Monthly meeting of the Portsmouth Public Library Fiction Book Club. All welcome! Whenever possible copies of each title are borrowed from New Hampshire libraries in advance. Books are available for check out with your PPL card.

Monday, January 12 | The Long Walk Home by Will North

“In this lyrical first novel about love and loss by a ghostwriter for Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Alec, a former speech writer for Jimmy Carter, walks 'like a pall bearer' from Heathrow Airport to North Wales to scatter the ashes of his late wife.”

Monday, February 9 | The Girl Who Fell From The Sky by Heidi Durrow

“Durrow's debut draws from her own upbringing as the brown-skinned, blue-eyed daughter of a Danish woman and a black G.I. to create Rachel Morse, a young girl with an identical heritage growing up in the early 1980s.”

Monday, March 9 | The Year We Left Home by Jean Thompson

“Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: 'she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure.' y

Monday April 13 | Necessary Lies by Diane Chamberlain

"In this heart-wrenching historical fiction, prolific author Chamberlain focuses on a time in North Carolina’s history that most people would rather forget. It’s 1960, and Jane is a 21-year-old newlywed who’s just accepted a job as a social worker, though her husband, Robert, would rather she stay home like the other country club wives."

Monday May 11 | Manuscript found in Accra by Paulo Coelho

"It is Jerusalem, the year 1099, and as French soldiers prepare to invade, a group gathers around a trite sage known as “the Copt.” The topics broached are wide-ranging..."

June 8  | The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit

"First-time novelist Nesbit chronicles the lives of a disparate group of women who forge a new community together after relocating to the desert of New Mexico during World War II. The collective “we” that serves as the book’s protagonist only knows that the women’s physicist husbands are working day and night on a secret government project."

LIBRARY PROGRAM

All synopses from Publisher's Weekly.