Book Discussions at Somerset County Libraries
Bridgewater Branch
Popular Fiction Book Discussion 
Tuesday, June 20 at 7:00pm
Frances Greany Learning Garden, Bridgewater Branch
 
True biz : a novel
by Sara Nović

Taking readers into a residential school for the deaf, this coming-of-age novel follows three people a rebellious transfer student, the schools golden boy and the headmistress as they each deal with personal and political crises and find their lives inextricable from one another and changed forever.
Tuesday, July 18 at 7:00pm
Frances Greany Learning Garden, Bridgewater Branch
 
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin

Embarking on a legendary collaboration launching them to stardom, two friends, intimates since childhood, have the world at their feet until they discover that their success, brilliance and money won't protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of the heart.
Tuesday, August 15 at 7:00pm
Frances Greany Learning Garden, Bridgewater Branch
 
The Golden Spoon
by Jessa Maxwell

During her annual televised baking competition on her Vermont estate, celebrated baker Betsy Martin, hailed as“America's Grandmother,” finds murder in the mix when a body is discovered, and everyone is a suspect.
Fantasy Discussion Group
Tuesday, June 13 at 6:30pm
Meeting Room C & Virtually -- Hybrid
 
Parable of the sower
by Octavia E Butler

"In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages."
Tuesday, July 11 at 6:30pm
Meeting Room C & Virtually -- Hybrid
 
Bruiser
by Neal Shusterman

Inexplicable events start to occur when sixteen-year-old twins Tennyson and Brontèe befriend a troubled and misunderstood outcast, aptly nicknamed Bruiser, and his little brother, Cody
Tuesday, August 8 at 6:30pm
Meeting Room C & Virtually -- Hybrid
 
When women were dragons : a novel
by Kelly Regan Barnhill

After the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when thousands of women, including her beloved Aunt Marla, transformed into dragons, left a trail fiery destruction and took to the skies, young Alex Green must face the consequences of this event as she learns to accept people as they really are.
Mysteries in the Mornings
Love a good mystery?  Always looking for a new book because you've read EVERYTHING by your favorite author?  Or do you just really enjoy reading mysteries?  come and join our Mysterious Morning discussions!

Every other month we'll discuss a different sub-genre of mysteries.  Pick a book from an author you haven't read already and tell the group all about it.  There's only one big rule -- don't tell us how it ends!

A list of suggested authors and titles are available at the Bridgewater Library and books will be on display about a month prior to the discussion.  (If you're a voracious mystery reader you can read more than one.)
 
July's Mystery Type:
Magicians and Conjurers
Wednesday, July 12
Bridgewater Branch, Meeting Room A
10:15am - 11:30am
Hillsborough Branch
"Suspense with Susie" Discussion Group
Tuesday, May 23 at 7:00pm
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
The stranger in the mirror : a novel
by Liv Constantine

Hiding the fact that she has no memory of her past from her fiance,̌ Addison, a survivor of a tragic accident, cannot shake the notion that she may have done something very, very bad. 
Tuesday, July 25 at 7:00pm
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
Things we do in the dark
by Jennifer Hillier

Accused of murdering her celebrity husband, Paris Peralta must stop the only person who knows her dark secret from destroying the new life she's worked so hard to build, along with any chance of a future.
Historical Fiction Fridays Discussion Group
Friday, May 19 at 10:30am
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
Take my hand
by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

In 1973 Montgomery, Alabama, Civil Townsend, a young black nurse working for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, grapples with her role when she takes two young girls into her heart and the unthinkable happens, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them.
Friday, June 16 at 10:30am
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
A gentleman in Moscow : A Novel
by Amor Towles

Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin, where he endures life in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history unfold. By the best-selling author of Rules of Civility.
Friday, July 21 at 10:30am
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
The autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb : a novel
by Melanie Benjamin

