The Noon Book Group meets on the second Friday of each month at noon, September through June in person. Contact Joanne Lee (jlee@minlib.net) for more details!
Meeting dates are in bold italics.
September 11
In rural New York, the Mulvaney family is undone after a violent incident involving their daughter. The family splinters as each member seeks a way forward, haunted by loyalty, shame, and the weight of what happened.
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October 9
In Kolkata, a young woman becomes entangled with a charismatic thief whose ambitions pull her into danger. As their lives intersect, each must decide what loyalty, survival, and justice mean in a city where opportunity and peril coexist.
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November 13
Bertha Truitt arrives out of nowhere and builds a bowling alley that becomes the center of a small town community. Her sudden death leaves the town to navigate a tangle of relationships, secrets, inheritances, and the odd magic of the alley.
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December 11
In the days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, Esch discovers that she is pregnant. Her pregnancy adds pressure as she and her brothers try to hold together what little they have in a struggling Mississippi community awaiting the storm.
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January 8
Amy Tan explores the origins of her creativity through family letters, childhood memories, and the emotional terrain that shaped her writing life. Her reflections trace how imagination grows from personal history and how her past continues to echo through her work.
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February 12
The lives of a judge, his granddaughter, and their cook are unsettled by local unrest around the Himalayan town where they live. Far away, the cook’s son struggles to build a life in New York as an undocumented worker. Their experiences reflect the pull of home, and the costs and promises of leaving it.
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March 12
During the weeks before Christmas, coal merchant Bill Furlong makes a delivery to a convent. There, he discovers a young woman in distress and is forced to weigh his quiet life against the cost of speaking up, even when no one else will.
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April 9
A family takes a cross-country road trip toward Arizona amidst the parents’ fraying marriage and on-going reports of migrant children disappearing at the border. The children absorb fragments of what they hear and witness, shaping their own understanding of the stories unfolding around them.
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May 14
A grieving woman follows her late husband’s path to an isolated island, seeking clarity about the man he was. The stark setting forces her to face memories and unanswered questions as she searches for the meaning of their life together and the distance that grew between them.
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June 11
Told through the eyes of Enzo the dog, who believes he will be reborn as a human, the story follows race‑car driver Denny as he faces triumphs and setbacks. Enzo’s devotion shapes how he understands hope, the human world, and his place in it.
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