Second Thursday Book Group

In 1953, Chippewa Council member Thomas Wazhushk, night watchman at a factory near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, is angered by a bill floating through Congress that will effectively deprive Native Americans of their land, their rights, and their identity. Meanwhile, high school valedictorian Patrice Paranteau resists the idea of staying on the reservation and marrying, instead doing mind-numbing work at the factory to save money for a move to Minneapolis to find older sister Vera. Thomas is inspired by the multi-award-winning Erdrich's own grandfather.

In her richest, most deeply searching novel yet, Tyler pens a story about what it is to be an American, and about Iranian-born Maryam Yazdan, who, after 35 years in this country, must finally come to terms with her outsiderness.

In 1660s Boston, blue-eyed, porcelain-delicate Mary Deerfield is determined to escape her marriage after her husband, the cruel and controlling Thomas Deerfield, shoves a fork through her hand in a drunken rage. Yet unfortunate incidents--a screaming maid, a boy's death after Mary treats him with herbs--leaves her longing not just for freedom but for her life; she could be condemned to the gallows as a witch.

It’s December 23, 1971, and heavy weather is forecast for Chicago. Russ Hildebrandt, the associate pastor of a liberal suburban church, is on the brink of breaking free of a marriage he finds joyless―unless his wife, Marion, who has her own secret life, beats him to it. Their eldest child, Clem, is coming home from college on fire with moral absolutism, having taken an action that will shatter his father.

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

Jane Eyre gets a modern, Alabama-based reboot in Hawkins' latest thriller. Dog walker to the elite and sometime petty thief, Jane will do what she must to survive. Growing up as a witness to violence in various foster homes, she's tougher than she looks. Then she meets Eddie Rochester, who's recently lost his wife, Bertha, and his wife's best friend, Blanche Ingraham, in a tragic boating accident, their bodies never found.