A story inspired by the wife of the historical circus performer finds mid-19th-century little person Mercy Levinia Warren Bump coming of age in the antebellum south before being invited to join the P. T. Barnum circus, through which she meets her future husband and pursues limitless international opportunities.
Friday, August 18 at 10:30am
Conference Room, Hillsborough Branch
 
All the light we cannot see : a novel
by Anthony Doerr

A blind French girl on the run from the German occupation and a German orphan-turned-Resistance tracker struggle with their respective beliefs after meeting on the Brittany coast. 
Manville Branch
Nighttime Book Discussion Group
Monday, June 12 at 6:00pm
Adult Media Area, Manville Branch
 
The reading list : a novel
by Sara Nisha Adams

Working at the local library, Aleisha reads every book on a secret list she found, which transports her from the painful realities she’s facing at home, and decides to pass the list on to a lonely widower desperate to connect with his bookworm granddaughter. 
Daytime Book Discussion Group
Wednesday, June 21 at Noon
Children's Area, Manville Branch
 
The wedding dress sewing circle : a novel
by Jennifer Ryan

After losing everything in the London Blitz, renowned fashion designer Cressida Westcott heads to the country where she inspires a local village sewing group to mend wedding dresses for both local brides and brides across the county, helping others celebrate love while searching for it themselves.
Montgomery Branch
Tuesday Morning Page Turners
Tuesday, June 13 at 10:00am
Montgomery Branch
 
An elderly lady is up to no good
by Helene Tursten

Maud is an irascible 88-year-old Swedish woman with no family, no friends, and... no qualms about a little murder. This funny, irreverent story collection by Helene Tursten, author of the Irene Huss investigations, features two-never-before translated stories that will keep you laughing all the way to the retirement home. Ever since her darling father's untimely death when she was only eighteen, Maud has lived in the family's spacious apartment in downtown Gothenburg rent-free, thanks to a minor clause in a hastily negotiated contract. That was how Maud learned that good things can come from tragedy. Now in her late eighties, Maud contents herself with traveling the world and surfing the net from the comfort of her father's ancient armchair. It's a solitary existence, and she likes it that way. Over the course of her adventures--or misadventures--this little bold lady will handle a crisis with a local celebrity who has her eyes on Maud's apartment, foil the engagement of her long-ago lover, and dispose of some pesky neighbors. But when the local authorities are called to investigate a dead body found in Maud's apartment, will Maud finally become a suspect?
Tuesday, July 11 at 10:00am
Montgomery Branch
 
Summer Book Share
Contact the Montgomery Branch for more information
 
Tuesday, August 11 at 10:00am
Montgomery Branch
 
Sharks in the time of saviors
by Kawai Strong Washburn

When a child falls overboard and is returned safely to his mother by a shark, his miraculous rescue is hailed as a sign from ancient Hawaiian gods, complicating his family's troubles amid a collapsing sugarcane industry. 
North Plainfield Branch
Thursday, May 25 at 6:45pm
Woodland Room, North Plainfield Branch
 
Horse
by Geraldine Brooks

A scientist from Australia and a Nigerian-American art historian become connected by their shared interest in a 19th century race horse, one studying its remains, the other uncovering the history of the Black horsemen who were critical to its success.
Thursday, June 22 at 6:45pm
Woodland Room, North Plainfield Branch
 
Wrong place wrong time : a novel
by Gillian McAllister

After witnessing her teenage son kill a man, a mother falls asleep in despair, wakes up and it is yesterday, and wakes up again and it is the day before yesterday, getting chance after chance to stop the murder and save her son
Thursday, July 27 at 6:45pm
Woodland Room, North Plainfield Branch
 
A flicker in the dark
by Stacy Willingham

A Baton Rouge psychologist connects a recent spate of missing teenage girls with a series of similar crimes from 20 years prior, to which her own father had confessed and was subsequently jailed for life. Original. 100,000 first printing.
Thursday, August 17 at 6:45pm
Woodland Room, North Plainfield Branch
 
