 Supporting COMMUNITY. Inspiring DISCOVERY. Promoting LITERACY. |
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Tuesday Morning Book Club 2025-2026 |
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About the Group
The Tuesday Morning Book Club was established at the Mary Riley Styles Public Library in 1987, and has been meeting to enjoy discussing books ever since! The club reads fiction and nonfiction titles, both classic and contemporary, selected by the group. No club membership is required; the book club is open to anyone interested in discussing the book. . Meeting Information - The club meets bimonthly on the first Tuesday of the month at 10:30 am in the Upper Level Conference Room of the library.
- No registration is necessary.
- Please check the library's Events Calendar for specific information.
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The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro
The novel's narrator, Stevens, is a perfect English butler who tries to give his narrow existence form and meaning through the self-effacing, almost mystical practice of his profession. In a career that spans the second World War, Stevens is oblivious of the real life that goes on around him -- oblivious, for instance, of the fact that his aristocrat employer is a Nazi sympathizer. Still, there are even larger matters at stake in this heartbreaking, pitch-perfect novel -- namely, Stevens' own ability to allow some bit of life-affirming love into his tightly repressed existence.
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Tuesday, October 7, 2025 @ 10:30 am
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Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
by Marjane Satrapi
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2025 @ 10:30 am
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Northanger Abbey
by Jane Austen
During an eventful season at Bath, young, naïve Catherine Morland experiences fashionable society for the first time, both its pleasures and its pitfalls. She is delighted with her new acquaintances: flirtatious Isabella, who shares Catherine’s love of Gothic romance and horror, and sophisticated Henry and Eleanor Tilney, who invite her to their father’s mysterious house, Northanger Abbey. There, Cather learns the danger of an active imagination. With its broad comedy and irrepressible heroine, this is the most youthful and optimistic of Jane Austen’s works.
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Tuesday, February 3, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels
by Jon Meacham
Our current climate of partisan fury is not new, and in The Soul of America Meacham shows us how what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” have repeatedly won the day. Painting surprising portraits of Lincoln and other presidents, including Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson, and illuminating the courage of such influential citizen activists as Martin Luther King, Jr., early suffragettes Alice Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt, civil rights pioneers Rosa Parks and John Lewis, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, and Army-McCarthy hearings lawyer Joseph N. Welch, Meacham brings vividly to life turning points in American history.
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Tuesday, April 7, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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This Is Happiness
by Niall Williams
Change is coming to Faha, a small Irish parish that hasn't changed in a thousand years. For one thing, the rain is stopping. Nobody remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard is a condition of living. But now – just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of the electricity – the rain clouds are lifting. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is idling in the unexpected sunshine when Christy makes his first entrance into Faha, bringing secrets he needs to atone for. Though he can't explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed. As the people of Faha anticipate the endlessly procrastinated advent of the electricity, and Noel navigates his own coming-of-age and his fallings in and out of love, Christy's past gradually comes to light, casting a new glow on a small world.
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Tuesday, June 2, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
by Bryan Stevenson
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit law office in Montgomery, Alabama, dedicated to defending the poor, the incarcerated, and the wrongly condemned. Just Mercy tells the story of EJI, from the early days with a small staff facing the nation’s highest death sentencing and execution rates, through a successful campaign to challenge the cruel practice of sentencing children to die in prison, to revolutionary projects designed to confront Americans with our history of racial injustice. One of EJI’s first clients was Walter McMillian, a young Black man who was sentenced to die for the murder of a young white woman that he didn’t commit. The case exemplifies how the death penalty in America is a direct descendant of lynching — a system that treats the rich and guilty better than the poor and innocent.
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Tuesday, August 4, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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Our Missing Hearts
by Celeste Ng
Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will learn the truth about what happened to his mother and what the future holds for them both. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children and the power of art to create change.
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Tuesday, October 6, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World
by Robin Wall Kimmerer
As Indigenous scientist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass Robin Wall Kimmerer harvests serviceberries alongside the birds, she considers the ethic of reciprocity that lies at the heart of the gift economy. How, she asks, can we learn from Indigenous wisdom and the plant world to reimagine what we value most? Our economy is rooted in scarcity, competition, and the hoarding of resources, and we have surrendered our values to a system that actively harms what we love. Meanwhile, the serviceberry’s relationship with the natural world is an embodiment of reciprocity, interconnectedness, and gratitude. The tree distributes its wealth—its abundance of sweet, juicy berries—to meet the needs of its natural community. And this distribution ensures its own survival. As Kimmerer explains, “Serviceberries show us another model, one based upon reciprocity, where wealth comes from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
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Tuesday, December 1, 2026 @ 10:30 am
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Absolution
by Alice McDermott
A riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award. American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam. Sixty years later, Charlene’s daughter, spurred by an encounter with an aging Vietnam vet, reaches out to Tricia. Together, they look back at their time in Saigon, taking wry account of that pivotal year and of Charlene’s altruistic machinations, and discovering how their own lives as women on the periphery—of politics, of history, of war, of their husbands’ convictions—have been shaped and burdened by the same sort of unintended consequences that followed America’s tragic interference in Southeast Asia. A virtuosic new novel from Alice McDermott, one of our most observant, most affecting writers, about folly and grace, obligation, sacrifice, and, finally, the quest for absolution in a broken world.
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Need a Copy of the Book? - Click on any of the titles (or book covers) above to check availability in our catalog.
- Check mrspl.overdrive.com to see if eBook or eAudiobook copies are available.
- Special book club copies for upcoming discussions are available on a first come, first served basis at each meeting.
Staff Contact for the Tuesday Morning Book Club - Paula Hawkins : email | 703-248-5368 (TTY 711)
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Thank You, MRSPL Foundation! Special thanks to the MRSPL Foundation, whose support enables us to purchase extra copies of each title for this book club. To learn more about the Foundation, which is an independent 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to enhancing library materials, services, programs, and equipment, please visit mrsplfoundation.org!
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Mary Riley Styles Public Library
120 N. Virginia Ave, Falls Church, Virginia 22046 703-248-5030 (TTY 711) www.mrspl.org
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