Lake Bluff Library Adult Reading Lists

Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott's marriage is in major league trouble. Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville's top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. (Description from NoveList.)

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of the pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful at everything until—betrayed and brokenhearted—she must turn to the person she thought she needed least.
(Description from NoveList)

When a new force takes hold of the world, people from different areas of life are forced to cross paths in an alternate reality that gives women and teenage girls immense physical power that can cause pain and death. (Description from catalog)

Most people don’t even notice them—three tiny figures sitting at the end of a long pier in the corner of one of the most famous paintings in the world. But eighteen-year-old Louisa, an aspiring artist herself, knows otherwise, and she is determined to find out the story of these three enigmatic figures.
(Description from NoveList)

Twin sisters, inseparable as children, ultimately choose to live in two very different worlds, one black and one white. (Description from NoveLIst.)

On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride's oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast. And then someone turns up dead. Who didn't wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?
(Description from catalog)

An actress who makes a film about adoption starts a media storm after admitting to a journalist that it's a bad movie and that she gave up a baby for adoption during her senior year.
(Description from NoveList)

Podcast producer Cecily Foster reluctantly agrees to host a show documenting her dating life under the guidance of an influencer coach and must reconcile her growing feelings for a kind photographer with her coach's conflicting advice.
(Description from NoveList0

Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she's thinking. That, combined with her unusual appearance means that Eleanor has become a creature of habit and a bit of a loner. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office.
(Description from catalog)

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. An insightful look into the lives of people who are bound and separated by forces beyond their control.
(Description from catalog)

A first-century intellectual fights the limitations imposed on women before an encounter with an 18-year-old Jesus leads to their marriage, his dangerous public ministry, and her flight to safety in Alexandria. (Description from NoveList.)

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him?
(Description from NoveList)

Sentenced to prison, Corby struggles to survive life on the inside, where he bears witness to frightful acts of brutality but also experiences small acts of kindness and a kinship with a prison librarian and some of his fellow offenders. Buoyed by them and by his mother's enduring faith in him, Corby begins to transcend the boundaries of his confinement, sustained by his hope that mercy and reconciliation might still be possible.
(Description from NoveList)

A propulsive novel of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean.
(Description from NoveList)

Lila Kennedy juggles a broken marriage, rebellious daughters, a crumbling house, and an elderly stepfather when her estranged father unexpectedly shows up after thirty-five years, forcing her to confront unresolved feelings and discover unexpected lessons about love and family amidst her chaotic life.
(Description from NoveList)

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves.
(Description from catalog)

In 1947, pregnant Charlie St. Clair, an American college girl banished from her family, arrives in London to find out what happened to her beloved cousin Rose, who disappeared in Nazi-occupied France during the war, and meets a former spy who, torn apart by betrayal, agrees to help her on her mission. (Description from NoveList.)

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself.
(Description from catalog)

A first novel by the award-winning author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds is written in the form of a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read about the impact of the Vietnam War on their family. (Description from NoveList.)

After giving birth, Jane experiences amnesia, hallucinations, and premonitions, leading to her sudden disappearance and a subsequent episode of dissociative fugue; her psychiatrist investigates the links between her struggles and a traumatic past, he grapples with questions of memory and reality, while a ghostly figure warns of impending disaster.
(Description from NoveList)