Local Reads Book Club

Monday, March 9th at 6PM 

Battery Park Book Exchange

Our first gathering will be a casual meet-and-greet to talk about what’s ahead and introduce our debut selection. Come grab a drink, meet fellow readers, and be part of Asheville’s vibrant literary scene, one local story at a time.

 Three daughters of a famed and eccentric puppeteer must confront their family divisions and tenuous relationships with their father and each other when, sinking into dementia, he announces there is a fourth daughter in this powerful story of family, ambition, and legacy. 

Discussion and Author Q&A with Heather Newton

Monday, April 6th at 6pm at The Battery Park Book Exchange

 The Red Grove is a special place, protected. Some say a spell was cast by its founder, Tamsen Nightingale. Some say the mountain lions stalking the nearby hills guard its mysteries and its boundaries. Some say the mighty redwoods keep its people safe.

Yet a man has died on the Red Grove’s sacred ground. And Luce’s mother, Gloria, has vanished. The Red Grove is Luce’s whole world. She is utterly devoted to its mission, its rituals and history. Still, she knows that her mother, frustrated free spirit though she might be, wouldn’t just leave without a word, wouldn’t leave Luce’s little brother, Roo, and their aunt, Gem, whose life and care in a suspended state they call everdream depend on Gloria in every way. But strange things begin to happen as Luce tries to figure out where her mother has gone. Clicks echo out from the trees, flies pound against the windows, and a strange man keeps calling on the phone. The deeper Luce digs, the more she must ask if her beloved home, the women she admires, and the stories they tell might be built on a devastating lie. 

Discussion and Author Q&A with Tessa Fontaine

Monday, May 4th at 6pm at The Battery Park Book Exchange

Once you begin looking for joy, you can find it pretty much anywhere.

When Jennifer McGaha's grandmother was in her late eighties, Jennifer asked her what her favorite age so far had been. "Fifty-five," her grandmother answered, as though there were something magical about this stage of life, some deeper way of knowing from this vantage point. So, in her own fifty-fifth year, Jennifer began to take note. She jotted down her impressions of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her.

These observations became Jennifer's Joy Document, a radical act of reclaiming joy and an exercise in paying attention. 

Discussion and Author Q&A with Jennifer McGaha

Monday, June 1st at 6pm at The Battery Park Book Exchange

Since Anabelle’s mother left for Earth to care for her own ailing mother, her days in New Galveston have been spent at school and her nights at her laconic father’s diner with Watson, the family Kitchen Engine and dishwasher, as her only companion. When the Silence came, and communication and shipments from Earth to its colonies on Mars stopped, life seemed stuck in foreboding stasis until the night Silas Mundt and his gang attacked.

At once evoking the dreams of an America explored in Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and the harsher realities of frontier life in Charles Portis True Grit, Ballingrud’s “brilliant” (Paul Tremblay, New York Times bestselling author of The Cabin at the End of the World) novel is haunting in its evocation of Annabelle’s quest for revenge amidst a spent and angry world accompanied by a domestic Engine, a drunken space pilot, and the toughest woman on Mars. 

Discussion and Author Q&A with Nathan Ballingrud

Monday, July 6th at 6pm at The Battery Park Book Exchange