PHS McLean Library Book Group "Stories From the Garden": Current Year

August 7, 2025
Carolyn W. 432 p.
Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice: on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards.

Oct 2, 2025
Leslie 372 p.
Traversing cycles of history, nature, and even literature, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment and to one another, across time, language and space.

Nov 6, 2025
Barbara B. 218 p.
Two women arrive in a village on the Spanish coast. Rose is suffering from a strange illness and her doctors are mystified. Her daughter Sofia has brought her here to find a cure with the infamous and controversial Dr Gomez - a man of questionable methods and motives.

Dec 4, 2025
Julia 116 p.
It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church

Jan 8, 2026
Carolyn W. 240 p.
Follows a group of twelve eerily mature children on a forced vacation with their families at a sprawling lakeside mansion. Contemptuous of their parents, the children decide to run away when a destructive storm descends on the summer estate, embarking on a dangerous foray into the apocalyptic chaos outside. National Book Award finalist

Feb 5, 2026
Janet 376 p.
In 1979, as violence erupts all over Ireland, two outsiders travel to a small island off the west coast in search of their own answers, despite what it may cost the islanders.

April 2, 2026
Carolyn W. 430 p.
Fictional exploration of fracking in PA. got on many best-book of the year lists when it came out in 2017

May 7, 2026
Reading choice TBD