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Bloomingdale Book Group Picks |
The library has multiple copies of popular book discussion titles available for check out. You can check out one or multiple copies of a title. If requested, we can also provide book discussion questions for these titles.
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
BOOK GROUP F ATW
Offred, a Handmaid, describes life in what was once the United States, now the Republic of Gilead, a shockingly repressive and intolerant monotheocracy, in a satirical tour de force set in the near future.
Reading Group Guide
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A Man Called Ove
by Fredrik Backman
BOOK GROUP F BAC
A curmudgeon hides a terrible personal loss beneath a cranky and short-tempered exterior while clashing with new neighbors, a boisterous family whose chattiness and habits lead to unexpected friendship.
Reading Group Guide
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The Vanishing Half
by Brit Bennett
BOOK GROUP F BEN
Separated by their embrace of different racial identities, two mixed-race identical twins reevaluate their choices as one raises a black daughter in their southern hometown while the other passes for white with a husband who is unaware of her heritage.
Reading Group Guide
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American Dirt
by
Jeanine Cummins
BOOK GROUP F CUM
Selling two favorite books to an unexpectedly erudite drug-cartel boss, a bookstore manager is forced to flee Mexico in the wake of her journalist husband’s tell-all profile and finds her family among thousands of migrants seeking hope in America.
Reading Group Guide
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The Language of Flowers
by Vanessa Diffenbaugh
BOOK GROUP F DIF
Discovering the symbolic meanings of flowers while languishing in the foster-care system, 18-year-old Victoria is hired by a florist when her talent for helping others is discovered, a situation that leads to a romantic prospect and the confrontation of a painful secret from her past.
Reading Group Guide
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The Christmas Crush
by Noelle Douglas
BOOK GROUP ROM DOU
Marketing executive Elena Voss's newest assignment for Sparkle Cookie, a large cookie conglomerate, was meant to be a much-needed break from her toxic boss and the stressful city. She never expected to get into a public--and embarrassing--argument with a sexy baker in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Lawrence Higgins-and his dog Sugar-have been a beloved staple in New Hope for years. Their bakery specializes in cookies, but with Sparkle Cookie's upcoming grand opening, he's worried about rent spikes and stolen customers. Elena and Lawrence immediately butt heads at a town hall meeting. When a cookie competition makes them join forces, sparks fly, and they find first impressions are often wrong. Can their blossoming connection survive the ensuing cookie war?
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The Correspondent
by Virginia Evans
BOOK GROUP F EVA
Sybil is seventy-three years old, in the winter of her life. Sybil has always made sense of the world through writing letters and through this epistolary novel we see how she comes to terms with her past and present and learns forgiveness.
Reading Group Guide
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The Great Gatsby
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
BOOK GROUP F FIT
A young man newly rich tries to recapture the past and win back his former love, despite the fact she has married.
Reading Group Guide
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Lessons in Chemistry
by Bonnie Garmus
BOOK GROUP F GAR
In the early 1960s, chemist and single mother Elizabeth Zott, the
reluctant star of America's most beloved cooking show due to her revolutionary skills in the kitchen, uses this opportunity to dare women to change the status quo.
Reading Group Guide
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The Midnight Library
by Matt Haig
BOOK GROUP F HAI
Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices...Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?
Reading Group Guide
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Broken Country
by Clare Leslie Hall
BOOK GROUP F HAL
Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. ... When Beth's brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn't realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives, for the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager--the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident. As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel's life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences.
Discussion Questions
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The Four Winds
by Kristin Hannah
BOOK GROUP F HAN
A Depression-era woman confronts a wrenching choice between
fighting for the Dust Bowl-ravaged land she loves in Texas or pursuing an uncertain future in California.
Reading Group Guide
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The Women
by Kristin Hannah
BOOK GROUP F HAN
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances Frankie McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.
Discussion Questions
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Verity
by Colleen Hoover
Hired by the husband of best-selling author Verity Crawford to complete the remaining books in a successful series she is unable to finish, Lowen Ashleigh, sorting through Veritys notes and outlines, uncovers an unfished autobiography Verity never intended for anyone to read that is filled with bone-chilling admissions.
