History Book Club

About this event

Explore history through compelling fiction and nonfiction. For more information, please contact the branch at 305-668-4571 or booke@mdpls.org. Ages 19 yrs.+

January 2026:

A Mercy by Toni Morrison: 167pp: In the 1680s the slave trade in the Americas is still in its infancy. Jacob Vaark is an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, with a small holding in the harsh North. Despite his distaste for dealing in “flesh,” he takes a small slave girl in part payment for a bad debt from a plantation owner in Catholic Maryland.

February 2026:

They Dared Return: The True Story of Jewish Spies behind the Lines in Nazi Germany by Patrick K. O’Donnell: 264pp: At the height of World War II, with the Third Reich’s Final Solution in full operation, a small group of Jews who were naturalized American citizens, having themselves barely escaped the Nazis, did the unthinkable: they went back. Trained as spies, these men took on a perilous covert mission to strike back at the Third Reich behind enemy lines. They Dared Return is their story — a gripping tale of adventure, espionage, love, and revenge.

March 2026:

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See: 352pp: An immersive historical novel inspired by the true story of a woman physician in 15th-century China.

April 2026:

Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light by Susan Dunn: 272pp: The American and French revolutions presented the world with two very different visions of democracy. Although both professed similar Enlightenment ideals of freedom, equality, and justice and set similar political agendas, there were also fundamental differences. The French sought a complete break with a thousand years of history; the Americans were content to preserve many aspects of their English heritage. Why did the two revolutions follow such different trajectories? And what lessons do they offer us about democracy today?

May 2026:

Sarah’s Key by Tatiana de Rosnay: 294pp: Paris, July 1942: Ten-year-old Sarah is brutally arrested with her family in the Vel' d'Hiv' roundup, the most notorious act of French collaboration with the Nazis. but before the police come to take them, Sarah locks her younger brother, Michel, in their favorite hiding place, a cupboard in the family's apartment. She keeps the key, thinking that she will be back within a few hours.

June 2026:

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard: 371pp: An illuminating history of North America's eleven rival cultural regions that explodes the red state-blue state myth. North America was settled by people with distinct religious, political, and ethnographic characteristics, creating regional cultures that have been at odds with one another ever since. Subsequent immigrants didn't confront or assimilate into an "American" or "Canadian" culture, but rather into one of the eleven distinct regional ones that spread over the continent each staking out mutually exclusive territory.

July 2026: