Category Book Club Picks

Peace Like a River Leif Enger  Raised on tales of cowboys and pirates, eleven-year-old Reuben Land has little doubt that miracles happen all around us, and that it’s up to us to “make of it what we will.” Reuben was…

Churchill’s Secret Messenger Alan Hlad Historical Fiction London, 1941: In a cramped bunker in Winston Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, underneath Westminster’s Treasury building, civilian women huddle at desks, typing up confidential documents and reports. Since her parents were killed in…

What She Left Behind Ellen Marie Wiseman Historical Fiction Ten years ago, Izzy Stone’s mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother’s apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new…

All the Forgivenesses Elizabeth Hardinger Historical Fiction Growing up on their hardscrabble farm in rural Kentucky, fifteen-year-old Albertina “Bertie” Winslow has learned a lot from her mama, Polly. She knows how to lance a boil, make a pie crust, butcher…

The Good Lord Bird James McBride Historical Fiction Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1856–a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces–when legendary abolitionist John Brown arrives. When an argument between Brown and Henry’s master…

Dictionary of Lost Words Pip Williams  Historical Fiction Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated…

The Flower Sisters Michelle Collins Anderson Historical Fiction Daisy Flowers is fifteen in 1978 when her free-spirited mother dumps her in Possum Flats, Missouri. It’s a town that sounds like roadkill and, in Daisy’s eyes, is every bit as dead.…

The Most Fun We Ever Had Claire Lombardo  Fiction Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love in the 1970s, blithely ignorant of all that awaits them. By 2016, they have four radically different daughters, each in a state of…

The Saints of Swallow Hill Donna Everhart Historical Fiction It takes courage to save yourself… In the dense pine forests of North Carolina, turpentiners labor, hacking into tree trunks to draw out the sticky sap that gives the Tar Heel…

Orphan Train Christina Baker Kline Historical Fiction  Between 1854 and 1929, so-called orphan trains ran regularly from the cities of the East Coast to the farmlands of the Midwest, carrying thousands of abandoned children whose fates would be determined by…