Open Book Club

In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows. As these characters’ stories overlap and deepen, it becomes clear how much the people who live on the margins struggle and what they must do to survive. There are two in-person sessions each month and a virtual option for those who can't make the in-person meetings!

A rich, rewarding exploration of ambition and sacrifice, desire and loss, People Collide is a portrait of shared lives that shines a refreshing light on everything we thought we knew about love, sexuality, and the truth of who we are. There are two in-person sessions each month and a virtual option for those who can't make the in-person meetings!

Established in 2003, the purpose of All Iowa Reads is to foster a sense of unity through reading. Iowans are encouraged to come together in their communities to read and talk about a single book title in the same calendar year. Join the Sioux City Public Library for a discussion on this year's book, The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson.

Told through the perspective of its charming and irresistible narrator, The History of a Difficult Child is about what happens when mother, God, and country are at odds, and how one difficult child finds her voice. There are two in-person sessions each month and a virtual option for those who can't make the in-person meetings!

Red Memory uncovers forty years of silence through the stories of individuals who lived through the decade of Maoist fanaticism between 1966 and 1976.

Beloved bestselling author Mitch Albom returns with a powerful novel that moves from a coastal Greek city during the Holocaust, to America, where the intertwined lives of three survivors are forever changed by the perils of deception and the grace of redemption. 

The Vulnerables offers a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history and considers how our present reality affects the way a person looks back on her past.

On the night of February 22, 1978, a devastating freight train derailment drastically altered Waverly, Tennessee, and its place in history. This was one of the worst train explosions of the twentieth century, killing 16 people, injuring hundreds more, and causing millions of dollars in damage.