21st ... an eloquent meditation on space and life on our planet through the eyes of six astronauts circling the earth in 24 hours |
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Have you ever wanted to read The Lord of the Rings? Maybe it's time for a re-read-or simply a love for epic fantasy adventure. Join us either in person or online this year as we travel through Tolkien's legendary world together! |
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The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession
by Michael Finkel
For centuries, works of art have been stolen in countless ways from all over the world, but no one has been quite as successful at it as the master thief Stâephane Breitwieser. Carrying out more than two hundred heists over nearly ten years-in museums and cathedrals all over Europe-Breitwieser, along with his girlfriend who worked as his lookout, stole more than three hundred objects, until it all fell apart in spectacular fashion. In The Art Thief, Michael Finkel brings us into Breitwieser's strange and fascinating world. Unlike most thieves, he never stole for money, keeping all his treasures in a single room where he could admire them to his heart's content. Possessed of a remarkable athleticism and an innate ability to assess practically any security system, Breitwieser managed to pull off a breathtakingly number of audacious thefts. Yet these strange talents bred a growing disregard for risk and an addict's need to score, leading Breitwieser to ignore his girlfriend's pleas to stop-until one final act of hubris brought everything crashing down--
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Anxious people : a novel
by Fredrik Backman
Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages and a plucky octogenarian discover their unexpected common traits.
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Before Dorothy
by Hazel Gaynor
Chicago, 1924. Emily Gale and her new husband Henry yearn to leave the bustle of Chicago behind for the promise of their own American dream. But leaving the city means leaving Emily's beloved sister Annie, who was once closer to her than anyone in the world. Kansas, 1932. Emily and Henry have made a life in the warmth of the community of Liberal, Kansas, and among the harsh beauty of the prairie. Their lives hold a precarious and hopeful purpose, until tragedy strikes and their orphaned niece Dorothy lands on their doorstep. The wide-eyed child isn't the only thing to disrupt Emily's world. Drought and devastating dust storms threaten to destroy everything, and their much-loved home becomes a place of uncertainty and danger. When the past catches up with the present and old secrets are exposed, Emily fears she will lose the most cherished thing of all: Dorothy--
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Broken country : a novel
by Clare Leslie Hall
Reese's Book Club
When her brother-in-law's actions reconnect her with a former love, Gabriel, whose son eerily resembles her deceased child, Beth's carefully constructed life unravels as past secrets and jealousies resurface, leading to deadly consequences and a difficult choice.
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The Girl Behind the Gates
by Brenda Davies
1939. Seventeen-year-old Nora Jennings has spent her life secure in the certainty of a bright, happy future - until one night of passion has more catastrophic consequences than she ever could have anticipated. Labelled a moral defective and sectioned under the Mental Deficiency Act, she is forced to endure years of unspeakable cruelty at the hands of those who are supposed to care for her.1981. When psychiatrist Janet Humphreys comes across Nora, heavily institutionalised and still living in the hospital more than forty years after her incarceration, she knows that she must be the one to help Nora rediscover what it is to live. But as she works to help Nora overcome her past, Janet realises she must finally face her own. --Provided by publisher.
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I Found You
by Lisa Jewell
Readers of Liane Moriarty, Paula Hawkins, and Ruth Ware will love. --Library Journal (starred review) Jewell's novel explores the space between going missing and being lost....how the plots intersect and finally collide is one of the great thrills of reading Jewell's book. She ratchets up the tension masterfully, and her writing is lively. --The New York Times In the windswept British seaside town of Ridinghouse Bay, single mom Alice Lake finds a man sitting on a beach outside her house. He has no name, no jacket, and no idea how he got there. Against her better judgment, she invites him inside. Meanwhile, in a suburb of London, newlywed Lily Monrose grows anxious when her husband fails to return home from work one night. Soon, she receives even worse news: according to the police, the man she married never even existed. Twenty-three years earlier, Gray and Kirsty Ross are teenagers on a summer holiday with their parents. The annual trip to Ridinghouse Bay is uneventful, until an enigmatic young man starts paying extra attention to Kirsty. Something about him makes Gray uncomfortable--and it's not just because he's a protective older brother. Who is the man on the beach? Where is Lily's missing husband? And what ever happened to the man who made such a lasting and disturbing impression on Gray? A mystery with substance (Kirkus Reviews), I Found You is a delicious collision course of a novel, filled with the believable characters, stunning writing, and surprising revelations all the way up to the ending (Booklist) that make the New York Times bestselling author of None of This Is True Lisa Jewell so beloved by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.
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The Jackal's Mistress
by Chris Bohjalian
In this Civil War love story, inspired by a real-life friendship across enemy lines, the wife of a missing Confederate soldier discovers a wounded Yankee officer and must decide what she's willing to risk for the life of a stranger, from the New York Times bestselling author of such acclaimed historical fiction as Hour of the Witch and The Sandcastle Girls. Virginia, 1864--Libby Steadman's husband has been away for so long that she can barely conjure his voice in her dreams. While she longs for him in the night, fearing him dead in a Union prison camp, her days are spent running a gristmill with her teenage niece, a hired hand, and his wife, all the grain they can produce requisitioned by the Confederate Army. It's an uneasy life in the Shenandoah Valley, the territory frequently changing hands, control swinging back and forth like a pendulum between North and South, and Libby awakens every morning expecting to see her land a battlefield. And then she finds a gravely injured Union officer left for dead in a neighbor's house, the bones of his hand and leg shattered. Captain Jonathan Weybridge of the Vermont Brigade is her enemy--but he's also a human being, and Libby must make a terrible decision: Does she leave him to die alone? Or does she risk treason and try to nurse him back to health? And if she succeeds, does she try to secretly bring him across Union lines, where she might negotiate a trade for news of her own husband? A vivid and sweeping story of two people navigating the boundaries of love and humanity in a landscape of brutal violence, The Jackal's Mistress is a heart-stopping new novel, based on a largely unknown piece of American history, from one of our greatest storytellers.
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Say Nothing
by Brad Parks
Judge Scott Sampson doesn't brag about having a perfect life, but the evidence is clear: a prestigious job, a beloved family. On an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, he is about to pick up his six-year-old twins to go swimming when his wife Alison texts him that she'll get the kids from school instead. It's not until she gets home later that Scott realizes she doesn't have the children. And she never sent the text. Then the phone rings, and every parent's most chilling nightmare begins--Amazon.com.
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The Stolen Life of Colette Marceau
by Kristin Harmel
Colette Marceau has been stealing jewels for nearly as long as she can remember, following the centuries-old code of honor instilled in her by her mother Annabel: take only from the cruel and unkind, and give to those in need. Never was their family tradition more important than seven decades earlier, during the Second World War, when Annabel and Colette worked side by side in Paris to fund the French Resistance. But one night in 1942, it all went wrong. Annabel was arrested by the Germans, and Colette's four-year-old sister Liliane disappeared in the chaos of the raid, along with an exquisite diamond bracelet sewn into the hem of her nightgown for safekeeping. Soon after, Annabel was executed, and Liliane's body was found floating in the Seine--but the bracelet was nowhere to be found. Seventy years later, Colette--who has 'redistributed' $30 million in jewels over the decades to fund many worthy organizations--has done her best to put her tragic past behind her, but her life begins to unravel when the long-missing bracelet suddenly turns up in a museum exhibit in Boston--
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Time of the Child: Winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award
by Niall Williams
I am utterly obsessed with Niall Williams. -Ann Patchett, New York Times bestselling author of Tom Lake From the author of the November 2025 Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club Pick, This Is Happiness, a compassionate, life-affirming novel about the Christmas season that transforms the small Irish town of Faha.
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Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers
by Jesse Q. Sutanto
A USA Today bestseller Edgar Award Winner for Best Original Paperback Audie Award Winner for MysteryLibby Award Winner for Best Mystery A lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto, bestselling author of Dial A for Aunties. Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady--ah, lady of a certain age--who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco's Chinatown. Despite living alone, Vera is not needy, oh no. She likes nothing more than sipping on a good cup of Wulong and doing some healthy detective work on the Internet about what her Gen-Z son is up to. Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing--a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. In his outstretched hand, a flash drive. Vera doesn't know what comes over her, but after calling the cops like any good citizen would, she sort of . . . swipes the flash drive from the body and tucks it safely into the pocket of her apron. Why? Because Vera is sure she would do a better job than the police possibly could, because nobody sniffs out a wrongdoing quite like a suspicious Chinese mother with time on her hands. Vera knows the killer will be back for the flash drive; all she has to do is watch the increasing number of customers at her shop and figure out which one among them is the killer. What Vera does not expect is to form friendships with her customers and start to care for each and every one of them. As a protective mother hen, will she end up having to give one of her newfound chicks to the police?
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Wild Dark Shore
by Charlotte McConaghy
A novel about a family living alone on a remote island, when a mysterious woman washes up on shore--
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The First Time I Saw Him
by Laura Dave
Reese's Book Club
Laura Dave continues Hannah Hall's pulse-pounding journey in the riveting and deeply moving sequel to the #1 New York Times bestselling blockbuster and Apple TV+ show, The Last Thing He Told Me. How far would you go for a second chance? Five years after her husband, Owen, disappeared, Hannah Hall and her stepdaughter, Bailey, have settled into a new life in Southern California. Together, they've forged a relationship with Bailey's grandfather Nicholas and are putting the past behind them. But when Owen shows up at Hannah's new exhibition, she knows that she and Bailey are in danger again. Hannah and Bailey are forced to go on the run in a relentless race to keep their past from catching up with them. As a thrilling drama unfolds, Hannah risks everything to get Bailey to safety--and finds there just might be a way back to Owen and their long-awaited second chance. A gripping, rich, and deeply moving novel about the power of forgiveness, The First Time I Saw Him picks up right where the epilogue for the genuinely moving (The New York Times) The Last Thing He Told Me left off, giving readers the eagerly awaited and absolutely exhilarating sequel to Dave's global blockbuster.
