Book Group Best Bets
Looking for good books for discussion? These recently released novels from a variety of genres are sure to spark lively discussion in your book group! Annotations from NoveList, unless otherwise noted. (Created October 2024)
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Family Lore
Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake—a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she’s led—her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else’s? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. But Flor isn’t the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Martyr!
An alcoholic, addict and poet, Cyrus Shams, the orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, finds his obsession with martyrs leading him to examine the mysteries of his past and to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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Entitlement
A woman working as an assistant to an octogenarian billionaire in the process of giving away his huge fortune fights the seduction of money.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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A Reason to See You Again
A mother and her two daughters find out the hard way over forty years that running from the past can’t save you, in the new novel from the New York Times best-selling author of The Middlesteins.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Swift River
A sweeping family saga about the complicated bond between mothers and daughters, the disappearance of a father and the long-hidden history of a declining New England mill town.
Format: Book
Availability: All copies in use
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The Storm We Made
A Malayan mother becomes an unlikely spy for the invading Japanese forces during WWII—causing shocking consequences to rain upon her community and family.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Daughters of Shandong
As China's civil war ravages and engulfs their once-privileged lives, four resourceful daughters defy tradition and flee their home as the Communist army closes in, charting a path across a war-torn nation to independence in Taiwan.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Acts of Forgiveness
A single mother is surprised when her family blocks her from uncovering her family's ancestry, past and secrets while trying to prove she was descended from slaves in order to participate in the nation's first federal reparations program.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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Behind You Is the Sea
A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore—from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich—shows lives which intersect across divides of class, generation and religion.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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The Night We Lost Him
Liame Noone was many things to many people. To the public, he was an exacting, self-made hotel magnate fleeing his past. To his three ex-wives, he was a loving albeit distant family man who kept his finances flush and his families carefully separated. To Nora, he was a father who often loved her from afar—notably, a cliffside cottage perched on the California coast where he fell to his death. The authorities rule the death accidental, but Nora and her estranged brother Sam have other ideas. As Nora and Sam form an uneasy alliance to unravel the mystery, they start putting together the pieces of their father’s past and uncover a family secret that changes everything.
Format: Book
Availability: Available
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