Explore all that Book Browse has to offer for book clubs!
Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before program begins.
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
In the spring of 2020, 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.
Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today. – Baker & Taylor
April 16 – The Bookbinder by Pip Williams
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
In the ballrooms and drawing rooms of Regency London, rules abound. From their earliest days, children of aristocrats learn how to address an earl and curtsey before a prince’while other dictates of the ton are unspoken yet universally understood. A proper duke should be imperious and aloof. A young, marriageable lady should be amiable’but not too amiable.
Daphne Bridgerton has always failed at the latter. The fourth of eight siblings in her close-knit family, she has formed friendships with the most eligible young men in London. Everyone likes Daphne for her kindness and wit. But no one truly desires her. She is simply too deuced honest for that, too unwilling to play the romantic games that captivate gentlemen.
Amiability is not a characteristic shared by Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings. Recently returned to England from abroad, he intends to shun both marriage and society’just as his callous father shunned Simon throughout his painful childhood. Yet an encounter with his best friend’s sister offers another option. If Daphne agrees to a fake courtship, Simon can deter the mamas who parade their daughters before him. Daphne, meanwhile, will see her prospects and her reputation soar.
The plan works like a charm’at first. But amid the glittering, gossipy, cut-throat world of London’s elite, there is only one certainty: love ignores every rule…
– Baker & Taylor
April 17 – Zora Books Her Happy Ever After by Taj McCoy
Let’s get down to the facts!
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Meet in January – October.
A groundbreaking new history of the role of American servicewomen in WWII, illuminating their forgotten yet essential contributions to the Allies’ victory.
Valiant Women is the story of the 350,000 American women who served in uniform during World War II. These incredible women served in every service branch, in every combat theater, and in nearly two-thirds of the available military occupations at the time.
They were pilots, codebreakers, ordnance experts, gunnery instructors, metalsmiths, chemists, translators, parachute riggers, truck drivers, radarmen, pigeon trainers, and much more. They were directly involved in some of the most important moments of the war, from the D-Day landings to the peace negotiations in Paris. These women—who hailed from every race, creed, and walk of life—died for their country and received the nation’s highest honors. Their work, both individually and in total, was at the heart of the Allied strategy that won World War II.
Yet, until now, their stories have been relegated to the dusty shelves of military archives or a passing mention in the local paper. Often the women themselves kept their stories private, even from their own families.
Now, military analyst Lena Andrews corrects the record with the definitive and comprehensive historical account of American servicewomen during World War II, based on new archival research, firsthand interviews with surviving veterans, and a deep professional understanding of military history and strategy. – Baker & Taylor
April 25– The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
What have you been reading? There are so many books out there! It’s time to share. You’ll have a chance to talk about your recent read…good, bad, or mediocre.
Do you enjoy a light and entertaining read? We do too!
We usually meet on the first Wednesday of every month.
This discussion will be a Zoom meeting. Please email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Liesl Weiss long ago learned to be content working behind the scenes in the distinguished rare books department of a large university, managing details and working behind the scenes to make the head of the department look good. But when her boss has a stroke and she’s left to run things, she discovers that the library’s most prized manuscript is missing.
Liesl tries to sound the alarm and inform the police about the missing priceless book, but is told repeatedly to keep quiet, to keep the doors open and the donors happy. But then a librarian unexpectedly stops showing up to work. Liesl must investigate both disappearances, unspooling her colleagues’ pasts like the threads of a rare book binding as it becomes clear that someone in the department must be responsible for the theft. What Liesl discovers about the dusty manuscripts she has worked among for so long – and about the people who care for and revere them – shakes the very foundation on which she has built her life. – Amazon
May 1 – A Traitor in Whitehall by Julia Kelly
This discussion will be in-person at the library.
In 1958, a small Minnesota town is rocked by a shocking murder, pouring fresh fuel on old grievances in this dazzling novel, an instant New York Times bestseller and “a work of art” (The Denver Post).
On Memorial Day in Jewel, Minnesota, the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast. The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, a highly decorated war hero who still carries the physical and emotional scars from his military service. Even before Dern has the results of the autopsy, vicious rumors begin to circulate that the killer must be Noah Bluestone, a Native American WWII veteran who has recently returned to Jewel with a Japanese wife. As suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence, Dern struggles not only to find the truth of Quinn’s murder but also put to rest the demons from his own past.
Caught up in the torrent of anger that sweeps through Jewel are a war widow and her adolescent son, the intrepid publisher of the local newspaper, an aging deputy, and a crusading female lawyer, all of whom struggle with their own tragic histories and harbor secrets that Quinn’s death threatens to expose.
Both a complex, spellbinding mystery and a masterful portrait of mid-century American life that is “a novel to cherish” (Star Tribune, Minneapolis), The River We Remember offers an unflinching look at the wounds left by the wars we fight abroad and at home, a moving exploration of the ways in which we seek to heal, and a testament to the enduring power of the stories we tell about the places we call home. – Baker & Taylor
May 2 – The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Creative Soul Gallery (208 N Second St) in Dunlap and the library are joining together to discuss “arty” reads. *Registration required.
Email mweyeneth@dunlaplibrary.org to receive the Zoom registration meeting invite to attend virtually or you may attend in-person at Creative Soul Gallery. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Please indicate how you wish to attend. If you would like to attend in person, please include your phone number in your response.
When all of Venice is unmasked, one man’s identity remains a mystery . . .
1807
When a baby is discovered floating in a basket along the quiet canals of Venice, a guild of artisans takes him in and raises him as a son, skilled in each of their trades. Although the boy, Sebastien Trovato, has wrestled with questions of his origins, it isn’t until a woman washes ashore on his lagoon island that answers begin to emerge. In hunting down his story, Sebastien must make a choice that could alter not just his own future, but also that of the beloved floating city.
1904
Daniel Goodman is given a fresh start in life as the century turns. Hoping to redeem a past laden with regrets, he is sent on an assignment from California to Venice to procure and translate a rare book. There, he discovers a city of colliding hope and decay, much like his own life, and a mystery wrapped in the pages of that filigree-covered volume. With the help of Vittoria, a bookshop keeper, Daniel finds himself in a web of shadows, secrets, and discoveries carefully kept within the stones and canals of the ancient city . . . and in the mystery of the man whose story the book does not finish: Sebastien Trovato. -Amazon
May 8 – The Art of Love and Lies by Rebecca Anderson
This discussion will be via a Zoom meeting. Please email kkerckhove@dunlaplibrary.org for a meeting invite registration. Requests for registration links will be accepted until 60 minutes before the program begins.
Mystery, suspense, thriller – fiction and nonfiction! No cozy titles here!
Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate.
I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that.
Have I killed someone? Yes. I have.
Who was it?
Let’s get started.
EVERYONE IN MY FAMILY HAS KILLED SOMEONE
My brother
My stepsister
My wife
My father
My mother
My sister-in-law
My uncle
My stepfather
My aunt
Me – Baker & Taylor
May 13 – The Last Word by Taylor Adams
We will gather in the library parking lot and then walk the Rock Island trail* while we talk about what we’ve been reading, listening to, or watching…whatever comes to mind!
*Weather permitting.
Meets in June and July.