Book Club Suggestions

 

Book clubs are a great way to establish a sense of community with other passionate readers in our neighborhood. There are many online and in person clubs in Cherry Creek North that meet to discuss themes, characters, and insights into the shared reading process.

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2034: A novel of the Next World War by Elliot Ackerman and James Stvridis
From two former military officers and award-winning authors, a chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller that imagines a naval clash between the US and China in the South China Sea in 2034—and the path from there to a nightmarish global conflagration.
 
A Good Marriage by Kimberley McCreight
A woman’s brutal murder reveals the perilous compromises some couples make—and the secrets they keep—to stay together.
 
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseni
By the author of The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns is at once an incredible chronicle of thirty years of Afghan history and a deeply moving story of family, friendship, faith, and the salvation to be found in love. Born a generation apart and with vastly different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, by loss and by fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them-in their home as well as in the streets of Kabul-they come to form a bond that makes them both sisters and mother-daughter to each other, and that will alter the course not just of their own lives but of the next generation. With heart-wrenching power and suspense, Hosseini shows how a woman's love for her family can move her to shocking and heroic acts of self-sacrifice, and that in the end it is love, or even the memory of love, which is often the key to survival.
 
Alice Network by Kate Quinn
In an enthralling new historical novel from author Kate Quinn, two women - a female spy recruited to the real-life Alice Network in France during World War I and an unconventional American socialite searching for her cousin in 1947 - are brought together in a mesmerizing story of courage and redemption.
 
All the Broken Pieces by John Boyne
In this novel ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby has lived in the same well-to-do mansion block in London for decades. She lives a quiet, comfortable life, despite her deeply disturbing, dark past. She does not talk about her escape from Nazi Germany at age 12. She does not talk about the grim post-war years in France with her mother. Most of all, she does not talk about her father, who was the commandant of one of the Reich’s most notorious extermination camps. Then, a new family moves into the apartment below her. Despite herself, Gretel cannot help but begin a friendship with the little boy, Henry, though his presence brings back memories she would rather forget. One night, she witnesses a disturbing, violent argument between Henry’s beautiful mother and his arrogant father, one that threatens Gretel’s hard-won, self-contained existence. All The Broken Places moves back and forth in time between Gretel’s girlhood in Germany to present-day London as a woman whose life has been haunted by the past. Now, Gretel faces a similar crossroads to one she encountered long ago. Back then, she denied her own complicity, but now, faced with a chance to interrogate her guilt, grief, and remorse, she can choose to save a young boy. If she does, she will be forced to reveal the secrets she has spent a lifetime protecting. This time, she can make a different choice than before—whatever the cost to herself.
 
Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston
This non-fiction book tells the horror and injustices of slavery as it relates the true story of one of the last-known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last "Black Cargo" ship to arrive in the United States.
 
Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
This book is based on one of America’s most notorious real-life scandals—in which Georgia Tann, director of a Memphis-based adoption organization, kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country. Readers learn of how the lives of countless children changed with their pasts stolen and their futures change. But the real feat of this stirring novel is how deeply Wingate plunges us into the heart and mind of twelve-year-old river gypsy Rill Foss.
 
Birnam Wood by Eleanor Canton
This gripping psychological thriller begins when a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice. For years, the group has struggled to break even. To occupy the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But the enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the place: he has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Birnam’s founder, Mira, when he catches her on the property. He is intrigued by Mira, and by Birnam Wood; although they are poles apart politically, it seems Lemoine, and the group might have enemies in common
 
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
Two estranged siblings delve into their mother’s hidden past—and how it all connects to her traditional Caribbean black cake—in this immersive multigenerational family saga. In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking tale Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their lineage and themselves.
 
Blue Asylum by Kathy Hepinstall
A woman falls in love with a wounded Civil War solider in this novel about the line between sanity and madness. When Virginia plantation wife Iris Dunleavy is put on trial and convicted of madness, she knows the real criminal is her husband. After all, the only thing she’s guilty of is disagreeing with him on notions of justice, cruelty, and property. Sent away to a remote Florida island, Iris meets an odd collection of residents in Sanibel Asylum
 
Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthsn
A courageous young Sri Lankan woman tries to protect her dream of becoming a doctor in this “heartbreaking exploration of a family fractured by civil war. In Jaffna, 1981, Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.
 
Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
This novel is a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s long-existing Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, known as Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.
 
Crimson Lake Road by Victor Methos
Bestselling author Victor Methos’s acclaimed series continues as prosecutor Jessica Yardley races to catch an art-obsessed serial killer before she becomes his next masterpiece. Retiring prosecutor Jessica Yardley cannot turn down one last investigation. This time, it is a set of murders inspired by a series of grisly paintings called The Night Things. She is the only one who can catch the killer, who is left a trail of bodies in a rural community outside of Las Vegas

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingslover (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.
 
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
This book is a thriller and fairy tale and is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy, and fate. In the novel, an old woman living in a secluded Polish village looks after the houses of the folk who spend their winters elsewhere. She is one of three who remain in the cold months- until one day, one of her neighbors comes knocking with a request for her to help him deal with the third man, who is dead.
 
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
This book takes readers on an intimate journey of groundbreaking scientific discovery. The author links her research to her personal experiences. She recounts her life's work uncovering the Wood Wide Web, the underground mycelium network that connects all the trees and plants within a forest.
 
Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
This heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is about family, love of parents and children, art, and money. It is also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news and with what it can mean to be Black in America
 
Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not despite who they are, but because of it. William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him—so when he meets the spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano in his freshman year of college, it’s as if the world has lit up around him. With Julia comes her family, as she and her three sisters are inseparable: Sylvie, the family’s dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book; Cecelia is a free-spirited artist; and Emeline patiently takes care of them all. With the Padavanos, William experiences a newfound contentment; every moment in their house is filled with loving chaos. But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable devotion to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. 
 
Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin
New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that does not mean his army was not there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001, reaching an apotheosis on January 6 when hundreds of rioters stormed the Capitol. Based on nearly a million previously unreleased tapes, photographs, and documents, including detailed communications between McVeigh and his lawyers, as well as interviews with such key figures as Bill Clinton, Homegrown reveals how the story of Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing is not only a powerful retelling of one of the great outrages of our time, but a warning for our future.
 
Honor by Thrity Umrigar
In Honor, Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena—a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man—Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. But the dual love stories of Honor are as different as the cultures of Meena and Smita themselves: Smita realizes she has the freedom to enter a casual affair, knowing she can decide later how much it means to her. In this tender and evocative novel about love, hope, familial devotion, betrayal, and sacrifice, Thrity Umrigar shows us two courageous women trying to navigate how to be true to their homelands and themselves at the same time.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks (Chosen by 4 Clubs)
Horse is a historical fiction book of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism. Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, the book addresses the legacy of enslavement and racism in America.  
 
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye--the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick. This is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
This is an immersive historical novel inspired by the true story of a woman physician in 15th-century China. Tan Yunxian, born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use in socity. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient. A captivating story of women helping each other, Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a triumphant reimagining of the life of one person who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.
 
Last Thing He Told Me by Laura Dave
With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a riveting mystery, certain to shock you with its final, heartbreaking turn. The book describes a woman searching for the truth about her husband’s disappearance, at any cost.

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
This book follows Elizabeth Zott as she navigates the treacherous and misogynistic 1950's society and workplace. First as a woman of intellect trying to make it in a “man's profession” and then as a single mother, fighting tooth and nail to keep herself and her child alive
 
Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward
Let Us Descend describes a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation. This is a journey that is beautifully rendered but also heart wrenching. Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with spirits: of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Annis leads readers through the descent, hers is a story of rebirth and reclamation.

Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
This book is a collaboration between two best-selling authors that seamlessly weaves together Olivia and Lily’s journeys, creating a provocative exploration of the strength that love and acceptance require. It is a riveting novel of suspense, an unforgettable love story, and a moving and powerful exploration of the secrets we keep and the risks we take to become ourselves.
 
Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
This book brings the world of Renaissance Italy to life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.
 
News of the World by Paulette Jiles
In the aftermath of the American Civil War, an aging itinerant news reader agrees to transport a young captive of the Kiowa back to her people in this morally complex, multi-layered novel of historical fiction from the author of Enemy Women that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.
 
