The Daytimers Book Group is an enthusiastic bunch of readers who meet monthly to discuss popular thought-provoking literary fiction.  Lewis & Clark Library Public Services Manager Lisa Skelton coordinates this lively book group. Lisa says the book discussions are engaging and interesting.  Each month a different member of the group takes a turn leading the discussion depending on the book chosen.  The group meets every third Thursday of the month, usually taking the summer months off.  The next Daytimers meeting will be Thursday, December 19th at 3 pm in the Large Community room. They will be discussing the book Elena Knows by Argentinian author Claudia Pineiro.  This slender novel takes place over the course of one day in the life of Elena, a retired woman suffering from Parkinson's Disease who has recently lost her daughter.  The novel interweaves crime fiction and moral conundrums--and I hear it's really good! This novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Award in 2022. Copies of book are available at the public service desk.  Elena Knows is also available as a Hoopla Instant Borrow both in eBook and audiobook form. Refreshments are served!

Read on for some great book recommendations compliments of the Daytimers group members:

Barbara recommends . . . 

Cover ArtThe Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure 
In 1942 Paris, gifted architect Lucien Bernard accepts a commission that will bring him a great deal of money--and maybe get him killed. But if he's clever enough, he'll avoid any trouble. All he has to do is design a secret hiding place for a wealthy Jewish man, a space so invisible that even the most determined German officer won't find it. He sorely needs the money, and outwitting the Nazis who have occupied his beloved city is a challenge he can't resist. But when one of his hiding spaces fails horribly, and the problem of where to hide a Jew becomes terribly personal, Lucien can no longer ignore what's at stake. The Paris Architect asks us to consider what we owe each other, and just how far we'll go to make things right. Written by an architect whose knowledge imbues every page, this story becomes more gripping with every soul hidden and every life saved.
Find The Paris Architect in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Hoopla eBook
Read more about the author Here
 

Connie recommends . . . 

Cover ArtTell Me Everything  by Elizabeth Strout
It's autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer Bob Burgess has become enmeshed in an unfolding murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also fallen into a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives down the road in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William. Together, Lucy and Bob go on walks and talk about their lives, their fears and regrets, and what might have been. Lucy, meanwhile, is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, now living in a retirement community on the edge of town. They spend afternoons together in Olive's apartment, telling each other stories. Stories about people they have known--"unrecorded lives," Olive calls them--reanimating them, and, in the process, imbuing their lives with meaning. Brimming with empathy and pathos, Tell Me Everything is Elizabeth Strout operating at the height of her powers, illuminating the ways in which our relationships keep us afloat. As Lucy says, "Love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love."
Find Tell Me Everything in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

 

Debbie recommends . . .

Cover ArtA Good Girl's Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson
Everyone in Fairview knows the story. Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town. But she can't shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer? Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn't want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger. 
Find A Good Girl's Guide to Murder in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

 

Jessica recommends . . . 

Cover ArtGreat Circle by Maggie Shipstead
After being rescued as infants from a sinking ocean liner in 1914, Marian and Jamie Graves are raised by their dissolute uncle in Missoula, Montana. There--after encountering a pair of barnstorming pilots passing through town in beat-up biplanes--Marian commences her lifelong love affair with flight. At fourteen she drops out of school and finds an unexpected and dangerous patron in a wealthy bootlegger who provides a plane and subsidizes her lessons, an arrangement that will haunt her for the rest of her life, even as it allows her to fulfill her destiny: circumnavigating the globe by flying over the North and South Poles. A century later, Hadley Baxter is cast to play Marian in a film that centers on Marian's disappearance in Antarctica. Vibrant, canny, disgusted with the claustrophobia of Hollywood, Hadley is eager to redefine herself after a romantic film franchise has imprisoned her in the grip of cult celebrity. Her immersion into the character of Marian unfolds, thrillingly, alongside Marian's own story, as the two women's fates--and their hunger for self-determination in vastly different geographies and times--collide. Epic and emotional, meticulously researched and gloriously told, Great Circle is a monumental work of art, and a tremendous leap forward for the prodigiously gifted Maggie Shipstead.
Find Great Circle in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

Julie recommends . . .

