The Margaret E. Heggan Free Public Library Adult Reference Desk

Consider joining one of the library’s numerous book discussion groups to explore great works and socialize with your community!

UPCOMING BOOK GROUP PROGRAMS

The white silhouette of a German Shepherd
Chasing Clues
This group meets in the evening to discuss a cozy mystery. Enjoy tea and cookies during the discussion. Advance registration is required.

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Mystery Book Group
The Mystery Book Discussion Group meets on the third Monday of each month at 6:30 p.m. This discussion is open to everyone. Registration is not required.

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View the 2026 Reading List ▼

January 26th

What would you do if you thought you murdered your best friend? And if everyone else thinks so too? What if the truth doesn’t matter? As Lucy Chase’s Texas hometown begins to tell versions of what happened and who Lucy is to a nationwide, true crime obsessed audience, at the bequest of her grandmother, she returns to the place she vowed never to set foot in again to solve her friend’s murder, even if she is the one that did it
CALL NUMBER: M TINTERA

February 23rd

Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge. In their quest to do better for their sons in death than they did in life, hardened men Ike and Buddy Lee will confront their own prejudices about their sons and each other, as they rain down vengeance upon those who hurt their boys.
CALL NUMBER: FIC COSBY

March 16th

The beautifully ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is completely silent one weekday morning, until a woman’s terrified scream echoes through the room. Security guards immediately appear and instruct everyone inside to stay put until they determine there is no threat. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers who had been sitting in the reading room get to chatting and quickly become friendly. Harriet, Marigold, Whit, and Caine each have their own reasons for being in the reading room that morning–and it just happens that one of them may turn out to be a murderer.
CALL NUMBER: M GENTILL

April 20th

Robert Harris returns to the thrilling historical fiction he has so brilliantly made his own. This is the story of the infamous Dreyfus affair told as a chillingly dark, hard-edged novel of conspiracy and espionage.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HARRIS

May 18th

If your mother was missing, would you tell the police? Even if the most obvious suspect was your father? This is the dilemma facing the four grown Delaney siblings.
CALL NUMBER: FIC MORIARTY

June 15th

July 20th

A bored suburban wife, a documentary photographer-turned-paparazzo, and a detective who cannot let go of a cold case hide secrets from their loved ones only to have the past return in dangerous ways.
CALL NUMBER: M COB

August 17th

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she later disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy becomes convinced that she had been right.
CALL NUMBER: M HALLETT

September 21st

In L.A. Cassie Black is another beautiful woman in a Porsche: except Cassie just did six years in prison and still has “outlaw juice” flowing in her veins. Now Cassie is returning to her old profession, taking down a money man in Vegas. But the perfect heist goes very wrong, and suddenly Cassie is on the run–with a near-psychotic Vegas “fixer” killing everyone who knew about the job. Between Cassie and the man hunting her are a few last secrets: like who really set up the job, why Cassie had to take the change, and how, in the end, it might all be a matter of the moon…
CALL NUMBER: M CON

October 19th

Living in virtual isolation years after the revelation of a painful family secret, Constance Kopp is terrorized by a belligerent silk factory owner and fights back in ways outside the norm for early twentieth-century women.
CALL NUMBER: FIC STEWART

November 16th

Maine game warden Mike Bowditch has been sent into exile, transferred by his superiors to a remote outpost on the Canadian border. When a blizzard descends on the coast, Bowditch is called to the rustic cabin of a terrified couple. A raving and halffrozen man has appeared at their door, claiming his friend is lost in the storm. But what starts as a rescue mission in the wilderness soon becomes a baffling murder investigation.
CALL NUMBER: M DOIRON

December 21st

Madeline Martin has built a life for herself as the young owner of a thriving business, The Next Chapter Bookshop, despite her tragic childhood and now needing to care for her infirm father. When Harley Granger, a failed novelist turned true crime podcaster, drifts into her shop in the days before Christmas, he seems intent on digging up events that Madeline would much rather forget. She’s the only surviving victim of Evan Handy, the man who was convicted of murdering her best friend Steph, and is suspected in the disappearance of two sisters, also good friends of Madeline’s, who have been missing for nearly a decade. It’s an investigation that has obsessed her father Sheriff James Martin right up until his stroke took his faculties.
CALL NUMBER: FIC UNGER

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Non-Fiction Addiction
This group meets at 11:30 a.m. on the third Thursday of the month to discuss nonfiction. From narrative nonfiction to true crime as long as it’s nonfiction. Advance phone or online registration is required.