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The Kite Runner
by Khaled Hosseini
BOOK GROUP F HOS
Traces the period between the final days of Afghanistan's monarchy through the horrific rule of the Taliban and follows the unlikely friendship between a wealthy Afghan boy and the son of his father's servant.
Reading Group Guide
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Have You Seen Luis Velez?
by Catherine Ryan Hyde
BOOK GROUP F HYD
Two strangers—one a lonely boy and the other a Holocaust survivor—develop an unlikely friendship while trying to track down the woman’s missing caretaker.
Book Club Questions are included in the back section of the book.
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News of the World
by Paulette Jiles
BOOK GROUP F JIL
A live news reader traveling the antebellum south is offered $50 to bring an orphan girl, who was kidnapped and raised by Kiowa raiders, back to her family in San Antonio.
Reading Group Guide
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Mudbound
by Hillary Jordan
BOOK GROUP F JOR
In 1946, Laura McAllan tries to adjust after moving with her husband and two children to an isolated cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta.
Reading Group Guide
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Lilac Girls
by Martha Hall Kelly
BOOK GROUP F KEL
A debut novel inspired by the life of unlikely World War II heroine Caroline Ferriday follows the experiences of a Manhattan debutante, who resolves to help upon learning of the atrocities at the Ravensbruck concentration camp; and a Catholic teen, who is swept up in the Polish resistance movement.
Reading Group Guide
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To Kill a Mockingbird
by Harper Lee
BOOK GROUP F LEE
The American classic follows the adventures of two children, their lawyer father, and a mysterious neighbor in a small southern town.
Reading Group Guide
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Pachinko
by Min Jin Lee
BOOK GROUP F LEE
In early 1900s Korea, prized daughter Sunja finds herself pregnant and alone, bringing shame on her family until a young tubercular minister offers to marry her and bring her to Japan, in the saga of one family bound together as their faith and identity are called into question.
Reading Group Guide
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The Glass Hotel
by
Emily St. John Mandel
BOOK GROUP F MAN
Presents a tale of crisis and survival in the hidden landscapes of homeless campgrounds, luxury hotels, private clubs, and federal prisons, where a massive Ponzi scheme is tied to a woman’s disappearance at sea.
Reading Group Guide
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Apeirogon
by
Colum McCann
BOOK GROUP F MCC
Two fathers, a Palestinian and an Israeli, navigate the physical and emotional checkpoints of their conflicted world before devastating losses compel them to work together to use their grief as a weapon for peace.
Reading Group Guide
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Gods of Jade and Shadow
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
BOOK GROUP FAN MOR
The Jazz Age is in full swing, but Casiopea Tun is too busy cleaning the floors of her wealthy grandfather's house to listen to any fast tunes. Nevertheless, she dreams of a life far from her dusty small town in southern Mexico. A life she can call her own. Yet this new life seems as distant as the stars until the day she finds a curious wooden box in her grandfather's room. She opens it--and accidentally frees the spirit of the Mayan god of death, who requests her help recovering his throne from his treacherous brother. Failure will mean Casiopea's demise, but success could make her dreams come true. Book Club Kit
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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
BOOK GROUP F MOR
Waging a fierce competition for which they have trained since childhood, circus magicians Celia and Marco unexpectedly fall in love with each other and share a fantastical romance that manifests in fateful ways. A first novel.
Reading Group Guide
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The Tattooist of Auschwitz
by Heather Morris
BOOK GROUP F MOR
An international best-seller based on the true story of an Auschwitz-Birkenau survivor traces the experiences of a Jewish Slovakian who uses his position as a concentration-camp tattooist to secure food for his fellow prisoners.
Reading Group Guide
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Dear Edward
by
Ann Napolitano
BOOK GROUP F NAP
A 12-year-old lone survivor of a plane crash investigates the stories of his less-fortunate fellow passengers before making a profound discovery about his life purpose in the face of transcendent losses.