Cover ArtAmericanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Ifemelu and Obinze are young and in love when they depart military-ruled Nigeria for the West. Beautiful, self-assured Ifemelu heads for America, where despite her academic success, she is forced to grapple with what it means to be Black for the first time. Quiet, thoughtful Obinze had hoped to join her, but with post-9/11 America closed to him, he instead plunges into a dangerous, undocumented life in London. At once powerful and tender, Americanah is a remarkable novel.
Find Americanah in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Hoopla eBook 
Read more about the author Here

 

Kay recommends . . . 

Cover ArtThe Sentence by Louise Erdrich
A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading "with murderous attention," must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning. The Sentence begins on All Souls' Day 2019 and ends on All Souls' Day 2020. Its mystery and proliferating ghost stories during this one year propel a narrative as rich, emotional, and profound as anything Louise Erdrich has written. 
Find The Sentence in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Hoopla eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

 

Lisa recommends . . .

Cover ArtLong Bright River by Liz Moore
In a Philadelphia neighborhood rocked by the opioid crisis, two once-inseparable sisters find themselves at odds. One, Kacey, lives on the streets in the vise of addiction. The other, Mickey, walks those same blocks on her police beat. They don't speak anymore, but Mickey never stops worrying about her sibling. Then Kacey disappears, suddenly, at the same time that a mysterious string of murders begins in Mickey's district, and Mickey becomes dangerously obsessed with finding the culprit--and her sister--before it's too late. Alternating its present-day mystery with the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence, Long Bright River is at once heart-pounding and heart-wrenching: a gripping suspense novel that is also a moving story of sisters, addiction, and the formidable ties that persist between place, family, and fate.
Find Long Bright River in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

 

Mary recommends . . . 

Cover ArtTom Lake by Ann Patchett
In the spring of 2020, Lara's three daughters return to the family's orchard in Northern Michigan. While picking cherries, they beg their mother to tell them the story of Peter Duke, a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance years before at a theater company called Tom Lake. As Lara recalls the past, her daughters examine their own lives and relationship with their mother, and are forced to reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew. Tom Lake is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. Both hopeful and elegiac, it explores what it means to be happy even when the world is falling apart. As in all of her novels, Ann Patchett combines compelling narrative artistry with piercing insights into family dynamics. The result is a rich and luminous story, told with profound intelligence and emotional subtlety, that demonstrates once again why she is one of the most revered and acclaimed literary talents working today.
Find Tom Lake in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Libby eBook and audiobook
Hoopla eBook and audiobook
Read more about the author Here

Wendy recommends . . .

Cover ArtTenacious Beasts by Christopher J. Preston
The news about wildlife is dire--more than 900 species have been wiped off the planet since industrialization. Against this bleak backdrop, however, there are also glimmers of hope and crucial lessons to be learned from animals that have defied global trends toward extinction. Bear in Italy, bison in North America, whales in the Atlantic. These populations are back from the brink, some of them in numbers unimaginable in a century. How has this happened? What shifts in thinking did it demand? In crisp, transporting prose, Christopher Preston reveals the mysteries and challenges at the heart of these resurgences. Drawing on compelling personal stories from the researchers, Indigenous people, and activists who know the creatures best, Preston weaves together a gripping narrative of how some species are taking back vital, ecological roles. Each section of the book--farms, prairies, rivers, forests, oceans--offers a philosophical shift in how humans ought to think about animals, passionately advocating for the changes in attitude necessary for wildlife recovery. Tenacious Beasts is quintessential nature writing for the Anthropocene, touching on different facets of ecological restoration from Indigenous knowledge to rewilding practices. More important, perhaps, the book offers a road map--and a measure of hope--for a future in which humans and animals can once again coexist.
Find Tenacious Beasts in the library catalog
Also available for digital checkout:
Hoopla audiobook
Read more about the author Here