Book Discussion Groups For Adults

Life on the Mississippi by Rinker Buck

Signal Fires opens on a summer night in 1985. Three teenagers have been drinking. One of them gets behind the wheel of a car, and, in an instant, everything on Division Street changes.

The Nature of Fragile Things by Susan Meissner

Born in 1722, the son of a Boston businessman, Samuel Adams studied at Harvard, worked for a while in the family malt business, and came into his own when, in the late seventeen-forties, he began to stand for local office. In detailing how Adams went on to shape every significant event in New England’s run-up to war, this biography weaves a pleasing tapestry of incident and inference.

Solito by Javier Zamora

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this 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.

An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South—and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America.

The Only Woman in the Room by Marie Benedict

In this funny and inciteful novel, you will meet Elizabeth Zott: a one-of-a-kind scientist in 1960s California whose career takes a detour when she becomes the star of a beloved TV cooking show.

The Royal Art of Poison by Eleanor Herman

A collection of short stories that make sense of our increasingly troubled world by MacArthur genius and Booker Prize winner George Saunders.

The Measure by Nikki Erlick

This novel transports us to the dazzling London of the Roaring Twenties in a whirlwind tale of corruption, seduction, and debts that have come due.

The Book of Hope by Jane Goodall

This science fiction novel of art, time, love, and plague takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Horse by Geraldine Brooks

Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin's Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.