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Check out the titles that have been discussed in previous sessions. ▼

2024

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health.
CALL NUMBER: 612.6 ATTIA

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by iCarly and Sam & Cat star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor-including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother-and how she retook control of her life
CALL NUMBER: YA B MCCURDY, JENNETTE

When London street musician James Bowen found an injured cat curled up in the hallway of his apartment building, he had no idea how much his life was about to change.
CALL NUMBER: 599.75105 BOWEN

For at least 20,000 years, we have led not just an earthly existence but a cosmic one. Celestial cycles drove every aspect of our daily lives. Our innate relationship with the stars shaped who we are–our art, religious beliefs, social status, scientific advances, and even our biology. But over the last few centuries we have separated ourselves from the universe that surrounds us. It’s a disconnect with a dire cost.

In Order to Live

CALL NUMBER: 582.16 WOHLLEBEN

Written with courage and conviction, Mark Mathbane’s reveals the extraordinary memoir of growing up in a world under apartheid.
CALL NUMBER: 968 MAT

Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.
CALL NUMBER: 158.1 PETERSON

From SoulCycle to Scientology, we’re all obsessed with cults. Linguist Amanda Montell examines the language cults use to draw us in

A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe—and built her back up again.At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life. With no experience or training, driven only by blind will, she would hike more than a thousand miles of the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State—and she would do it alone.Told with suspense and style, sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild powerfully captures the terrors and pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.

Endless ice. Thin air. The threat of dropping into nothingness thousands of feet below. This is the climb Silvia Vasquez-Lavado braves in her page-turning, pulse-raising memoir chronicling her journey to Mount Everest.
CALL NUMBER: B VASQUEZ LAVADO, SILVIA

2023

America is polarized, first and foremost, by identity. Everyone engaged in American politics is engaged, at some level, in identity politics. Over the past fifty years in America, our partisan identities have merged with our racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. These merged identities have attained a weight that is breaking much in our politics and tearing at the bonds that hold this country together.

Klein shows how and why American politics polarized around identity in the 20th century, and what that polarization did to the way we see the world and one another. And he traces the feedback loops between polarized political identities and polarized political institutions that are driving our system toward crisis.

CALL NUMBER: 320.973 KLEIN

Written with courage and conviction, Mark Mathbane’s reveals the extraordinary memoir of growing up in a world under apartheid.
CALL NUMBER: 968 MAT

In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions–even abandoning his phone for three months–but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention–and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
CALL NUMBER: 153.7 HARI

Lucie Blackman–tall, blond, twenty-one years old–stepped out into the vastness of Tokyo in the summer of 2000, and disappeared forever. The following winter, her dismembered remains were found buried in a seaside cave.
CALL NUMBER: 364.1523 PAR

After his December 2003 arrest, registered nurse Charlie Cullen was quickly dubbed “The Angel of Death” by the media. But Cullen was no mercy killer, nor was he a simple monster. He was a favorite son, a husband and beloved father, a best friend and a celebrated caregiver. Implicated in the deaths of as perhaps as many as 400 patients, he was also perhaps the most prolific serial killer in American history.
CALL NUMBER: 364.1523 GRAEBER

A memoir about a young woman’s coming of age in a tight-knit working-class family during Iraq’s seemingly endless series of wars.
CALL NUMBER: B HASSAN, FALEEHA

With wit, heartwarming stories and a keen insight into new and exciting ways to see both the past and the future of the country, the actor, writer and woodworker takes a literary journey to America’s frontier to celebrate the people and landscape that have made it great.
CALL NUMBER: 973.93 OFFERMAN

A New York Times BestsellerAn Award-winning AuthorIn a time when discussions of race are once again coming to the fore, the event that launched the civil rights movement — the 1955 lynching of a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till — is now reexamined by an award-winning author with access to never-before-heard accounts from those involved as well as recently recovered court transcripts from the trial.
CALL NUMBER: LP 973.0496 TYSON

Recounts the decades-long saga of the New Jersey seaside town plagued by childhood cancers caused by air and water pollution due to the indiscriminate dumping of toxic chemicals.
CALL NUMBER: NJC 363.72 FAGIN

