Fiction Addiction ~ Book Club: 1st Tues each month EXCEPT SEP

Viewing on a smart phone? Click on "read more" for book list. Three months titles are listed.

Our group is co-ed and has been meeting for nearly 13 years. We enjoy chatting with each other, eating good food and discussing interesting books. Every meeting is fun! Newcomers are always welcome!

Please RSVP on our Meetup website. The next books will be posted every 2 months.

UPCOMING DISCUSSIONS:
July 1, 2025 The Lost Apothecary by Sarah Penner, Rosie Pudvah reviewer
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Historical Fiction (2021), Nominee for Readers' Favorite Debut Novel (2021)
A female apothecary secretly dispenses poisons to liberate women from the men who have wronged them - setting three lives across centuries on a dangerous collision course.

Rule #1: The poison must never be used to harm another woman.
Rule #2: The names of the murderer and her victim must be recorded in the apothecary’s register.

One cold February evening in 1791, at the back of a dark London alley in a hidden apothecary shop, Nella awaits her newest customer. Once a respected healer, Nella now uses her knowledge for a darker purpose - selling well-disguised poisons to desperate women who would kill to be free of the men in their lives. But when her new patron turns out to be a precocious twelve-year-old named Eliza Fanning, an unexpected friendship sets in motion a string of events that jeopardizes Nella’s world and threatens to expose the many women whose names are written in her register.

In present-day London, aspiring historian Caroline Parcewell spends her tenth wedding anniversary alone, reeling from the discovery of her husband’s infidelity. When she finds an old apothecary vial near the river Thames, she can’t resist investigating, only to realize she’s found a link to the unsolved “apothecary murders” that haunted London over two centuries ago. As she deepens her search, Caroline’s life collides with Nella’s and Eliza’s in a stunning twist of fate - and not everyone will survive.

August 5, 2025 James by Percival Everett, Laurie Scheiner reviewer

Goodreads Choice Award
Nominee for Readers' Favorite Historical Fiction (2024), Nominee for Readers' Favorite Audiobook (2024)

A brilliant reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—both harrowing and satirical—told from the enslaved Jim's point of view

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he runs away until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck has faked his own death to escape his violent father. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Brimming with nuanced humor and lacerating observations that have made Everett a literary icon, this brilliant and tender novel radically illuminates Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion as never before. James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first-century American literature.