Just the nicest couple
by Mary Kubica

When her husband Jack vanishes without a trace, Nina Hayes will stop at nothing to uncover the truth, which, unbeknownst to her, is inextricably linked to their close friends, who may have been the last to see Jake before he went missing.
Peapack Gladstone Branch
Monday, June 12 at 3:00pm
Conference Room, Peapack Gladstone Branch
 
Go set a watchman
by Harper Lee

A highly anticipated release of a newly discovered early work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird continues the stories of iconic characters 20 years later during turbulent 1950s America.
Monday, July 24 at 3:00pm
Conference Room, Peapack Gladstone Branch
 
Meet me at the museum
by Anne Youngson

A disenchanted farmer's wife and a widowed museum curator begin a correspondence over their mutual fascination with poet Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man" and gradually share details from their lives, forging an unexpected bond along the way.
Monday, August 21 at 3:00pm
Conference Room, Peapack Gladstone Branch
 
Remarkably bright creatures : a novel
by Shelby Van Pelt

After her husband dies, widow Tova Sullivan starts working at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, where she forms a special bond with a giant Pacific octopus who holds the key solving the mysterious disappearance of her 18-year-old son, Erik, over thirty years ago on the Puget Sound. 
Somerville Branch
Not On the Same Page
Read ANY fiction or non-fiction book and come tell us about it
 
Saturday, June 17
Saturday, July 15
Saturday, August 19
Meeting Room
10am to 11am
 
Warren Township Branch
Wednesday, June 7 at 2:00pm
Meeting Room
 
A man called Ove : a novel
by Fredrik Backman

A curmudgeon hides beneath a cranky and short-tempered exterior a terrible personal loss while clashing with new neighbors, a boisterous family whose chattiness and habits lead to unexpected friendship. A first novel by the Swedish author of Things My Son Needs to Know About Life.
Wednesday, July 12 at 3:00pm
Meeting Room
 
** Part of a Book/Film/Film discussion -- contact Warren Township branch for more information**
 
Washington Square
by Henry James

In the Washington Square area of New York City in the late nineteenth century, devastating betrayals by both her father and her lover leave shy and fragile Catherine Sloper permanently scarred. 
Wednesday, August 9 at 2:00pm
Meeting Room
 
Last summer at the golden hotel
by Elyssa Friedland

Perfect for fans of Dirty Dancing and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, this funny, nostalgia-filled story follows the Goldman and Weingold families as they, amid drama and scandal, try to save the Golden Hotel – their beloved getaway in the Catskills.
Watchung Library
Thursday, June 8 at 6:30pm
Bicentennial Room, Watchung Branch
 
The maid : a novel
by Nita Prose

When she discovers the dead body of the infamous and wealthy Charles Black in his suite, hotel maid Molly Gray finds her orderly life upended as she becomes the prime suspect in the case and is caught in a web of deception that she has no idea how to unravel.
Thursday, July 13 at 6:30pm
Bicentennial Room, Watchung Branch
 
River of the gods : genius, courage, and betrayal in the search for the source of the Nile
by Candice Millard

Set against the backdrop of the race to exploit Africa by the colonial powers, a story of courage and adventure brings to life the rivalry between two enemies—a decorated soldier and a young aristocrat/Army officer—as they set out to find the mysterious headwaters of the Nile River. Illustrations. Maps.
Thursday, August 10 at 6:30pm
Bicentennial Room, Watchung Branch
 
Dolores Claiborne : a novel
by Stephen King

Forced by overwhelming evidence to confess her life of crime, Dolores Claiborne, a foul-tempered New Englander, describes how her disintegrating marriage years before caused her heart to turn murderous
Somerset County Library System of New Jersey1 Vogt Drive
P.O. Box 6700
Bridgewater, New Jersey 08807
(908) 526-4016
www.sclsnj.org/