Old Town Books

Upcoming Events

July True Story! Book Club: The Kissing Bug by Daisy Hernández

Sunday July 18, 2021 | 1:00PM - 2:00PM

Our first hybrid book club! Join us in-person in the shop or via zoom to discuss The Kissing Bug by Daisy Hernández.

RSVP HERE!

About the club:

Old Town Books' True Story! book club is free and open to the public. While buying the book at OTB is not required to attend, we would greatly appreciate it to help keep our free literary programming sustainable! Buy your copy of The Kissing Bug in person or online and note book club to get 10% off.

This is a hybrid book club! Both in-person attendees and online attendees (via Zoom) will be meeting at the same time. Masks are required to attend in-person. Please RSVP accordingly.

About the book:

Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases. Even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of Chagas, a rare and devastating illness that affects the heart and digestive system. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas—or the kissing bug disease—is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus.

After her aunt’s death, Hernández began searching for answers. Crisscrossing the country, she interviewed patients, doctors, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learned that in the United States more than three hundred thousand people in the Latinx community have Chagas, and that outside of Latin America, this is the only country with the native insects—the “kissing bugs”—that carry the Chagas parasite.

Through unsparing, gripping, and humane portraits, Hernández chronicles a story vast in scope and urgent in its implications, exposing how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all.

July Old Town Book(s) Club: Your Mother Is a Witch

Sunday July 25, 2021 | 1:00PM - 2:00PM

About the club:

Old Town Book(s) Club is free and open to the public. While buying the book at OTB is not required to attend, we would greatly appreciate it to help keep our free literary programming sustainable! Buy your copy of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch in person or online and note book club to get 10% off.

This is a hybrid book club! Both in-person attendees and online attendees (via Zoom) will be meeting at the same time. Masks are required to attend in-person. Please RSVP accordingly.
RSVP HERE!

About the book:

The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances.

The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years' War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.

Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It's enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone's business.

So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katharina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.

Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen's bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

August True Story! Book Club: The Fox and I by Catherine Raven

Sunday August 15, 2021 | 1:00PM - 2:00PM

About the club:

Old Town Books' True Story! book club is free and open to the public. While buying the book at OTB is not required to attend, we would greatly appreciate it to help keep our free literary programming sustainable! Buy your copy of The Fox and I in person or online and note book club to get 10% off.

This is a hybrid book club! Both in-person attendees and online attendees (via Zoom) will be meeting at the same time. Masks are required to attend in-person. Please RSVP accordingly.

RSVP HERE!

About the book:

An unforgettable memoir about the friendship between a solitary woman and a wild fox.

When Catherine Raven finished her PhD in biology, she built herself a tiny cottage on an isolated plot of land in Montana. She was as emotionally isolated as she was physically, but she viewed the house as a way station, a temporary rest stop where she could gather her nerves and fill out applications for what she hoped would be a real job that would help her fit into society. In the meantime, she taught remotely and led field classes in nearby Yellowstone National Park. Then one day she realized that a mangy-looking fox was showing up on her property every afternoon at 4:15 p.m. She had never had a regular visitor before. How do you even talk to a fox? She brought out her camping chair, sat as close to him as she dared, and began reading to him from The Little Prince. Her scientific training had taught her not to anthropomorphize animals, yet as she grew to know him, his personality revealed itself and they became friends. From the fox, she learned the single most important thing about loneliness: we are never alone when we are connected to the natural world. Friends, however, cannot save each other from the uncontained forces of nature. Fox and I is a poignant and remarkable tale of friendship, growth, and coping with inevitable loss—and of how that loss can be transformed into meaning. It is both a timely tale of solitude and belonging as well as a timeless story of one woman whose immersion in the natural world will change the way we view our surroundings—each tree, weed, flower, stone, or fox.

August Bad Romance Book Club: Her Night With the Duke & The Viscount Made Me Do It

Friday August 20, 2021 | 7:30PM - 8:30PM

Join the Bad Romance Book Club in discussing Her Night with the Duke and The Viscount Made Me Do It by Diana Quincy in July! Purchase Her Night with the Duke and The Viscount Made Me Do It from Old Town Books and mention BRBC at checkout to get added to the virtual event and to get 10% off the book club picks!

About Her Night With the Duke:
Desire knows no reason...

When Lady Delilah Chambers finds herself stranded at a country inn on a rain-swept evening, she’s forced to fend off a group of ruffians with the help of a handsome gentleman. Irresistibly drawn to each other, Leela and the stranger spend one reckless night in each others’ arms—and then go their separate ways. But the very next day Leela receives the shock of her life when she meets the duke who is set on wedding her beloved stepdaughter.

When it finds two destined hearts...

One night isn’t enough with a woman as fierce, fiery, and brilliant as Leela. Elliot Townsend, Duke of Huntington, cannot believe his good fortune when their chance encounter leads to an unforgettable evening of passion. Yet Hunt’s luck runs out when he is introduced to his prospective mother-in-law. Dowagers aren’t supposed to look like this...

Leela and Hunt are determined to keep each other at arm’s length, which should be easy enough for two intelligent adults with reputations to uphold. The problem is all logic is lost when it comes to a passion that refuses to be ignored.

About Viscount Made Me Do It:

Diana Quincy returns with the second novel in her Clandestine Affairs series featuring a steamy romance between a working class London bonesetter who is dangerously attracted to her mysterious noble client.

A seduction that could ruin everything...

Hanna Zaydan has fought to become London’s finest bonesetter, but her darkly appealing new patient threatens to destroy everything she’s worked so hard for. The daughter of Arab merchants is slowly seduced by the former soldier — even though she’s smart enough to know Griff is after more than he’ll reveal. Whatever it is, the bonesetter’s growing desire for the man just might tempt her to give it to him.

An attraction that cannot be denied...

Rumors that he killed his own parents have followed Thomas Ellis, Viscount Griffin, practically since he was a boy. More than a decade after the tragedy, Griff receives a tip about his parents’ killer… one that takes him straight to a captivating bonesetter. Griff is convinced Hanna is a fraud, but the dark-eyed beauty stirs deep feelings in him that he thought had perished along with his family.

Hanna has a gift for fixing fractured people, but can she also mend a broken heart? More importantly, will Griff let her?

August Murder by the Book Club: The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream

Tuesday August 31, 2021 | 7:00PM - 8:00PM

Old Town Books' Murder by the Book Club is free and open to the public. While buying the book at OTB is not required to attend, we would greatly appreciate it to help keep our free literary programming sustainable! Buy your copy of The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream in person or online and note book club to get 10% off.

This is a hybrid book club! Both in-person attendees and online attendees (via Zoom) will be meeting at the same time. Masks are required to attend in-person. Please RSVP accordingly.

RSVP HERE!

About the book:

The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream takes readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard follows the trail of a cold-blooded serial killer who was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper and who would finally be brought to justice by detectives employing a new science called forensics.

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream poisoned at least ten women in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedents.
Structured around Cream’s London murder trial in 1891, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help.

Dean Jobb vividly re-creates this largely forgotten historical account against the backdrop of the birth of modern policing and newly adopted forensic methods, though most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then most police departments could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown at the time. As the Chicago Tribune wrote then, Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer, one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.”

Purchase your book here!