Northwood by Daniel Mason
This is a sweeping novel about a single house in the woods of New England, told through the lives of those who inhabit it across the centuries. When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we are connected to our environment, to history, and to one another.
 
Privileged Information by Stephen White
Alan Gregory is a clinical psychologist with a thriving practice in Boulder, Colorado. His life begins to unravel when one of his female patients is found in an apparent suicide and the local paper begins printing accusations from an unnamed source of sexual impropriety between the woman and Dr. Gregory. He launches a psychological and personal quest for the truth that rapidly intensifies when more of his patients die untimely deaths, and Gregory suspects not only that the deaths are related but that another one of his patients may be somehow involved.
 
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
This novel is a charming, witty, and compulsively readable exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope that traces a widow's unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus. After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors, and tidying up. Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but would not dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors—until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.
 
Reputation by Sarah Vaughn
The bestselling author of Anatomy of a Scandal returns with a psychological thriller about a politician whose less-than-perfect personal life is thrust into the spotlight when a body is discovered in her home. As a politician, Emma has sacrificed a great deal for her career—including her marriage and her relationship with her daughter, Flora
 
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a peaceful future. With its sensitive depiction of the wronged Tess and powerful criticism of social convention, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is one of the most moving and poetic of Hardy's novels.
 
The Alienist by Caleb Carr
Fast paced and riveting, infused with historical detail, The Alienist conjures up Gilded Age New York, with its tenements and mansions, corrupt cops, and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. It is an age in which questioning society’s belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and fatal consequences.
 
The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters
This riveting novel is about the search for truth, the shadow of trauma, and the persistence of love across time. A four-year-old Mi’kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years.
 
The Bird Hotel by Joyce Maynard
The Bird Hotel tells the story of a young American who, after suffering tragedy, restores and runs La Llorona. Along the way we meet a rich assortment of characters who live in the village or come to stay at the hotel. With a mystery at its center and filled with warmth, drama, romance, humor, pop culture, and a little magical realism,  
 
The Book of Charlie: Wisdom from the Remarkable American Life of a 109-Year-Old Man by David Von Drehle
One of our nation’s most prominent writers discovers the truth about how to live a long and happy life from the centenarian next door in this account of a splendid American life. When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life

The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
The book is the tale of a quiet librarian who becomes history’s deadliest female sniper during World War II. The story is based Mila Pavlichenko, a female sniper in the Russian army. 
 
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
This novel describes how Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
 
The First Ladies by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray
A novel about the extraordinary partnership between First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune—an unlikely friendship that changed the world. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune are initially drawn together because of their shared belief in women’s rights and the power of education, Mary and Eleanor become fast friends confiding their secrets, hopes and dreams—and holding each other’s hands through tragedy and triumph. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president, the two women begin to collaborate more closely, particularly as Eleanor moves toward her own agenda separate from FDR, a consequence of the devastating discovery of her husband’s secret love affair. Eleanor becomes a controversial First Lady for her outspokenness, particularly on civil rights. And when she receives threats because of her strong ties to Mary, it only fuels the women’s desire to fight together for justice and equality.
 
The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. Chicken Hill was where Moshe and Chona Ludlow lived when Moshe integrated his theater and where Chona ran the Heaven & Earth Grocery Store. When the state came looking for a deaf boy to institutionalize him, it was Chona and Nate Timblin, the Black janitor at Moshe’s theater and the unofficial leader of the Black community on Chicken Hill, who worked together to keep the boy safe. As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins of white, Christian America struggle and what they must do to survive. When the truth is finally revealed about what happened on Chicken Hill and the part the town’s white establishment played in it, McBride shows us that even in dark times, it is love and community—heaven and earth—that sustain us.
 