At the height of the Holocaust twenty-five young inmates of the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp?mainly Jewish women and girls?were selected to design, cut, and sew beautiful fashions for elite Nazi women in a dedicated salon. It was work that they hoped would spare them from the gas chambers. This fashion workshop?called the Upper Tailoring Studio?was established by Hedwig Höss, the camp commandant?s wife, and patronized by the wives of SS guards and officers. Here, the dressmakers produced high-quality garments for SS social functions in Auschwitz, and for ladies from Nazi Berlin?s upper crust.
CALL NUMBER: 940.5318 ADLINGTON

Much-anticipated, emotionally-charged debut memoir from award-winning actor and icon Viola Davis
CALL NUMBER: B DAVIS, VIOLA

What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
CALL NUMBER: 591.5 ROACH

2022

In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the next Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup “unicorn” promised to revolutionize the medical industry with its breakthrough device, which performed the whole range of laboratory tests from a single drop of blood. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at more than $9 billion, putting Holmes’s worth at an estimated $4.5 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn’t work. Erroneous results put patients in danger, leading to misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatments. All the while, Holmes and her partner, Sunny Balwani, worked to silence anyone who voiced misgivings–from journalists to their own employees.
CALL NUMBER: LP 338.7681 CARREYROU

A major literary event: a newly published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God, with a foreword from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker, brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells 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.
CALL NUMBER: B LEWIS, CUDJO

The surprising and captivating memoir and radical manifesto of one of the most controversial women in Hollywood–actress, activist, musician, director, and all-around feminist badass Rose McGowan
CALL NUMBER: B MCGOWAN, ROSE

The decline and fall of reason — The new culture wars — “Moi” and the rise of subjectivity — The vanishing of reality — The co-opting of language — Filters, silos, and tribes — Technology — “The firehose of falsehood” : propaganda and fake news — The Schadenfreude of the trolls.
CALL NUMBER: 306.2 KAKUTANI

Bryson share his experiences hiking the Appalachian Trail with a childhood friend. The two encounter eccentric characters, a blizzard, getting lost, and rude yuppies along the way.
CALL NUMBER: 917.404 BRY

Malala Yousafzai was only ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region. They said music was a crime. They said women weren’t allowed to go to the market. They said girls couldn’t go to school.

Raised in a once-peaceful area of Pakistan transformed by terrorism, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. So she fought for her right to be educated. And on October 9, 2012, she nearly lost her life for the cause: She was shot point-blank while riding the bus on her way home from school.

No one expected her to survive.

Now Malala is an international symbol of peaceful protest and the youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner. In this Young Readers Edition of her bestselling memoir, which has been reimagined specifically for a younger audience and includes exclusive photos and material, we hear firsthand the remarkable story of a girl who knew from a young age that she wanted to change the world–and did.

Malala’s powerful story will open your eyes to another world and will make you believe in hope, truth, miracles and the possibility that one person–one young person–can inspire change in her community and beyond.

CALL NUMBER: YA B YOUSAFZAI, MALALA

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
CALL NUMBER: 305.5 WILKERSON

With more than 52 million pet dogs in America today, it’s clear we are a nation of unabashed dog lovers. Yet the relationship between dogs and humans remains a fascinating mystery, as no one really knows what goes on in the canine mind. Now, in Inside of a Dog, Alexandra Horowitz fuses her perspectives as both scientist and dog owner to deliver a fresh look at the world of dogs-as seen from the animal’s point of view.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes the fascinating story of America’s national day of thanks and of the tenacious and inspiring Sarah Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century woman who made establishing this holiday her life’s mission-one brought to fruition by the wise support of Abraham Lincoln
CALL NUMBER: LP 394.2694 KIERNAN

Quiet
At least one-third of the people we know are introverts. They are the ones who prefer listening to speaking; who innovate and create but dislike self-promotion; who favor working on their own over working in teams. It is to introverts—Rosa Parks, Chopin, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak—that we owe many of the great contributions to society.

