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The Banister Book Group meets at the Library Annex at 18 Common St. (next to the library) on the last Wednesday of every month, from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m.
Each month, copies of the chosen title are available for pickup at the library.
New members always welcome!
October
Save What's Left
by Elizabeth Castellano
Discussion: Wednesday, October 28, 2026
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When Kathleen Deane’s husband, Tom, tells her he's no longer happy with his life and their marriage, Kathleen is confused. They live in Kansas. They’ve been married thirty years. Who said anything about being happy? But with Tom off finding himself, Kathleen starts to think about what she wants. And her thoughts lead her to a small beach community on the east coast, a town called Whitbey that has always looked lovely in the Christmas letters her childhood friend Josie sends every year.
It turns out, though, that life in Whitbey is nothing like Josie’s letters. Kathleen’s new neighbor, Rosemary, is cantankerous, and the town’s supervisor won't return Kathleen’s emails, but worst of all is the Sugar Cube, the monstrosity masquerading as a holiday home that Kathleen’s absentee neighbors are building next door to her quaint (read: tiny) cottage. As Kathleen gets more and more involved in the fight against the Sugar Cube and town politics overall, she realizes that Whitbey may not be a fairytale, but it just might be exactly what she needed.
Save What’s Left can best be described as the “un-beach read.” It pulls back the curtain on life in a beach town, revealing the true cost of a pretty view. Told from the candid and irreverent perspective of a newcomer turned local, this is a story of forgiveness, fortitude, and second chances.
September
News of the World
by Paulette Jiles
Discussion: Wednesday, November 25
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"In post-Civil War Texas, a 10-year-old girl makes an odyssey back to her aunt and uncle's home after living with Kiowa warriors who had killed her parents four years earlier. Johanna Leonberger remembers almost nothing of her first 6 years, when she lived with her parents. Instead, her memory extends only as far as her Kiowa family. ... Enter Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a 70-year-old veteran of two wars and, in 1870, when the novel takes place, a professional reader ... At first reluctant to take her 400 miles to a town near San Antonio where her aunt and uncle live, he soon realizes his itinerant live makes him the most plausible person for the job--and he also knows it's the right thing to do. He buys a wagon, and they start their journey, much to the reluctance and outrage of a undomesticated Johanna; but a relationship soon begins to develop between the two. Jiles makes the narrative compelling by unsentimentally constructing a bond based at least in part on a mutual need for survival, but slowly and delicately, Johanna and Kidd begin to respect as well as need one another. ... Lyrical and Affecting, the novel succeeds in skirting cliches through its empathy and through the depth of its major characters.".—Kirkus Reviews