St. Charles Public Library - Book Discussion Sets

"One spring morning, a stranger arrives in the small southern city of Golden. No one knows where he has come from ... or why ... His name is Theo. And he asks a lot more questions than he answers. Theo visits the local coffeehouse, where ninety-two pencil portraits hang on the walls, portraits of the people of Golden done by a local artist. He begins purchasing them, one at a time, and putting them back in the hands of their "rightful owners." With...

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that's before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart. Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and elemental kinship with a prison librarian who sees...

An "exquisite" (The Washington Post) "hauntingly beautiful" (Associated Press) portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staff who spent a decade as a museum guard. Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They're the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping...

"Tuberculosis has been entwined with humanity for millennia. Once romanticized as a malady of poets, today tuberculosis is seen as a disease of poverty that walks the trails of injustice and inequity we blazed for it. In 2019, author John Green met Henry Reider, a young tuberculosis patient at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. John became fast friends with Henry, a boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. In the years since that first...

"It's a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She's immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she's actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn't here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she's dreamed of coming for years--she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband,...

"John, an impoverished Scottish minister, has accepted a job evicting the lone remaining occupant of an island north of Scotland--Ivar, who has been living alone for decades, with only the animals and the sea for company. Though his wife, Mary, has serious misgivings about the errand, he decides to go anyway, setting in motion a chain of events that neither he nor Mary could have predicted. Shortly after John reaches the island, he falls down a cliff...

"In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces and the tragic impact of big business"-- Provided by publisher.

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn't initially concerned when her father and younger brother Eugene don't return from a walk in a nearby...

For Piglet - an unshakable childhood nickname - getting married is her opportunity to reinvent. Together, Kit and Piglet are the picture of domestic bliss - effortless hosts, planning a covetable wedding ... But if a life looks too good to be true, it probably is. Thirteen days before they are due to be married, Kit reveals an awful truth, cracking the facade Piglet has created. It has the power to strip her of the life she has so carefully built,...

Thirty-something Lauren has been leading a steady, enjoyable single life: great friends, good job, and a nice flat in south-east London, until, one night, she comes back from a party to find a stranger in her home. His name is Michael. He's attractive, sweet, and, according to him, her friends, and the pictures on her walls, he's Lauren's husband. Just as Lauren is trying to figure out how she could be married to someone she can't remember meeting,...