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

August 3, 2023
Sally 320 p.
Set in Depression era Appalachia, story is about a you woman who joins the historical Pack Horse Library Project of Kentucky and becomes a librarian, riding across slippery creek beds and up treacherous mountains on her faithful mule to deliver books and other reading material to the impoverished hill people of Eastern Kentucky.

September 28, 2023
Kit 368 p.
This novel weaves together eels, ale-making and madness, the heartless sweep of history and a family romance as tormented as Greek tragedy into one epic story. Waterland is concerned with the nature and importance of history as the primary source of meaning in a narrative. It won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

November 2, 2023
Carolyn B. 224 p
Under the guidance of Sister Clodagh, five European Sisters of the Servants of Mary leave their monastery in Darjeeling, India, and make their way to remote Mopu in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains. This is a novel about how the natural environment influences us.

December 7, 2023
Janet 208 p.
In Natural History, Andrea Barrett completes the beautiful arc of intertwined lives of a family of scientists, teachers, and innovators that she has been weaving through multiple books since her National Book Award–winning collection, Ship Fever.

January 4, 2024
Mary Ellen 145 p.
On a sunny day in Berkeley, California, in 1942, a woman sees a sign in a post office window, returns to her home, and matter-of-factly begins to pack her family's possessions. Like thousands of other Japanese Americans they have been reclassified, virtually overnight, as enemy aliens and are about to be uprooted from their home and sent to a dusty internment camp in the Utah desert.

February 1, 2024
Suzanne 343 p.
It is set in February 1862. Lincoln's son Willie has typhoid fever, dies, and is is laid to rest in a crypt. There were reports at the time that Lincoln returned alone to the crypt several times to hold his son's body. The novel is built around this bit of historical fact and is made of a chorus of voices; some are quotes from historical sources (books, letters, news articles) and the others are the voices of spirits or souls in the cemetery who have lingered there. There is some really wonderful use of fruit/plants/trees/vines/water imagery & metaphor in the novel.

April 4, 2024
Carolyn W. 256 p.
A stunning novel about a couple that pushes against traditional expectations, moving with their dogs to the Irish countryside where they embed themselves in nature and make attempts to disappear from society.

May 2, 2024
This is the Longwood Community Read choice for 2024. We are pleased to be partnering with Longwood for this book discussion.