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions (From the Read With Jenna Book Club)
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Everything I Never Told You
by Celeste Ng
BOOK GROUP F NG
A first novel by a Pushcart Prize-winning writer explores the fallout of a favorite daughter's shattering death on a Chinese-American family in 1970s Ohio.
Reading Group Guide
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Little Fires Everywhere
by Celeste Ng
BOOK GROUP F NG
When a custody battle divides her placid town, straitlaced family woman Elena Richardson finds herself pitted against her enigmatic tenant and becomes obsessed with exposing her past, only to trigger devastating consequences for both families.
Reading Group Guide
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The Dutch House
by
Ann Patchett
BOOK GROUP F PAT
A tale set over the course of five decades traces a young man’s rise from poverty to wealth and back again as his prospects center around his family’s lavish Philadelphia estate.
Reading Group Guide
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Such a Fun Age
by
Kiley Reid
BOOK GROUP F REI
Seeking justice for a young black babysitter who was wrongly accused of kidnapping by a racist security guard, a successful blogger finds her efforts complicated by a video that reveals unexpected connections. A first novel.
Reading Group Guide
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
BOOK GROUP F REI
When an aging and reclusive Hollywood icon selects an unknown magazine reporter to write her life story, the baffled journalist forges deep ties with the actress during a complicated interview process that exposes their tragic common history.
Reading Group Guide
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The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
by
Kim Michele Richardson
BOOK GROUP F RIC
During Kentucky’s Great Depression, Pack Horse Library Project member Cussy Mary Carter, a young outcast, delivers books to the hillfolk of Troublesome Creek, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times, but not everyone is keen on her or the Library Project.
Reading Group Guide
Author's Website
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The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
by Victoria Schwab
BOOK GROUP FAN SCH
Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early 18th-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.
Reading Group Guide
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Where'd You Go, Bernadette
by Maria Semple
BOOK GROUP F SEM
When her notorious, hilarious, volatile, talented, troubled and agoraphobic mother goes missing, teenage Bee begins a trip that takes her to the ends of the earth to find her in this new novel from the author of This One is Mine.
Reading Group Guide
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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
by Mary Ann Shaffer
BOOK GROUP F SHA
In 1946, as England emerges from the shadow of World War II, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey and his eccentric friends, who tell her about their island, the books they love, German occupation, and the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book club born as an alibi during German occupation.
Reading Group Guide
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The Paris Library
by Janet Skeslien Charles
BOOK GROUP F SKE
Based on a true story, describes how a lonely, 1980s teenager befriends an elderly neighbor and uncovers her past as a librarian at the American Library in Paris who joined the Resistance when the Nazis arrived.
Reading Group Guide
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The Lincoln Highway
by Amor Towles
BOOK GROUP F TOW
In June of 1954, 18-year-old Emmett Watson, released after serving 15 months for involuntary manslaughter, discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden’s car and have hatched a different plan for Emmett’s future.
Reading Group Guide
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Remarkably Bright Creatures
by Shelby Van Pelt
BOOK GROUP F VAN
A luminous debut novel about a widow's unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium-and the truths she finally uncovers about her son's disappearance 30 years ago.
Reading Group Guide
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A Little Life
by Hanya Yanagihara
BOOK GROUP F YAN
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition ... Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is [their center of gravity] Jude, ... by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he'll not only be unable to overcome, but that will define his life forever.
Reading Guide
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Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
by Gabrielle Zevin
BOOK GROUP F ZEV
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.
Reading Group Guide
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A Promised Land
by Barack Obama
BOOK GROUP B OBA
A deeply personal account of history in the making—from the president who inspired us to believe in the power of democracy.
Reading Group Guide
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
by Rebecca Skloot
BOOK GROUP 616.0277 SKL
Documents the story of how scientists took cells from an unsuspecting descendant of freed slaves and created a human cell line that has been kept alive indefinitely, enabling discoveries in such areas as cancer research, in vitro fertilization and gene mapping.
Reading Group Guide
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