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Homeschooled: A Memoir
by Stefan Merrill Block
Read with Jenna
A heartbreaking, empowering and often hilarious debut memoir about a mother's all-consuming love, a son's perilous quest to discover the world beyond the front door and the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions like himStefan Merrill Block was nine when his mother pulled him from school, certain that his teachers were stifling his creativity. Hungry for more time with her boy who was growing up too quickly, she began to instruct Stefan in the family's living room. Beyond his formal lessons in math, however, Stefan was largely left to his own devices and his mother's erratic whims, such as her project to recapture her twelve-year-old son's early years by bleaching his hair and putting him on a crawling regimen.Years before homeschooling would become a massive nationwide movement, at a time when it had just become legal in his home state of Texas, Stefan vanished into that unseen space and into his mother's increasingly eccentric theories and projects. But when, after five years away from the outside world, Stefan reentered the public school system in Plano as a freshman, he was in for a jarring awakening.At once a novelistic portrait of mother and son, and an illuminating window into an overlooked corner of the American education system, Homeschooled is a moving, funny and ultimately inspiring story of a son's battle for a life of his own choosing, and the wages of a mother's insatiable love.
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Skylark
by Paula McLain
GMA Book Club
The New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife weaves a mesmerizing tale of Paris above and below--where a woman's quest for artistic freedom in 1664 intertwines with a doctor's dangerous mission during the German occupation in the 1940s, revealing a story of courage and resistance that transcends time. 1664: Alouette Voland is the daughter of a master dyer at the famed Gobelin Tapestry Works, who secretly dreams of escaping her circumstances and creating her own masterpiece. When her father is unjustly imprisoned, Alouette's efforts to save him lead to her own confinement in the notorious Salpêtrière asylum, where thousands of women are held captive and cruelly treated. But within its grim walls, she discovers a small group of brave allies, and the possibility of a life bigger than she ever imagined. 1939: Kristof Larson is a medical student beginning his psychiatric residency in Paris, whose neighbors on the Rue de Gobelins are a Jewish family who have fled Poland. When Nazi forces descend on the city, Kristof becomes their only hope for survival, even as his work as a doctor is jeopardized. A spellbinding and transportive look at a side of Paris known to very few--the underground city that is a mirror reflection of the glories above--Paula McLain's unforgettable new novel chronicles two parallel journeys of defiance and rescue that connect in ways both surprising and deeply moving.
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Best Offer Wins
by Marisa Kashino
GMA Book Club
An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino's darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success--and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams? Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian -- and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track -- Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it's publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand). A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners' lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged--but just when she thinks she's won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there's no boundary she won't cross to seize the dream life she's been chasing. The most unsettling part? You'll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief. Dark, biting, and laugh-out-loud funny, Best Offer Wins is a propulsive debut and a razor-sharp exploration of class, ambition, and the modern housing crisis.
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The Heir Apparent: Reese's Book Club Pick
by Rebecca Armitage
Reese's Book Club
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--
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Pride and Prejudice (a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick)
by Jane Austen
Read with Jenna
When Elizabeth Bennet first encounters the aristocratic Fitzwilliam Darcy at a ball, the two young people are mutually appalled--she by his arrogance and aloof manners and he by her embarrassingly crass relatives. Though Elizabeth's future security depends on finding a prosperous husband, she is determined to follow her heart instead. Darcy, meanwhile, finds himself thoroughly unsettled by such an uncommonly lively and headstrong woman. Further misunderstandings widen the gulf between them, before a devastating scandal forces the pair to confront the errors of pride and prejudice that have kept them from recognizing each other's true worth. Jane Austen's skill in uniting sparklingly humorous dialogue with profound depths of feeling never found more dazzling expression than in this much-loved novel.
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Some Bright Nowhere
by Ann Packer
Oprah's Book Club
Eliot and his wife Claire have been happily married for nearly four decades. They've raised two children in their sleepy Connecticut town and have weathered the inevitable ups and downs of a long life spent together. But eight years after Claire was diagnosed with cancer, the end is near, and it's time to gather loved ones and prepare for the inevitable. Over the years of Claire's illness, Eliot has willingly--lovingly--shifted into the role of caregiver, appreciating the intimacy and tenderness that comes with a role even more layered and complex than the one he performed as a devoted husband. But as he focuses on settling into what will be their last days and weeks together, Claire makes an unexpected request that leaves him reeling. In a moment, his carefully constructed world is shattered--
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