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
This is a spellbinding novel based on real events about love and betrayal, colonialism and revolution, storytelling, and redemption. The year is 1921. Lesley Hamlyn and her husband, Robert, a lawyer, and war veteran, are living at Cassowary House on the Straits Settlement of Penang. When “Willie” Somerset Maugham, a famed writer and old friend of Robert's, arrives for an extended visit with his secretary Gerald, the pair threatens a rift that could alter more lives than one. Maugham, one of the great novelists of his day, is beleaguered: Having long hidden his homosexuality, his unhappy and expensive marriage of convenience becomes unbearable after he loses his savings and the freedom to travel with Gerald. His career deflating, his health failing, Maugham arrives at Cassowary House in desperate need of a subject for his next book. Lesley, too, is enduring a marriage more duplicitous than it first appears. Maugham suspects an affair and learning of Lesley's past connection to the Chinese revolutionary, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, decides to probe deeper. But as their friendship grows and Lesley confides in him about life in the Straits, Maugham discovers a far more surprising tale than he imagined, one that involves not only war and scandal, but the trial of an Englishwoman charged with murder. It is, to Maugham, a story worthy of fiction.

The Island of Sea Women by Lisa See (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
This historical novel is set on the Korean island of Jeju. It tells the story of a friendship between Mi-ja, the daughter of a Japanese collaborator, and Young-Sook, the heir apparent in a family of haenyeo. Throughout the decades from Japanese rule to the modern era, the two become close but find their relationship strained because of their backgrounds. These two girls work in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective.
 
The Last Flight by Julie Clark
This book is thoroughly absorbing—not only because of its tantalizing plot and deft pacing, but also because of its unexpected poignancy and its satisfying, if bittersweet, resolution. Here is the story of two women—both alone, both scared—and one agonizing decision that will change the trajectory of both of their lives.
 
The Last Kingdom of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman
This is an epic, multigenerational story of two rival dynasties who flourished in Shanghai and Hong Kong as twentieth-century China surged into the modern era. By the 1930s, the Sassoons had been doing business in China for a century, rivaled in wealth and influence by only one other dynasty--the Kadoories. These two Jewish families, both originally from Baghdad, stood astride Chinese business and politics for more than 175 years, profiting from the Opium Wars; surviving Japanese occupation; courting Chiang Kai-shek; and losing nearly everything as the Communists swept into power. In The Last Kings of Shanghai, Jonathan Kaufman tells the remarkable history of how these families participated in an economic boom that opened China to the world but remained blind to the country's deep inequality and to the political turmoil at their doorsteps. In a story stretching from Baghdad to Hong Kong to Shanghai to London, Kaufman enters the lives and minds of these ambitious men and women to forge a tale of opium smuggling, family rivalry, political intrigue, and survival
 
The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz
The Latecomer is a layered and immersive literary novel about three siblings, desperate to escape one another, and the upending of their family by the late arrival of a fourth. The Latecomer follows the story of the wealthy, New York City-based Oppenheimer family, from the first meeting of parents Salo and Johanna, under tragic circumstances, to their triplets born during the early days of IVF. As children, the three siblings – Harrison, Lewyn, and Sally – feel no strong familial bond and cannot wait to go their separate ways, even as their father becomes more distanced and their mother more desperate. When the triplets leave for college, Johanna, faced with being truly alone, makes the decision to have a fourth child. What role will the “latecomer” play in this fractured family?
 
The Lewis Man by Peter May
In The Lewis Man, the second book of the trilogy, Fin Macleod has returned to the Isle of Lewis, the storm-tossed, wind-scoured outer Hebridean island where he was born and raised. Having left behind his adult life in Edinburgh - including his wife and his career in the police force - the former Detective Inspector is intent on repairing past relationships and restoring his parents' derelict cottage. His plans are interrupted when an unidentified corpse is recovered from a Lewis peat bog. 
 
The Maidens by Alex Michaelides
This novel is a spellbinding tale of psychological suspense, weaving together Greek mythology, murder, and obsession. Mariana Andros is a brilliant but troubled group therapist who becomes fixated on The Maidens (a secret society of female students) when one member, a friend of Mariana’s niece Zoe, is found murdered in Cambridge.

The Measure by Nicki Erick (Chosen by 2 Clubs)
The book is about a box delivered to each person on the planet. Inside each box is the recipient’s name and a piece of string   It soon becomes clear that the length of string stands for the length of their life. The story follows people who must make a choice whether to open the box and live with the consequences. The Measure is an ambitious, invigorating story about family, friendship, hope, and destiny that encourages us to live life to the fullest.
 
The Overstory by Richard Powers
The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn into its unfolding catastrophe.
 
