The Book Club will usually meet on the third Tuesday of every month, with a few exceptions. Our meetings are held in the ministry center at 7:00 p.m.
People are welcome to bring a light snack.
Reading the book isn’t necessary for anyone to attend!
No sign up required. For more information, contact Donna.
Upcoming Books:
August 19, 2025: The Perfumist of Paris | Alka Joshi | 368 pp
Paris, 1974. Radha is now thirty-two and living in Paris with her husband, Pierre, and their two daughters. She still grieves for the baby boy she gave up years ago, when she was only a child herself, but she loves being a mother to her daughters, and she’s finally found her passion—the treasure trove of scents.
When her friend’s grandfather offered her a job at his parfumerie, she quickly discovered she had a talent—she could find the perfect fragrance for any customer who walked in the door. Now, ten years later, she’s working for a master perfumer, helping to design completely new fragrances for clients and building her career one scent at a time. She only wishes Pierre could understand her need to work. She feels his frustration, but she can’t give up this thing that drives her.
Tasked with her first major project, Radha travels to India, where she enlists the help of her sister, Lakshmi, and the courtesans of Agra—women who use the power of fragrance to seduce, tease and entice. She’s on the cusp of a breakthrough when she finds out the son she never told her husband about is heading to Paris to find her—upending her carefully managed world and threatening to destroy.
September 16, 2025: Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine | Gail Honeyman | 325 pp
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
October 21, 2025: Still Life | Louise Penny | 314 pp
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has
been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it’s a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon
certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.
November 18, 2025: The Berry Pickers | Amanda Peters | 256 pp
July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the
summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come. In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often
troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.
December 16, 2025: Still Life |Kirsten Miller| 304 pp
Beverly Underwood and her arch enemy, Lula Dean, live in the tiny town of Troy,
Georgia, where they were born and raised. Now Beverly is on the school board, and
Lula has become a local celebrity by embarking on mission to rid the public libraries of
all inappropriate books—none of which she’s actually read. To replace the
“pornographic” books she’s challenged at the local public library, Lula starts her own
lending library in front of her home: a cute wooden hutch with glass doors and neat rows
of the worthy literature that she’s sure the town’s readers need. What Lula doesn’t know is that a local troublemaker has stolen her wholesome books, removed their dust jackets, and restocked Lula’s library with banned books: literary classics, gay romances, Black history, witchy spell books, Judy Blume novels, and more. One by one, neighbors who borrow books from Lula Dean’s library find their lives changed in unexpected ways. Finally, one of Lula Dean’s enemies discovers the library and decides to turn the tables on her, just as Lula and Beverly are running against each other to replace the town’s disgraced mayor. That’s when all the townspeople who’ve been borrowing from Lula’s library begin to reveal themselves. That’s when the showdown that’s been brewing between Beverly and Lula will roil the whole town…and change it
forever.
January 20, 2026: The Frozen River| Ariel Lawhon| 432 pp
Maine, 1789: The Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice. Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As the local midwife and healer, Martha is good at keeping secrets. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, every murder and debacle that unfolds in the town of Hallowell. In that diary she
also documented the details of an alleged rape that occurred four months earlier. Now, one of the men accused of that heinous attack has been found dead in the ice. While Martha is certain she knows what happened the night of the assault, she suspects that the two crimes are linked, and that there is more to both cases than meets the eye. Over the course of one long, hard winter, as the trial nears, and whispers and prejudices mount, Martha’s diary lands at the center of the scandal and threatens to tear both her family and her community apart.
February 17, 2026: What the Ermine Saw: The Extraordinary Journey of Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Mysterious Portrait| Eden Collinsworth | 288 pp
Author Eden Collinsworth illuminates the startling history of this unique masterpiece, as
it journeyed for over five centuries from one owner to the next–from the cunning Milanese duke,
likely to have murdered his seven-year-old nephew for the title, to an unconventional Polish noblewoman, who counted as acquaintances Benjamin Franklin and Voltaire. From Hitler, who designated it for his private collection, to Hans Frank, the Nazi high command in Poland, who hung it above his desk until it was returned after the War to the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków. Along the way, Collinsworth reveals a bewildering maze of social alliances and cultural upheavals, polarizing political divisions and territorial fragmentation.