August 8, 2024 at 1 pm

A depression-era novel about a young girl who must learn to be brave in the face of violent prejudice when the Ku Klux Klan reappears in her segregated southern town. 352 pgs.

June 13 at 1 pm: Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

At the Reform Club, Fogg gets involved in an argument over an article in The Daily Telegraph stating that with the opening of a new railway section in India, it is now possible to travel around the world in 80 days. He accepts a wager for £20,000 (equal to about £1.6 million today) from his fellow club members, which he will receive if he makes it around the world in 80 days. 255 pgs or so.

July 11 at 1 pm: Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See

With the arrival of a special silk fan, a friendship between two girls is sealed at the age of seven. Time passes and they reflect upon their lives, The two find a bond that keeps their spirits alive until they have a misunderstanding. Now-Lily is haunted by memories-of who she once was and of a person, long gone, who defined her existence. She has nothing but time now, as she recounts the tale of Snow Flower, and asks the gods for forgiveness. 288 pgs.

April 11, 2024 at 1 pm

He emerged from the war as America's most decorated soldier, having received twenty-one medals, including out highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor. To Hell and Back is a powerfully real portrayal of American GI's at war. 274 pgs. 

March 14, 2024 at 1 pm

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language 416 pgs.

February 8, 2024

The basis of the Oscar-winning film from writer/director Sarah Polley, starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, with Ben Whishaw and Frances McDormand.

One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.

While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women―all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in―have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?

Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

Meeting: Thursday, Feb. 8, 1 pm, at Shelby Senior Services, Suite 101 inside the YMCA, 2120 Intelliplex Drive, Shelbyville.

January 11, 2024

In Still Life, bestselling author Louise Penny introduces Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter.
Still Life introduces not only an engaging series hero in Inspector Gamache, who commands his forces - and this series - with integrity and quiet courage, but also a winning and talented new writer of traditional mysteries in Penny.

Still Life begins the series that inspired Three Pines on Prime Video.

Meeting: Thursday, Jan. 11, 1 pm, at Shelby Senior Services, Suite 101 inside the YMCA, 2120 Intelliplex Drive, Shelbyville.

Join the book club to discuss your favorite books for this year.

• Meet in the Horizon Center of Shelby Senior Services
• 1 pm on Thursday, Dec. 14.

“A heartfelt and lovely Christmas tale for book lovers everywhere!” — Jenny Colgan, author of The Bookshop on the Shore

In small-town England, two booksellers facing tough times decide to spread some Christmas cheer through the magic of anonymous book deliveries in this uplifting holiday tale for book lovers everywhere.
Nora and her husband, Simon, have run the beautiful oak-beamed book shop in their small British village for thirty years. But times are tough and the shop is under threat of closure--this Christmas season will really decide their fate. When an elderly man visits the store and buys the one book they've never been able to sell, saying it's the perfect gift for his sick grandson, it gives Nora an idea. She and Simon will send out books to those feeling down this Christmas. Maybe they can't save their bookstore, but at least they'll have one final chance to lift people's spirits through the power of reading.

After gathering nominations online, Nora and Simon quietly deliver books to six residents of the village in need of some festive cheer, including a single dad of twins who is working hard to make ends meet, a teenage boy grieving for his big sister, a local Member of Parliament who is battling depression, and a teacher who's newly retired and living on her own. As the town prepares for a white Christmas, the books begin to give the recipients hope, one by one. But with the future of the bookshop still up in the air, Nora and Simon will need a Christmas miracle--or perhaps a little help from the people whose lives they've touched--to find a happy ending of their own....

• Book Selection for August / Meeting Thursday, Aug. 17@Horizon Center

“Part Annie Dillard, part Anne Lamott, essayist and NPR commentator Heather Lende introduces readers to life in the town of Haines, Alaska . . . subtly reminding readers to embrace each day, each opportunity, each life that touches our own and to note the beauty of it all.” —The Los Angeles Times

Tiny Haines, Alaska, is ninety miles north of Juneau, accessible mainly by water or air—and only when the weather is good. There's no traffic light and no mail delivery; people can vanish without a trace and funerals are a community affair. Heather Lende posts both the obituaries and the social column for her local newspaper. If anyone knows the goings-on in this close-knit town—from births to weddings to funerals—she does.

Whether contemplating the mysterious death of eccentric Speedy Joe, who wore nothing but a red union suit and a hat he never took off, not even for a haircut; researching the details of a one-legged lady gold miner's adventurous life; worrying about her son's first goat-hunting expedition; observing the awe-inspiring Chilkat Bald Eagle Festival; or ice skating in the shadow of glacier-studded mountains, Lende's warmhearted style brings us inside her small-town life. We meet her husband, Chip, who owns the local lumber yard; their five children; and a colorful assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including aging hippies, salty fishermen, native Tlingit Indians, and volunteer undertakers — as well as the moose, eagles, sea lions, and bears with whom they share this wild and perilous land.

