Dorset Library Book Clubs
The Dorset Library offers two options for book clubs. One, called the Book Club, will focus on fiction with an occasional non-fiction selection. It meets on the fourth Thursday of every month at 5pm. The second, called the Non-Fiction Book Club will focus on modern history and other nonfiction books chosen by participants. It meets on the second Tuesday of each month at 5pm.You will find good conversation and refreshments at each meeting! We will add the list of upcoming books soon so you can get a head start! Call or email the Library to reserve any of the upcoming books.
The current non-fiction book is East West Street by Philippe Sands.
The current fiction book is This is Happiness by Niall Williams.
The upcoming fiction books for 2025:
February- This is Happiness by Niall Williams – Jennifer L
March- Birds in Fall by Brad Kessler –
April- Bullet Swallower by Elizabeth Gonzales James – Lisa
May- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner – Anniken
June- James by Pervical Everett – Roger
July- The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon – Kelly
August- The Personal Librarian by Heather Terrell and Christopher Murray – Cathie
September- Table for Two(short stories) by Amor Towles – Linda
October- The Other Eden by Paul Harding – Karen
November-
December- NO MEETING
Past books in 2025:
January – Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner – – Terrie
February-
March-
April-
May-
June-
July-
August-
September-
October-
November-
December-
February 11 @5pm
East West Street by Philippe Sands
A book that explores the development of the world-changing legal concepts of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” that came about as a result of the unprecedented atrocities of Hitler’s Third Reich.
It is also a spellbinding family memoir, as the author traces the mysterious story of his grandfather as he maneuvered through Europe in the face of Nazi atrocities. This is “a monumental achievement … told with love, anger and precision” (John le Carré, acclaimed internationally bestselling author).
East West Street looks at the personal and intellectual evolution of the two men who simultaneously originated the ideas of “genocide” and “crimes against humanity,” both of whom, not knowing the other, studied at the same university with the same professors, in “the Paris of Ukraine,” a major cultural center of Europe, a city variously called Lemberg, Lwów, Lvov, or Lviv.
Phillipe Sands changes the way we look at the world, at our understanding of history and how civilization has tried to cope with mass murder.
February 27 @5pm
This is Happiness by Niall Williams
A profound and enchanting bestselling novel from Booker Prize-longlisted author Niall Williams about the loves of our lives and the joys of reminiscing.
You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you’ve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.
The rain is stopping. Nobody in the small, forgotten village of Faha remembers when it started; rain on the western seaboard was a condition of living. Now–just as Father Coffey proclaims the coming of electricity–it is stopping. Seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe is standing outside his grandparents’ house shortly after the rain has stopped when he encounters Christy for the first time. Though he can’t explain it, Noel knows right then: something has changed.
This is the story of all that was to follow: Christy’s long-lost love and why he had come to Faha, Noel’s own experiences falling in and out of love, and the endlessly postponed arrival of electricity–a development that, once complete, would leave behind a world that had not changed for centuries.
Niall Williams’ latest novel is an intricately observed portrait of a community, its idiosyncrasies and its traditions, its paradoxes and its inanities, its failures and its triumphs. Luminous and otherworldly, and yet anchored with deep-running roots into the earthy and the everyday, This Is Happiness is about stories as the very stuff of life: the ways they make the texture and matter of our world, and the ways they write and rewrite us.