Becky Frusher
2025 Book Talk selections
Friends of the Library (FOL) is pleased to announce a stellar lineup for our 2025 Book Talk series. Volumes were chosen by FOL Book Talk Selection Committee members Deborah Diehl, Cindy Voliva, Rebecca Fridley, Scott Baker, and Sonya Smith. Here are the amazing stories we’ll explore this year (descriptions from Amazon.com):
The Women, by Kristin Hannah
#1 Bestseller: The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times
Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.
Master Slave Husband Wife, by Ilyon Woo
Winner: 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, NPR, and Smithsonian Magazine.
In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they escaped together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
The Rose Code, by Kate Quinn
In 1940, as England prepares to fight the Nazis, three very different women answer the call to country estate Bletchley Park, where the best minds in Britain train to break German military codes. War, loss, and the impossible pressure of secrecy tear the three apart until 1947; when a mysterious traitor emerges from their shadowy past and they must resurrect their old alliance to crack one last code together.
The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
New York Times bestseller, Reese’s Book Club pick, winner of the Australian Book Industry Award
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, this story is inspired by actual events, and Esme, a motherless and irrepressibly curious girl who spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded, so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. This highly original story is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
Please watch the FOL website at rrtxfol.org for book talk dates/times.