The Plot by Jean Hans Korelitz
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he is teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what is left of his self-respect; he has not written—let alone published—anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he does not need Jake’s help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then, he hears the plot.
 
The Quarry Girls by Jess Lourey
In a close-knit community in Minnesota, summer means late-night swimming parties at the quarry, the county fair, and venturing into the tunnels beneath the city. But for two best friends, it is not all fun and games. Heather and Brenda have a secret. Something they saw in the dark. Something they cannot forget. They have decided to never tell a soul. But their vow is tested when their friend disappears―the second girl to vanish in a week. And yet the authorities are reluctant to investigate.
 
The Raft of Stars by Andrew J. Graff
Two hardscrabble young boys think they’ve committed a crime and they flee into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Will the adults trying to find and protect them reach them before it’s too late? One night, tired of seeing his best friend bruised and terrorized by his no-good dad, Fish takes action. A gunshot rings out and the two boys flee the scene, believing themselves murderers. They head for the woods, where they find their way onto a raft, but the natural terrors of Ironsforge gorge threaten to overwhelm them.
 
The Secret Book of Flora Lea by Patti Callahan Henry
When a woman discovers a rare book with connections to her past, long-held secrets about her missing sister and their childhood in the English countryside during World War II are revealed in this “beguiling blend of hope, mystery, and true familial love.” In the war-torn London of 1939, fourteen-year-old Hazel and five-year-old Flora are evacuated to a rural village to escape the horrors of the Second World War. Living with the kind Bridie Aberdeen and her teenage son, Harry, in a charming stone cottage along the River Thames, Hazel fills their days with walks and games to distract her young sister, including one that she creates for her sister and her sister alone—a fairy tale about a magical land, a secret place they can escape to that is all their own. But the unthinkable happens when young Flora suddenly vanishes while playing near the banks of the river. Shattered, Hazel blames herself for her sister’s disappearance, and she carries that guilt into adulthood as a private burden she feels she deserves. Twenty years later, Hazel is in London, ready to move on from her job at a cozy rare bookstore to a career at Sotheby’s. With a charming boyfriend and her elegantly timeworn Bloomsbury flat, Hazel’s future seems determined. But her tidy life is turned upside down when she unwraps a package containing an illustrated book called Whisperwood and the River of Stars. Hazel never told a soul about the imaginary world she created just for Flora. Could this book hold the secrets to Flora’s disappearance? Could it be a sign that her beloved sister is still alive after all these years?
 
The Sound of Gravel: A Memoir by Ruth Werner
The Sound of Gravel is the remarkable true story of one girl's coming-of-age in a polygamist Mormon Doomsday cult. Ruth Wariner was the thirty-ninth of her father’s forty-two children. Growing up on a farm in rural Mexico, where authorities ignored the practices of her community, Ruth lives in a ramshackle house without indoor plumbing or electricity. At church, preachers teach that God will punish the wicked by destroying the world and that women can only ascend to Heaven by entering into polygamous marriages and giving birth to as many children as possible. After Ruth's father--the man who had been the founding prophet of the colony--is brutally murdered by his brother in a bid for church power, her mother remarries, becoming the second wife of another faithful congregant.In need of government assistance and supplemental income, Ruth and her siblings are carted back and forth between Mexico and the United States, where her mother collects welfare and her step-father works a variety of odd jobs. Ruth comes to love the time she spends in the States, realizing that the community into which she was born is not the right one for her. As Ruth begins to doubt her family’s beliefs and question her mother’s choices, she struggles to balance her fierce love for her siblings with her determination to forge a better life for herself.
 
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson
This book delivers a fresh and compelling portrait of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz. Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people "the art of being fearless." It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and, of course, 10 Downing Street in London.
 
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. The characters are realistic, and most are pleasant.
 
The Wager by David Grann
David Grann, author of the best seller Killers of the Flower Moon, unfurls a story of mayhem and murder, adventure, and reckless ambition on the high seas. Drawing on “archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the half-truthful journals, the surviving records from the troubling court-martial,” he retells the story of the Wager—a British boat bound for South America on a secret mission during the Imperial War with Spain. The fate of the captain and crew was not to be one of conquest or fortune, but frightening storms, shipwreck, savagery, and betrayal. This is an epic narrative that is both shocking and utterly absorbing. 
 