Like Garrison Keillor's reports from the Midwest, NPR commentator Heather Lende's take on her offbeat Alaskan hometown celebrates life in a dangerous and breathtakingly beautiful place.

• Book Selection for July / Meeting July 13 @Horizon Center

The highest-rated drama in BBC history, Call the Midwife will delight fans of Downton Abbey
Viewers everywhere have fallen in love with this candid look at post-war London. In the 1950s, twenty-two-year-old Jenny Lee leaves her comfortable home to move into a convent and become a midwife in London's East End slums. While delivering babies all over the city, Jenny encounters a colorful cast of women—from the plucky, warm-hearted nuns with whom she lives, to the woman with twenty-four children who can't speak English, to the prostitutes of the city's seedier side.

An unfortgettable story of motherhood, the bravery of a community, and the strength of remarkable and inspiring women, Call the Midwife is the true story behind the beloved PBS series.

• Fiction selection for June/ Nonfiction selection Killing Custer by James Welch / Meeting June 8 at 1 pm @ Horizon Center

Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden and Father John O’Malley are caught between two cultures that won’t let go of the past—and a killer who won’t leave any witnesses...

On the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Colonel Edward Garrett, a well- known Custer impersonator, leads a troop of reenactors in a cavalry parade down Main Street in Lander, Wyoming. But a group of Arapaho youth disrupts the parade by riding their horses around the column, just to remind everyone who actually won the battle. Then history repeats itself when, in the confusion, Garrett is shot dead.

Father John O’Malley knows in his heart the Arapaho are not guilty. And Vicky Holden finds herself professionally and personally compromised from getting involved. But what begins as a murder soon reveals itself as a conspiracy that neither Father John nor Vicky could have foreseen. And someone wants to ensure that the truth they discover will die with them…

• Nonfiction selection for June / with fiction selection Killing Custer by Margaret Coel / Meeting June 8 at 1 pm @ Horizon Center

The classic account of Custer's Last Stand that shattered the myth of the Little Bighorn and rewrote history books.

Custer's ill-fated attack on June 25, 1876, has gone down as the American military's most catastrophic defeat. This historic and personal work tells the Native American side, poignant revealing how disastrous the encounter was for the "victors," the last great gathering of Plains Indians under the leadership of Sitting Bull. Telling of the pride and desperation of a people systematically stripped of their treaty rights, hounded from their ancestral hunting grounds, and herded into wretched reservations,Killing Custerreveals how this defining moment in American history was no more a "Last Stand" than a final celebration of waning power and freedom.

(Author Visit on May 16 @ShelbyvilleMain)  Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery

Mindy McGinnis, the acclaimed author of Not a Drop to Drink and In a Handful of Dust, combines murder, madness, and mystery in a beautifully twisted gothic historical thriller perfect for fans of novels such as Asylum and The Diviners as well as television's True Detective and American Horror Story.

Grace Mae is already familiar with madness when family secrets and the bulge in her belly send her to an insane asylum—but it is in the darkness that she finds a new lease on life. When a visiting doctor interested in criminal psychology recognizes Grace's brilliant mind beneath her rage, he recruits her as his assistant. Continuing to operate under the cloak of madness at crime scenes allows her to gather clues from bystanders who believe her less than human. Now comfortable in an ethical asylum, Grace finds friends—and hope. But gruesome nights bring Grace and the doctor into the circle of a killer who will bring her shaky sanity and the demons in her past dangerously close to the surface.

A murderer could be around every corner in this YA thrilling trilogy based on the board game CLUE!

When a storm strikes at Blackbrook Academy, an elite prep school nestled in the woods of Maine, a motley crew of students—including Beth “Peacock” Picach, Orchid McKee, Vaughn Green, Sam “Mustard” Maestor, Finn Plum, and Scarlet Mistry—are left stranded on campus with their headmaster.

Hours later, his body is found in the conservatory, and it’s very clear his death was no accident. With this group of students who are all hiding something, nothing is as it seems, and everyone has a motive for murder.

Fans of the CLUE board game and cult classic film will delight in Diana Peterfreund’s modern reimagining of the brand, its characters, and the dark, magnificent old mansion with secrets hidden within its walls

Horizon Center Book Group will discuss this book on March 9 at 1 pm at the Horizon Center at 2120 Intelliplex Drive, Suite 101/Senior Services.