Intelligence is usually seen as the ability to think and learn, but in a rapidly changing world, there’s another set of cognitive skills that might matter more: the ability to rethink and unlearn. In our daily lives, too many of us favor the comfort of conviction over the discomfort of doubt. We listen to opinions that make us feel good, instead of ideas that make us think hard. We see disagreement as a threat to our egos, rather than an opportunity to learn. We surround ourselves with people who agree with our conclusions, when we should be gravitating toward those who challenge our thought process. The result is that our beliefs get brittle long before our bones. We think too much like preachers defending our sacred beliefs, prosecutors proving the other side wrong, and politicians campaigning for approval–and too little like scientists searching for truth. Intelligence is no cure, and it can even be a curse: being good at thinking can make us worse at rethinking. The brighter we are, the blinder to our own limitations we can become.
CALL NUMBER: 153.4 GRANT

Something has been going wrong on many college campuses in the last few years. Speakers are shouted down. Students and professors say they are walking on eggshells and are afraid to speak honestly. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide are rising–on campus as well as nationally. How did this happen?
CALL NUMBER: 306.2 LUKIANOFF

The sun
Novel Mornings
This group meets at 11:30 a.m. on the first Thursday of the month to discuss popular fiction. These discussions are open to all adults. Advance phone or online registration is required.

See our upcoming sessions!

Check out the titles that have been discussed in previous sessions. ▼

2025

Alicia Berenson is a famous painter married to an in-demand fashion photographer, living in a posh area of London. One evening, her husband Gabriel returns home late. Alicia shoots him five times in the face and then never speaks another word.
CALL NUMBER: FIC MICHAELIDES

It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an ’emancipation’ bill; but it isn’t about freedom – it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ERDRICH

Joining the elite Bletchley Park codebreaking team during World War II, three women from very different walks of life uncover a spy’s dangerous agenda years later against the backdrop of the royal wedding of Elizabeth and Philip.
CALL NUMBER: FIC QUINN

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?
CALL NUMBER: FIC REID

For fans of A Man Called Ove, a luminous debut novel about a widow’s unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium-and the truths she finally uncovers about her son’s disappearance 30 years ago.
CALL NUMBER: FIC VAN PELT

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.
CALL NUMBER: FIC WILKERSON

A gripping historical mystery based on the real-life diary entries of Martha Ballard, an 18th-century midwife who found herself at the center of a murder trial.
CALL NUMBER: FIC LAWHON

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.
CALL NUMBER: FIC NAPOLITANO

2024

During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this historical novel with a speculative twist
CALL NUMBER: FIC ARDEN

While attending a month-long writing retreat at the estate of a feminist horror writer who issues a life-changing challenge, Alex, determined to win this seemingly impossible contest, ignores the strange happenings around her until the disappearance of a fellow writer leads her on a desperate search for the truth.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BARTZ

2019: Under cover of darkness, Kate flees London for ramshackle Weyward Cottage, inherited from a great aunt she barely remembers. With its tumbling ivy and overgrown garden, the cottage is worlds away from the abusive partner who tormented Kate. But she begins to suspect that her great aunt had a secret. One that lurks in the bones of the cottage, hidden ever since the witch-hunts of the 17th century.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HART

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it’s everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?
CALL NUMBER: FIC BENNETT

From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara–an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities–watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara she is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ISHIGURO

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her.
CALL NUMBER: FIC STR

In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind.
CALL NUMBER:

Worldwide bestselling “dazzling storyteller” (Associated Press) Isabel Allende returns with a sweeping novel about three very different people who are brought together in a mesmerizing story that journeys from present-day Brooklyn to Guatemala in the recent past to 1970s Chile and Brazil.
CALL NUMBER: FIC ALLENDE

From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HANNAH

From James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird, comes a wise and witty novel about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting.
CALL NUMBER: FIC MCBRIDE

1960s Florida. Kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood Curtis is about to enroll in the local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South, one mistake is enough to destroy the future.
CALL NUMBER: FIC WHITEHEAD

Anxious People meets the delights of bookish fiction in a stunning debut following a librarian whose quiet life is turned upside down when a priceless manuscript goes missing. Soon she has to ask- what holds more secrets in the library-the ancient books shelved in the stacks, or the people who preserve them?
CALL NUMBER: FIC JURCZYK

By
In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
CALL NUMBER: FIC TOWLES

Inspired by historical events, Clark and Division infuses an atmospheric and heartbreakingly real crime fiction plot with rich period details and delicately wrought personal stories Naomi Hirahara has gleaned from thirty years of research and archival work in Japanese American history.
CALL NUMBER: FIC HIRAHARA

Sent to a Tasmanian penal colony after conceiving her employer’s grandchild, a young governess befriends a talented midwife and an orphaned Aboriginal chief’s daughter while confronting the harsh realities of British colonialism and oppression in nineteenth-century Australia.
CALL NUMBER: FIC KLINE

