MARTHA MERRELL’S BOOK CLUBS

Martha Merrell’s hosts a variety of book clubs and is pleased to offer the following services free-of-charge to area clubs.

We can:

• Provide a meeting space for clubs

• Provide a selection of books for your club to choose from

• Special order club selections

• Provide a 15% discount on club selections

• Facilitate discussions

• No-charge consulting on new books and current trends

• Share what other clubs are reading

We invite you to stop by our location at 231 West Main Street in the Avalon Square Building.

UPCOMING BOOK CLUBS

Monday Morning Group meets at 10:30 AM

NO SEPTEMBER MEETING

10/12       33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen

11/19          The Thanksgiving Visitor by Truman Capote

12/14         A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote

Wednesday Evening Group meets at 5:45 PM

9/2/26      The Queens of Crime by Marie Benedict

London, 1930. The five greatest women crime writers have banded together to form a secret society with a single goal: to show they are no longer willing to be treated as second class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club. Led by the formidable Dorothy L. Sayers, the group includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and Baroness Emma Orczy. They call themselves the Queens of Crime. Their plan? Solve an actual murder of a young woman found strangled in a park in France who may have connections leading to the highest levels of the British establishment.

May Daniels, a young English nurse on an excursion to France with her friend, seemed to vanish into thin air as they prepared to board a ferry home. Months later, her body is found in the nearby woods. The murder has all the hallmarks of a locked room mystery for which these authors are famous: how did her killer manage to sneak her body out of a crowded train station without anyone noticing? If, as the police believe, the cause of death is manual strangulation, why is there is an extraordinary amount of blood at the crime scene? What is the meaning of a heartbreaking secret letter seeming to implicate an unnamed investigation, discovering they’re stronger together. But soon the killer targets Dorothy Sayers herself, threatening to expose a dark secret in her past that she would do anything to keep hidden.

10/7/26    33 Place Brugmann by Alice Austen

On the eve of the Nazi occupation, in the heart of Brussels, life for the residents of 33 Place Brugmann is about to change forever.  Charlotte Sauvin, an art student raised by her beloved architect father in apartment 4L, knows all the details of the building and its people: how light falls on wood floors and voices echo off the marble staircase, the distinct knock of her dear friend, Julian Raphaël, the son of the art dealer’s family across the hall. Then the Raphaëls disappear, leaving everything behind but their priceless art collection, which has simply vanished.

All else that’s familiar fractures when whispers of German occupation become reality, and the lives of the residents grow increasingly intertwined. Charlotte’s godmother Masha, a beautiful seamstress living upstairs, deepens her risky affair with a wartime compatriot of Colonel Warlemont in 3L–a man far more calculating than his neighbors believe. When a Nazi functionary with an interest in the Raphaëls moves into the building, knowing who can and cannot be trusted becomes a matter of life and death.

In the face of their perilous new reality, every member of this accidental community will discover they are not the person they believed themself to be. When confronted with a cruel choice–submit to the regime or risk their lives to save one another–each learns the truth about what, and who, matters to them the most. 

Avalon Book Group meets at 2 PM               

9/7/26      Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth

Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick: eighty-one years old, gloriously grumpy, fiercely independent, and never without a hot cup of tea–or a cutting remark. She minds her own business in her quiet Melbourne suburb, until a neighbor turns up dead and the whispers start flying because Elsie hasn’t always been Elsie. Once upon a headline, she was Mad Mabel Waller–Australia’s youngest convicted murderer. Was she really mad or just misunderstood? Either way, she’s kept her secret buried for decades.

Enter seven-year-old Persephone, a relentless little chatterbox who has just moved in across the road (armed with stickers, questions, and no sense of personal boundaries); Joan, who appears to have it in for Elsie; and a healthy dose of public interest–the cops are sniffing around, and the media is circling like seagulls at a picnic.

So Mabel does what she’s always done best–she takes matters into her own hands.

Is she a cantankerous old lady with a shady past? A cold-blooded killer with arthritis? Or just someone who’s finally ready to tell her side of the story?

Monday Afternoon Book Group meets at 2:30 PM

9/14/26    The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters

Even before Ruthie disappeared from the Maine field where her parents and siblings were gathering blueberries, six-year-old Joe had hints that the world was against his Indigenous family: people wanted to remove him and his siblings from their parents’ care to Christianize them; he and his family were treated with suspicion and disregard. The policeman asked to investigate Ruthie’s disappearance only confirmed this, refusing to even take a report. Ruthie would show up, the family was told. But weeks passed, and Ruthie stayed gone. Her family was forced to return to Canada; they could not be made to forget.

With her most solid memories beginning days after Ruthie’s disappearance, Norma grows up in outward comfort, though in a home shadowed by secrets. There are no photographs of her as a baby. She has dreams of another house and another mother. She does not know why her skin browns in the sun. She knows only that her mother is sad: following a string of miscarriages, Norma is the only child that stuck. A hole remains in Norma’s life into her adulthood, with no one willing to answer the questions that plague her.

10/12/26   The Story She Left Behind by Patti Callahan Henry

In 1927, eight-year-old Clara Harrington’s magical childhood shatters when her mother, renowned author, Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham, vanishes off the coast of South Carolina. Bronwyn stunned the world with a book written in an invented language that became a national sensation when she was just twelve years old. Her disappearance leaves behind not only a devoted husband and heartbroken daughter, but also the hope of ever translating the sequel to her landmark work. As the headlines focus on the missing author, Clara yearns for something far deeper and more insatiable: her beloved mother.

By 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising her own daughter, Wynnie. When a stranger named Charlie Jameson contacts her from London claiming to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical. Compelled by the tragedy of her mother’s disappearance, she crosses the Atlantic with Wynnie only to arrive during one of London’s most deadly natural disasters–the Great Smog. With asthmatic Wynnie in peril, they escape the city with Charlie and find refuge in the Jameson’s family retreat nestled in the Lake District. It is there that Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.

11/9/26     The Correspondent by Virginia Evans

Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters–to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.

Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has–a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.

1//27         Theo of Golden by Allen Levi

2//27        Life, and Death, and Giants by Ronald Rindo

3//27        The Secret War of Julia Child by Diana Chambers

4//27        The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles

5//27        The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson

6//27        The River Is Waiting by Wally Lamb

Discover what we have to offer!

Contact us to set up your club meeting at the store on a regular monthly basis. If you are interested in using our space on a more occasional basis, feel free to schedule a time with us as well.  (New surroundings can be just what your book club needs to invigorate itself.)  We will gladly accommodate your group’s needs including light refreshments, lunch or dinner.