Brown Bag Book Discussion Group
Meets the fourth Tuesday of the month at Noon at 26 North Road
Books are available at the library's circulation desk.
Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
Tuesday, August 25 at Noon
One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from...or why... His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers. Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their "rightful owners." With each exchange, a story is told, a friendship born, and a life altered. A story of giving and receiving, of seeing and being seen, Theo of Golden is a beautifully crafted novel about the power of creative generosity, the importance of wonder to a purposeful life, and the invisible threads of kindness that bind us to one another.
Kin by Tayari Jones
Tuesday, September 22 at Noon
In Kin, Vernice and Annie grow up as motherless neighbors and close friends in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, but their lives diverge as they reach adulthood. Vernice, raised by a protective aunt, leaves for Spelman College, where she becomes part of an influential community of Black women and confronts new experiences shaped by privilege, ambition, and social inequality. Annie, driven by the desire to find the mother who abandoned her, embarks on a journey marked by instability, risk, and emotional discovery, ultimately facing life-threatening circumstances. The novel explores themes of motherhood, friendship, identity, and the social complexities of womanhood in the American South.
The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett
Tuesday, October 27 at Noon
Oxford, Mississippi, 1933. Abandoned by her mother one Christmas Eve, eleven-year-old Meg Lefleur has learned the hard way to rely on no one. Now one of the unadoptable 'big girls' at the Lafayette County Orphan Asylum, she fights each day to keep her spirit unbowed. Birdie Calhoun, unmarried and outspoken, has come to Oxford to ask her socialite sister to help the struggling family she's left behind. But as the Depression tightens its grip, Birdie discovers her sister's seemingly charmed life is a tapestry of lies. Then, Birdie encounters Charlie, a woman running low on luck with little left to lose. When their fates--and Meg's--converge, Charlie comes up with an audacious plan to claim what's rightfully theirs. But in a place and time where hypocrisy is rife and women's freedom is fragile, even the smallest act of defiance can have dangerous consequences.
Land by Maggie O'Farrell
Tuesday, November 24 at Noon
On a windswept peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic, Tomás and his reluctant son, Liam, are working for the great Ordnance Survey project to map the whole of Ireland. The year is 1865, and in a country not long since ravaged and emptied by the Great Hunger, the task is not an easy one. Tomás, however, is determined that his maps will be a record of the disaster.
The British soldiers in charge are due to arrive any day, expecting the work to be completed, but Tomás is unexpectedly sent off course by an unsettling encounter in a copse. His life, and the lives of those of his family, will never be the same again. Liam is terrified by the sudden change in his taciturn father. What was it that caused such cracks to open in Tomás, and how is Liam, aged only ten, going to finish the mapping and get them both home?
