Best Book Club Books for Fall

Book Summary

In 1961, the only son of a family that owns a summer camp in the Adirondacks disappeared while hiking and was never found. Now, in 1975, a camp counselor discovers that their daughter, thirteen year old Barbara, is missing. Are the tragedies related?

As soon as they realize Barbara is not in her bunk, a frantic search is launched. The investigation is deeply layered, with Barbara’s counselor, Louise, her bunkmate, Tracy, her mother, Alice, and a young female detective, Judyta, all sharing their own impactful stories along the way.

Book Summary

Briarwood House is an all-female boardinghouse in Washington DC, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. It’s 1950 when the mysterious widow Grace moves into the attic. She throws attic-room dinner parties for her new friends, including a beautiful English wife and mother, a police officer’s daughter who is involved with a gangster, a baseball star frustrated with the end of the female league after WW2, and a woman who threw herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare. 

While Grace’s dinner parties are healing to the women, she also has her own secrets…and there may be an enemy within the group. 

Book Summary

Although she’s only 11, Olive(Ollie) Augusta Radley knows that her step-father does not have good intentions with the two Choctaw girls boarded in their home as wards. When the older girl disappears, Ollie bravely chooses to flee into the woods with the younger girl, 6-year-old Nessie. As they journey through the rugged Winding Stair Mountains, they risk encountering outlaws, treasure hunters, and other desperate men.

Along their travels, Ollie and Nessie bond with each other and other children on the run from terrible situations.

In 1990, in Oklahoma, Ranger Valerie Boren O’Dell arrived at Horsethief Trail National Park seeking a quiet place to balance a career and single parenthood. Instead, she quickly has to investigate a teenage hiker gone missing from one of the trails and the long-hidden burial site of three children deep in a cave. As she digs into the area’s dark past, she finds an ally in the Choctaw Tribal Police.

Book Summary

For years, Phoebe has dreamed of visiting the iconic Cornwall Inn in Newport, Rhode Island. She looked forward to shucking oysters and sailing into the sunset with her husband. But instead, she’s arrived alone to stay in the most expensive room for one night.

As it turns out, Phoebe is the only guest at the Inn who is not apart of a big wedding party. The bride, Lila, thought she had accoutned for every possibilty in her effort to host the perfect wedding, but she couldn’t have predicted Phoebe’s arrival.

Phoebe and Lila are complete opposites, but sometimes chance meetings turn into the most unexpected friendships.

Book Summary

This thought-provoking novel transports you back to 1840s Missouri, the land of Huckleberry Finn. However, in James, you’ll find the story reimaged from the point of view of the enslaved man, Jim, who prefers to be called James.

James overhears that he’s about to be sold to a man in New Orleans. If this happens, he’ll never see his wife and daughter again. That thought is too much for him to bear, so he decides to hide on Jackson Island until he comes up with a long-term plan. The island is also the temporary home of Huck Finn, who is running from his abusive father.

Together, the unlikely duo is determined to make it down the Mississippi River to the elusive Free States. Along the way, they encounter the same trials Mark Twain included, but they feel different through the eyes of James.

Book Summary

Looking to escape his circumstances, Jacob Jankowski jumps onto a passing train and suddenly finds himself thrust into the world of a circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression.

Because Jacob is just shy of his veterinary degree, he’s put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. He becomes enamored with Marlena – the star of the equestrian show. But Marlena is married to the circus’s cruel animal trainer. Jacob also meets Rosie, an elephant that everyone had hoped would help save the circus, but who appears to be untrainable.

Book Summary

Kerala, on India’s southern coast, is a slender, coastal state with almost 373 miles of Arabian Sea coast and beaches. Being surrounded by water makes this a popular tourist destination. But for the family at the heart of this novel, being surrounded by water has plagued three generations. In every generation, at least one person dies by drowning.

This new literary fiction epic is a tale of love, faith, and medicine in which the family is seeking answers to this strange secret. The family is part of a Christian community that traces itself to the time of the apostles, but times are shifting, and the matriarch of this family, known as Big Ammachi—literally “Big Mother”—will witness unthinkable changes at home and at large over the span of her extraordinary life.

Book Summary

Ashlyn Greer is a rare-book dealer who loves the smell of old paper, ink, and leather. Old volumes appeal to all of her senses, including a sense the rest of us don’t have. She is gifted with the unique ability to feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners.

When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound, unpublished volumes with no evidence of how they came to be, she gets wrapped up in a decades-old literary mystery. Each volume bears a curious inscription, as well as the emotional fingerprints of the authors, Hemi and Belle. The books tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the closer she comes to bringing closure to their love story, and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

Book Summary

Charlie greets the women in his family, including his wife and four daughters, by saying “Hello, Beautiful” and truly sees something special in each of them. Unfortunately, Charlie is resented by his wife, Rose, because he’s an alcoholic, which also impacts his ability to provide for the family.

Their oldest daughter, Julie, is smart and ambitious. When she meets William, whose family couldn’t be more different than her own, he’s at college on a basketball scholarship. For William, the sport has been his saving grace and a substitute for the love of family. At least until he meets Julie and her family embraces him in their family unit when they become a couple. Once that happens, the family refuses to give up on him.

While you’ll get some fall vibes when Julie heads to college, Hello Beautiful also follows the characters for nearly four decades. The book begins in the main character’s childhood, in the 1960s, and spans into their middle age years.

Book Summary

Fourteen-year-old June had a very close relationship with her uncle, Finn, and was devastated when he died in 1987 from AIDS, which was then still a mysterious and seldom talked about illness.

June meets a stranger at Finn’s funeral – someone who is also struggling with the loss – and as the two get to know each other, their unexpected friendship may be what they each need to heal.

Book Summary

This is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Like Copperfield, Copperhead examines institutional poverty, but in contemporary Appalachia.

Born to a teenage single mother, Damon (soon to be known as Demon) braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, opioid addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

Book Summary

Civil is fresh out of nursing school and has dreams of making a big difference in her post-segregation African American community. She works for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, and she’s sent to a rural cabin during her first week on the job. When she arrives, Civil is shocked to find that her patients are children, only 11 and 13 years old.

The girls, Erica and India, are innocent and not even thinking of boys. However, because they are poor and Black, those handling their benefits have requested the children be on birth control. Civil struggles with this unexpected aspect of her new career. Despite the shocking reason for meeting the sisters, Civil is endeared to them and their family. However, one day when she arrives for her visit, something unthinkable has happened, and Civil soon finds herself involved in a legal case.

You’ll also see Civil years later, at the end of her career, with a daughter of her own, as she tries to find peace without forgetting those she encountered along the way.

Book Summary

West With Giraffes is a charming tale of adventure that takes you on the ride of a lifetime from the East Coast of the US to the West, alongside a rowdy 17-year-old, a grumpy older man, and two giraffes. The year is 1938, and no American zoo has successfully housed giraffes before. The female zoo director of the San Diego Zoo believes she can do it. The giraffes have just survived a hurricane en route to the East Coast, and Riley Jones, the curmudgeonly head zookeeper, is responsible for safely transporting the giraffes from New York City to San Diego.

America is still in the throes of the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl conditions continue to ravage the drought-stricken Southern Plains states. A coast-to-coast trek with giant animals is no easy feat. Jones begrudgingly teams up with a starving teenager named Woody to help him make the journey. The adventures along the way include run-ins with circus con artists, being tailed by a female photographer looking for a big scoop, an emotional visit to Woody’s hometown, and so much more.

At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story. Now, at the age of 105, Woody recounts his 12-day cross-country trip with Jones and the giraffes and how it shaped his life.