PCL Book Club 2023 Reading List
Reading List
PCL Book Club meets at 7pm on the third Tuesday of the month. All are welcome. Non-residents may participate with their own copy of the book.
Click the links below to view our catalog and place a hold.
Be sure to RSVP on our events calendar.
*Reading list is subject to change.
January
As Bright As Heaven by Susan Meissner
February
Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis
March
The Things We Cannot Say by Kelly Rimmer
April
A Year to the Day by Robin Benway
May
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
June
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
July
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
August
The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid
September
The Splendid And The Vile by Erik Larson
October
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
November
Lessons In Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
April
A Year to the Day
by Robin Benway
“It’s been a year–a year of missing Nina. A year of milestones. Leo feels like she should remember what happened that night. But all she knows is that she left the party and got into a car with Nina and Nina’s boyfriend, East. East, who once promised Nina he’d watch out for her younger sister. East, who has been trying to keep that promise every day since. But East won’t give Leo the one thing she wants–the one thing she needs. He won’t tell her anything about the accident. He won’t talk about that night at all. As the days tumble one into the next, Leo’s story comes together while her world falls apart. The only constant is the one person who can help her bear the enormous weight of her love for Nina–and East might be carrying too heavy a load of his own.”
May
The Water Dancer: A Novel
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Set mainly in Virginia with side trips to Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, the novel follows the gradual awakening of Hiram, the son of a Tasked and a Quality, to the importance of family no matter where he finds it or with whom. Hiram reaches a milestone in his development when he realizes that not a single person, not a Tasked, a Low, or a Quality is without conflicting motivations that may lead to redemption or to condemnation. By finding and asserting his agency and ability to act, Hiram becomes an Everyman, one who finds his way among the worst and the best of both the people and the circumstances that his life has to offer.
June
Everything I Never Told
You
by Celeste Ng
Lydia is dead. But they don’t know this yet. So begins the story of this exquisite debut novel, about a Chinese American family living in 1970s small-town Ohio. When Lydia’s body is found in the local lake, the delicate balancing act keeping the Lee family together tumbles into chaos, forcing them to confront the long-kept secrets that have been slowly pulling them apart. Everything I Never Told You is both a gripping page-turner and a sensitive family portrait, exploring the divisions between cultures and the rifts within a family and uncovering how mothers and daughters, fathers and sons, and husbands and wives struggle all their lives to understand one another.
January
As Bright As Heaven
by Susan Meissner
“From the darkest hours rises life in all its glory…From the acclaimed author of Secrets of a Charmed Life and A Bridge Across the Ocean comes a new novel set in Philadelphia during the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which tells the story of a family reborn through loss and love. In 1918, Philadelphia was a city teeming with promise. Even as its young men went off to fight in the Great War, there were opportunities for a fresh start on its cobblestone streets. Into this bustling town, came Pauline Bright and her husband, filled with hope that they could now give their three daughters–Evelyn, Maggie, and Willa–a chance at a better life. Their dreams are short-lived. Just months after they arrive, the Spanish Flu reaches the shores of America. As the pandemic claims more than twelve thousand victims in their adopted city, they find their lives left with a world that looks nothing like the one they knew. But even asthey lose loved ones, they take in a baby orphaned by the disease who becomes their single source of hope. Amidst the tragedy and challenges that surround them, they learn what they cannot live without–and what they are willing to do about it. Under the Canopy of Heaven is the compelling story of a mother and her daughters who find themselves in a harsh world not of their making, which will either crush their resolve to survive or purify it”
February
Magnolia Palace
by Fiona Davis
Eight months since losing her mother, twenty-one-year-old Lillian Carter’s life has completely fallen apart. So when she stumbles upon an employment opportunity at the Frick mansion, a building that, ironically, bears her “own” visage, Lillian jumps at the chance. But the longer she works as a private secretary to the imperious and demanding Helen Frick, the daughter and heiress of industrialist and art patron Henry Clay Frick, the more deeply her life gets intertwined with that of the family, pulling her into a tangled web of romantic trysts, stolen jewels, and family drama that runs so deep, the stakes just may be life or death. Nearly fifty years later, mod English model Veronica Weber has her own chance to make her career-and with it, earn the money she needs to support her family back home, within the walls of the former Frick residence, now converted into one of New York City’s most impressive museums. But when she, along with a charming intern-budding art curator named Joshua, is dismissed from the Vogue shoot taking place at the Frick Collection, she chances upon a series of hidden messages in the museum: messages that will lead her and Joshua on a hunt that could not only solve Veronica’s financial woes but could finally reveal the truth behind a decades-old murder in the infamous Frick family.
March
The Things We Cannot Say
by Kelly Rimmer
Since she was nine years old, Alina Dziak knew she would marry her best friend, Tomasz. Now fifteen and engaged, Alina is unconcerned by reports of Nazi soldiers at the Polish border, believing her neighbors that they pose no real threat, and dreams instead of the day Tomasz returns from college in Warsaw so they can be married. But little by little, injustice by brutal injustice, the Nazi occupation takes hold, and Alina’s tiny rural village, its families, are divided by fear and hate. Then, as the fabric of their lives is slowly picked apart, Tomasz disappears. Where Alina used to measure time between visits from her beloved, now she measures the spaces between hope and despair, waiting for word from Tomasz and avoiding the attentions of the soldiers who patrol her parents’ farm. Slipping between Nazi-occupied Poland and the frenetic pace of modern life, Kelly Rimmer creates an emotional and finely wrought narrative that weaves together two women’s stories into a tapestry of perseverance, loyalty, love and honor.
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