Third Tuesday Book Group – Lakewood Memorial Library

The Third Tuesday Book Group meets the third Tuesday of each month from 2:30-3:30pm. Below are the selections for the 2026 calendar year:

Jan 20 – The Life impossible by Matt Haig (fiction)

When retired math teacher Grace Winters is left a run-down house on a Mediterranean island by a long-lost friend, curiosity get the better of her. She arrives in Ibiza with a one-way ticket, no guidebook and no plan. Among the rugged hills and golden beaches of the island, Grace searches for answers about her friend’s life and how it ended. What she uncovers is stranger than she could have dreamed.

Feb 17 – All the Colors of the Dark by Chris Whitaker (fiction)

An epic novel about a man fixated on finding a missing woman and the FBI agent on his tail, who might be even more obsessed than he is.

Mar 17 – Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey (fiction)

Alaska, 1920, a brutal place to homestead, and especially tough for recent arrivals Jack and Mabel. Childless, they are drifting apart. In a moment of levity during the season’s first snowfall, they build a child out of snow. The next morning the snow child is gone – but they glimpse a young, blonde-haired girl running through the trees.

Apr 21 – Miller’s Valley by Anne Quindlan (fiction)

For generations the Millers have lived in Miller’s Valley. Mimi Miller tells about her life with intimacy and honesty. Home, as Mimi begins to realize, can be “a place where it’s just as easy to feel lost as it is to feel content.”

May 19 – My Cousin Rachel by Daphne DuMaurier (fiction)

The story of a young Englishman who plots revenge against his mysterious, beautiful cousin, believing that she murdered his guardian.

June 16 – By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult (fiction)

A novel about two women, centuries apart – one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays – who are both forced to hide behind another name.

July 21 – My Friends by Fredrick Backman (fiction)

An unforgettably funny, deeply moving tale of four teenagers whose friendship creates a bond so powerful that it changes a complete stranger’s life twenty-five years later.

Aug 18 – Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout (fiction)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. On NY Times list of best books of the century. At times stern, at other times patient, at times perceptive, at other times in sad denial, Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher, deplores the changes in her little town of Crosby, Maine, and in the world at large, but she doesn’t always recognize the changes in those around her.

Sep 15 – An Unfinished Love Story: a personal history of the 1960s by Doris Kearns Goodwin (non-fiction)

The author, one of America’s most beloved historians, artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history. She takes you along on the emotional journey she and her husband, Richard Goodwin embarked upon in the last years of his life.

Oct 20 – The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafer (fiction)

Two teenagers, a Greek Cypriot and a Turkish Cypriot, meet at a taverna on the island and fall in love. War breaks out, the teenagers vanish. Decades later Kostas returns. He is a botanist looking for native species, but really he’s searching for lost love.

Nov 17 – The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore (non-fiction)

1860: As the clash between the states rolls slowly to a boil, Elizabeth Packard, housewife and mother of six, is facing her own battle. The enemy sits across the table and sleeps in the next room. Threatened by Elizabeth’s intellect, independence, and outspokenness, her husband of 21 years has her committed to an insane asylum. The horrific conditions inside the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Illinois, are overseen by Dr. Andrew McFarland, a man who will prove to be even more dangerous to Elizabeth than her traitorous husband. But most disturbing is that she is not the only sane woman confined to the institution.

Dec 15 – A Redbird Christmas by Fannie Flagg (fiction)

This is a tale of a magical Christmas when something so amazing happened that those who witnessed it have never forgotten it.

Jan 19, 2027 – The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (fiction)

Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.

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