The Which Way Tree by Elizabeth Crook
This is poignant odyssey of a tenacious young girl (Samantha) who braves the dangers of the Texas frontier to avenge her mother's death. In the Samantha’s brother’s (Bemjamin) beguilingly plainspoken voice, The Which Way Tree is the story of Samantha's unshakeable resolve to stalk and kill the infamous panther, rumored across the Rio Grande to be a demon, and avenge her mother's death. In their quest she and Benjamin, now orphaned, enlist a charismatic Tejano outlaw and a haunted, compassionate preacher with an aging but relentless tracking dog.
 
The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig
Rose Llewellyn and her brother, Morris Morgan, along with a stampede of homesteaders are drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch—a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the “several kinds of education”—none of them of the textbook variety—Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region’s one-room schoolhouse.
 
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath was raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents. But in 1965, the world is changing, and when her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets—and becomes one of—the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.
 
The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
The New York Times best-selling author of Magpie Murders and Moriarty brilliantly reinvents the classic crime novel once again with this clever and inventive mystery starring a fictional version of the author himself as the Watson to a modern-day Holmes, investigating a case involving buried secrets, murder, and a trail of bloody clues.
 
The Year of Dangerous Days by Nicholas Griffin
The Year of Dangerous Days is “an engrossing, peek-between-your-fingers history of an American city on the edge.” With a cast that includes iconic characters such as Jimmy Carter, Fidel Castro, and Janet Reno, this slice of history is brought to life through intertwining personal stories. At the core, there’s Edna Buchanan, a reporter for the Miami Herald who breaks the story on the wrongful murder of a black man and the shocking police cover-up; Captain Marshall Frank, the hardboiled homicide detective tasked with investigating the murder; and Mayor Maurice Ferré, the charismatic politician who watches the case, and the city, fall apart.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (Chosen by 3 Clubs)
This book is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. It explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. Lara’s three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.
 
Wavewalker by Suzzane Heywood.
This is a story of an epic childhood journey, so exciting and so shocking it is hard to know whether you are reading about a dream or a nightmare. Aged just seven, Suzanne Heywood set sail with her parents and brother on a three-year voyage around the world. What followed turned instead into a decade-long way of life, through storms, shipwrecks, reefs, and isolation, with little formal schooling. No one else knew where they were most of the time and no state showed any interest in what was happening to the children.
 
West with Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge
This is an emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America. It is 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. Inspired by true events, the tale weaves real-life figures with fictional ones, including the world’s first female zoo director, a crusty old man with a past, a young female photographer with a secret, and assorted reprobates as spotty as the giraffes.
 
White Fire by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child
Past and present collide as Special Agent Pendergast uncovers a mysterious connection between a string of 19th century bear attacks in a Colorado mining town, a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story, and a deadly arsonist.

 

 

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Below is a compilation of the most favored books read by our neighbors during the pandemic, Happy reading.  

 

The Alice Network by Kate Quinn

American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Becoming Mrs. Lewis by Patti Callahan

Big Lies in a Small Town by Diane Chamberlain

The Book of Longings by Sue Monk Kidd

Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown

Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Faithful Place by Tana French

Gentleman from Moscow by Amor Towles

The Giver of Stars by JoJo Moyes

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows

The Guest List  by Lucy Foey

How to be Parisian Wherever You Are: Love, Style and Bad Habits by Caroline de Maigret

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love by Dani Shapiro 

Inspector Gamache by Louise Penny

Island of Sea Women by Lisa See

The Last Bus to Wisdom by Ivan Doig

Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende

Lost in Shangri-La: A True Story of Survival, Adventure, and the Most Incredible Rescue Mission of World War II  by Mitchell Zuckoff 

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World by Admiral William H. McRaven

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

The Orphan Masters Son by Adam Johnson

Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint by Nadia Boltz-Weber

The Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Some Danger Involved by Will Thomas

Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl 

The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson.

Tell Me More by Kim Corrigan 

There There by Tommy Orange

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens

Educated by Tara Westover

Cooking for Picasso by Camille Aubray