Book Clubs

Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, or realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Makkai swings between 1980s Chicago, where art gallery employee Yale Tishman has lost friend Nico to AIDS, and Paris, with Nico's younger sister Fiona seeking her estranged daughter while contemplating how the virus damaged her family.

Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. The House in the Cerulean Sea is an enchanting love story, masterfully told, about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place--and realizing that family is yours.

In the wake of the Civil War, a seventy-year-old retired army captain does live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. He is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan, raised by Kiowa raiders who killed her family, to relatives she doesn't remember 400 miles away. This exquisitely rendered, morally complex novel explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust.

In 1982, Viv Delaney wants to move to New York City, and to help pay for it she takes a job as the night clerk at the Sun Down Motel in Fell, New York. But something isn't right at the motel, something haunting and scary. In 2017, Carly Kirk has never been able to let go of the story of her aunt Viv, who mysteriously disappeared from the Sun Down before she was born. She decides to move to Fell and visit the motel. She soon finds herself ensnared in the same mysteries that claimed her aunt.

A horrific car accident leaves Tara Beckley in a vegetative state. At least, so her doctors think. In fact, she's a prisoner of locked-in syndrome: fully alert but unable to move a muscle. Trapped in her body, she learns that someone powerful wants her dead--but why? And what can she do, lying in a hospital bed, to stop them? Abby Kaplan, an insurance investigator, is hired to look in to Tara's case and she can tell that it was no accident. When she starts asking questions, things quickly spin out of control, leaving Abby on the run and a mysterious young hit man named Dax Blackwell hard on her heels.

Anna McLean loves to revel in life's unsavory details. When she's keeping up appearances as an upper-class Edinburgh housewife, there's no better escape than other people's sordid stories retold in true-crime podcasts. She successfully conceals her dark past until a true-crime podcast and a photo posted on social media send her running across Europe, with a faded rock star by her side and extremely dangerous enemies on her trail.

A fortysomething-year-old sheriff and a thirteen-year-old girl may not seem to have a lot in common. But they both have come to expect that people will disappoint you, loved ones will leave you, and if you open your heart it will be broken. So when trouble arrives with Vincent King, Walk and Duchess find they will be unable to do anything but usher it in, arms wide closed.

Eighteen-year-old Finn, an outsider in his quiet Midwestern town, is the only witness to the abduction of town favorite Roza, but his inability to distinguish between faces makes it difficult for him to help with the investigation, and subjects him to even more ridicule and bullying.

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym 'Truly, Devious.'

In an attempt to find a cure after being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob's (aka mad cow) disease, Cameron Smith, a disaffected sixteen-year-old boy, sets off on a road trip with a death-obsessed video gaming dwarf he meets in the hospital.

Read what you like and come back fresh for book club in September! Contact us if you'd like some reading recommendations!