Please find below the list of titles for the 2025 Rye Public Library Book Group, the Rye Reader’s. The Book Group meets on the fourth Wednesday of every month (with exceptions noted below) at 2:00PM.
January 22
Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune
After he dies, a curious and powerful being give Wallace one week to cross over to the land of the dead, and Wallace, who finally starts to learn about all the things he missed in life, sets about living a lifetime in seven days.
February 26
Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame by Olivia Ford
Mrs. Quinn’s Rise to Fame is a women’s fiction novel about Jenny, a 77 year old woman who secretly enters a televised baking show after her husband’s health declines. The book is described as cozy, a love story, and a redemptive coming-of-old-age tale.
March 26
That Librarian by Amanda Jones
Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of America’s vicious culture wars.
April 30
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in 18th-century Ghana and experience profoundly different lives and legacies throughout subsequent generations marked by wealth, slavery, war, coal mining, the Great Migration and the realities of 20th-century Harlem.
May 28
The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
June 25
Beach Read by Emily Henry
An acclaimed but blocked literary master and a best-selling novelist who has stopped believing in true love agree to a summer-long writing project that challenges to write well in each others’ styles. Acerbic wit – very funny!
July 23
Women We Buried, Women We Burned by Rachel Louise Snyder
An award-winning journalist, in this necessary story of family struggle, female survival and the passionate drive to bear witness, relates her personal journey from teenage runaway to reporter on the global epidemic of violence against women.
August 27
Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred by Damien Duffy
Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artist Damien Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th Century.
September 24
The Women by Kristin Hannah
In 1956, nursing student Frankie McGrath, after hearing the words “Women can be heroes, too,” impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam where she is overwhelmed by the destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.
October 22
The Witches of Moonshyne Manor by Bianca Marais
To save Moonshyne Manor and Distillery from demolition, five octogenarian witches, having only nine days to save their home, make a bargain with an evil far more powerful than anything they’ve ever faced, fracturing their sisterhood and leading to a fiery confrontation with their enemies.
November 19 (3rd Wednesday)
Women’s Hotel by Daniel Lavery
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There’s Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. As trenchant as the novels of Fawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women’s Hotel is a modern classic – and it is very, very funny.
December 17 (3rd Wednesday)
Bright and Tender Dark by Joanna Pearson
Days after the dawn of Y2K, beautiful, charismatic nineteen-year-old Karlie Richards is found brutally murdered in her campus apartment. Two decades later, those who knew Karlie remain consumed by her death. Among them is her freshman year roommate, Joy, now middle-aged and mid-divorce, living in the same college town and desperate for a new beginning. When she stumbles upon a twenty-year-old letter from Karlie, Joy becomes convinced the man in prison for her murder was wrongfully convicted. Soon she is diving deep into the dark world of internet conspiracy theorists and amateur sleuth blogs and bouncing off others touched by the long, sensational aftermath of this crime.