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

August 4, 2022
Barbara S. 432 p.
Axel Heyst, a dreamer and a restless drifter, believes he can avoid suffering by cutting himself off from others. Then he becomes involved in the operation of a coal company on a remote island in the Malay Archipelago, and when it fails he turns his back on humanity once more.

September 29, 2022
Lillian 391 p.
Inara Erickson is exploring her deceased aunt's island estate when she finds an elaborately stitched piece of fabric hidden in the house. As she peels back layer upon layer of the secrets it holds, Inara's life becomes interwoven with that of Mei Lein, a young Chinese girl mysteriously driven from her home a century before.

November 3, 2022
Janet 256 p.
Follows three close friends and their circle through a year of extraordinary transformation. Set between London, Cap d'Antibes, Big Sur, and a rewilded corner of Sussex, this thrilling, ambitious novel is about the headlong pursuit of knowledge—for the purposes of pleasure, revelation, money, sanity, or survival—and the consequences of fleeing from what we know about others and ourselves.

December 1, 2022
Julia, 135 p.
This is a beautiful tale set in the English countryside about the restorative power of nature and art.

January 5, 2023
Sally 144 p.
First published in Prague in 1929, The Gardener’s Year combines a richly comic portrait of life in the garden, narrated month by month, with a series of delightful illustrations by the author’s older brother and collaborator, Josef.

Jan. 5, 2023 We'll read 2 short stories "The Blue Chrysanthemum" & "The Stolen Cactus" Contact mcleanlibrary@pennhort.org for copies of these stories

February 2, 2023
Suzanne 315 p.
Little Starhorodivka, a village of three streets, lies in Ukraine's Grey Zone, the no-man's-land between loyalist and separatist forces. Beekeeper Sergey Sergeyich decides to move his bees out of the Grey Zone so they can collect their pollen in peace. This simple mission on their behalf introduces him to combatants and civilians on both sides of the battle lines.

April 6, 2023
Barbara B. 333 p.
In her most exuberant, most fanciful novel, Woolf has created a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, Orlando is a young nobleman at the beginning of the story-and a modern woman three centuries later.

May 11, 2023
Lynn 238 p.
Set in the easternmost region of Norway, Out Stealing Horses begins with an ending. Sixty-seven-year-old Trond has settled into a rustic cabin in an isolated area to live the rest of his life with a quiet deliberation. A meeting with his only neighbor, however, forces him to reflect on a summer long ago.

June 1, 2023.
320 p. Longwood Gardens Community Read Choice 2023
In this stunning and deeply heartfelt tribute to Black culinary ingenuity, Bryant Terry captures the broad and divergent voices of the African Diaspora through the prism of food.