Read and Chat Book Discussion
Read ’n Chat September 2026 – May 2027
September 9 The Secret Sewing Society by Siobhan Curham
Every stitch contains a spark of rebellion…
Occupied Ukraine, 1940. Zirka and her cousin Perla embroider quietly by candlelight in their old dressmaker’s shop. War is raging: and hidden in the intricate traditional embroidery are secret messages for the resistance. If the two women are caught, or betrayed, it would mean certain death…
Lviv, 2022. As Ana gazes around at the peeling wallpaper, she hopes the little shop she was shocked to inherit will bring her closer to the memory of her grandmother Zirka. When she finds a diary stashed in a long-forgotten kitchen drawer. The pages inside tell of a secret sewing society vital to the war effort, a doomed love affair, and a woman on the run with a newborn.
October 14 Unwritten by Charles Martin
A priest changes the lives of an actress running from her past and a man hiding from his future in this heartfelt novel about loss and redemption. When someone wants to be lost, a home tucked among the Ten Thousand Islands off the Florida coast is a good place to live.
It’s a nice enough existence, until the one person who ties Sunday to the world of the living asks him for help. Father Steady Capri knows Katie Quinn’s desire to end her life may be beyond his abilities. There is one person who still may be able to save her from herself: Sunday. Ultimately, Sunday will need to leave his secluded home and sacrifice the serenity he’s found to help her.
November 11. Theo of Golden by Allen Levi
An elderly man arrives in the town of Golden and makes connections with people in the neighborhood whose portraits hang in the local coffee shop. Mystery and kindness surround him as he becomes a part of the community and influences their lives.
December 9 The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (2025)
Written in epistolary form, Sybil Van Antwerp writes letters and e-mails that are at once quirky, direct, smart, and sometimes funny and sometimes sad. She has written letters all her life, and as she writes letters to friends, authors, associates, neighbors, celebrities, and members of her family, the reader is able to piece together important strands of her long life, because she slowly reveals long-held secrets that even she has difficulty sharing.
January 13 The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (2024)
This work of historical fiction focuses on real-life Martha Ballard, a middle-aged midwife, living with her husband and seven children in the cold, snowy landscape along the Kennebec River in Maine during the 1700s. An unsolved murder and a sexual attack occur early in the novel, and from those two events, this story explores male privilege, female domesticity, and the details of Ballard’s life as a midwife in this time period.
February 10 The Lion Women of Tehran by Marjan Kamali (2024)
An historical fiction novel following the lifelong friendship and eventual estrangement of 2 Iranian girls growing up in Tehran from the 1950’s to the 1979 Revolution. The girls come from completely different socioeconomic classes in Tehran but this does not preclude them from becoming best friends in their youth. But, that fact also helps lead to the fracture of their bond later in the book. The main themes of the novel was the resilience of the main women characters (and other women of Iran). These women seek to be fearless and independent but the backdrop of the political upheaval in Iran certainly puts some stumbling blocks in the way. It is almost like the Political system and culture and history of Iran is another main character of the book.
March 10 The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world
April 14 The World Played Chess by Robert Dugoni
In 1979, Vincent Bianco has just graduated high school. His only desire: collect a little beer money and enjoy his final summer before college. He lands a job as a laborer on a construction crew working alongside two Vietnam vets, one suffering from PTSD. Vincent gets the education of a lifetime. Now forty years later, with his own son leaving for college, the lessons of that summer—Vincent’s last taste of innocence and first taste of real life—dramatically unfold in a novel about breaking away, shaping a life, and seeking one’s own destiny.
May 12 The Nine by Gwen Strauss (true story)
The Nine follows the true story of the author’s great aunt Hélène Podliasky, who led a band of nine female resistance fighters as they escaped a German forced labor camp and made a ten-day journey across the front lines of WWII from Germany back to Paris.
Drawing on incredible research, this powerful, heart-stopping narrative from Gwen Strauss is a moving tribute to the power of humanity and friendship in the darkest of times.