Louisiana, 1875: In the tumultuous aftermath of Reconstruction, three young women set off as unwilling companions on a perilous quest: Lavinia, the pampered heir to a now-destitute plantation; Juneau Jane, her illegitimate free-born Creole half-sister; and Hannie, Lavinia’s former slave. Each carries private wounds and powerful secrets as they head for Texas, following dangerous roads rife with ruthless vigilantes and soldiers still fighting a war lost a decade before.
CALL NUMBER: FIC WINGATE

CALL NUMBER: FIC TOI

In her twenties, Belle da Costa Greene is hired by J. P. Morgan to curate a collection for his newly built Pierpont Morgan Library. Belle becomes a fixture on the New York society scene and one of the most powerful people in the art and book world as she helps build a world-class collection. But Belle has a secret, one she must protect at all costs. She is the daughter of Richard Greener, the first Black graduate of Harvard and a well-known advocate for equality. Belle’s complexion isn’t dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white – her complexion is dark because she is African American.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BENEDICT

The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett’s intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett’s future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction-to the City of New York.
CALL NUMBER: FIC TOWLES

This unforgettable novel puts human faces on the Syrian war with the immigrant story of a beekeeper, his wife, and the triumph of spirit when the world becomes unrecognizable.
CALL NUMBER: FIC LEFTERI

From the New York times bestselling author of ‘The Paris Wife’ comes an atmospheric novel of intertwined fate and heart-wrenching suspense: A detective hiding away from the world. A series of disappearances that reach into her past. Can solving them help her heal?
CALL NUMBER: FIC MCLAIN

2022

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of The English Patient: a mesmerizing new novel that tells a dramatic story set in the decade after World War II through the lives of a small group of unexpected characters and two teenagers whose lives are indelibly shaped by their unwitting involvement.
CALL NUMBER: LP FIC ONDAATJE

The long-awaited, daring, and magnificent novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad. Manhattan Beach opens in Brooklyn during the Great Depression. Anna Kerrigan, nearly twelve years old, accompanies her father to the house of Dexter Styles, a man who, she gleans, is crucial to the survival of her father and her family. Years later, her father has disappeared and the country is at war. Anna works at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, where women are allowed to hold jobs that had always belonged to men. She becomes the first female diver, the most dangerous and exclusive of occupations, repairing the ships that will help America win the war. She is the sole provider for her mother, a farm girl who had a brief and glamorous career with the Ziegfeld Follies, and her lovely, severely disabled sister. At a nightclub, she chances to meet Dexter Styles again, and she begins to understand the complexity of her father’s life, the reasons he might have vanished.
CALL NUMBER: FIC EGAN

Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially seems like a haven. But the city’s placid surface masks an insidious scheme designed for its black denizens. And even worse: Ridgeway, the relentless slave catcher, is close on their heels. Forced to flee again, Cora embarks on a harrowing flight, state by state, seeking true freedom.
CALL NUMBER: FIC WHITEHEAD

From the author of the number-one international bestseller The History of Bees, a captivating story of the power of nature and the human spirit that explores the threat of a devastating worldwide drought, witnessed through the lives of a father, a daughter, and a woman who will risk her life to save the future.
CALL NUMBER: FIC LUNDE

In Where the Crawdads Sing, Owens juxtaposes an exquisite ode to the natural world against a heartbreaking coming of age story and a surprising murder investigation. Thought-provoking, wise, and deeply moving, Owens’s debut novel reminds us that we are forever shaped by the children we once were, and that we are all subject to the beautiful and violent secrets that nature keeps.
CALL NUMBER: FIC OWENS

By
A chilling debut in which a detective must uncover the dark history of a luxury hotel in the Alps if she has any hope of stopping the deaths that won’t let up. . . Half-hidden by forest and overshadowed by threatening peaks, Le Sommet has always been a sinister place. Once a sanatorium treating tuberculosis patients, it was abandoned years ago and had fallen into disrepair. Long plagued by troubling rumours, it has recently been renovated into a lavish hotel. And an imposing, isolated hotel, high up in the Swiss Alps, is the last place detective Elin Warner wants to be. But having received an invitation out of the blue to celebrate her estranged brother’s recent engagement, she had no choice but to accept.
CALL NUMBER: M PEARSE

Amanda and Clay head out to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a vacation: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter, and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But a late-night knock on the door breaks the spell. Ruth and G. H. are an older couple–it’s their house, and they’ve arrived in a panic. They bring the news that a sudden blackout has swept the city. But in this rural area–with the TV and internet now down, and no cell phone service–it’s hard to know what to believe.

Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple–and vice versa? What happened back in New York? Is the vacation home, isolated from civilization, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one other?

CALL NUMBER: FIC ALAM

An epic novel that spans thirty years in the lives of a farm family in Iowa, telling a parallel story of the changes taking place in America from 1920 through the early 1950s
CALL NUMBER: FIC SMILEY

A young Puritan woman–faithful, resourceful, but afraid of the demons that dog her soul–plots her escape from a violent marriage in this riveting and propulsive novel of historical suspense.
CALL NUMBER: FIC BOHJALIAN

After receiving a call from a stranger about her son’s ex-girlfriend being injured, Willa flies across the country to Baltimore to take care of her and her nine-year-old daughter.
CALL NUMBER: FIC TYLER

A mother-daughter story of reinvention—about an African American woman who unexpectedly inherits a sugarcane farm in Louisiana
CALL NUMBER: FIC BASZILE

A while silhouette of a man on a hike wearing a backpack and carrying a walking stick
Rambling Readers
The Rambling Readers: This group discusses books as they walk through Washington Lake Park. Discuss your favorite or least favorite book. Make suggestions to others on books they may enjoy. Learn from others about new books to add to your reading list. Advance registration is required.

See our upcoming sessions!

Rambling Readers Book Recommendations ▼

“The book is both Historical Fiction and Fiction as the author presents the complex relationship between Vincent Van Gogh, Theo Van Gogh and his wife Johanna during the late 1800’s. The fictional story line involves Emsley and her grandmother Violet and other characters in current time while presenting artistry in a different form.”
–Grace
CALL NUMBER: FIC MOL

“I listened to the Audiobook using the Libby app & own the book to follow along. This book kept me engaged due to the main characters and detailed description of the location (which I could envision). Now, I plan to finally see the movie based on this book.”
–Kathy
CALL NUMBER: FIC OWENS

“This novel spans events from WWII to the present through the reminiscences of a woman of advanced years. Characters suffer traumatic upheavals during turbulent times, but also experience many types of love. This is history through the lives of ordinary people described by a great storyteller.”
–Mary
CALL NUMBER: FIC ALLENDE

“Historical drama about jewel thieves, a priceless bracelet, and the French Resistance in World War 2.”
–Beth
CALL NUMBER: FIC HARMEL

“Historical Novel about the experiences of Italian Jews during the Holocaust.”
–Mary
CALL NUMBER: FIC HUNTER

“Mystery with short chapters and major twist at the end.”
–Judy
CALL NUMBER: FIC MCFADDEN

“Mystery with short chapters and major twist at the end.”
–Judy
CALL NUMBER: FIC MCFADDEN

“I first heard the author’s interview on a morning talk show and was intrigued by this book. Amy Griffin’s Interview It is about true childhood trauma and how repressed memories of the trauma affected this author. This story was very impactful and sadly, makes me wonder the scope of how many adults have repressed memories of their own trauma. I listened to this book using the Libby app. My husband Dave overheard me listening to it & he became caught up in Amy Griffin’s story.”
–Kathy
CALL NUMBER: B GRIFFIN, AMY

View the Rambling Readers gallery ▼

Seven members of the Rambling Readers book group pose for a photograph at Washington Lake Park
A fallen tree surrounded by shrubs on a carpet of brown leaves
A dirt path lined with green trees
A wooden bridge suspended over green shrubbery
Washington lake from the perspective of a nearby bridge
A wooden bridge suspended over green shrubbery
A dirt path lined with trees and shrubs leads to a wooden bridge
A green bench overlooking a lake
A dirt path lined with green trees
A dirt path lined with green trees
A grassy field featuring a dirt path leading into a wall of trees
A dirt path lined with green trees
An asphalt road lined with smooth rocks and shrubs
A view of Washington Lake with trees in the distance and the water clear enough to see the flora underneath
A view of Washington Lake with trees in the distance and the water clear enough to see the flora underneath
A path leading to a clearing overlooking Washington Lake
Trees, shrubs, and overgrowth beyond the boundaries of the trail

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