Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (June)
Discussing
The Lilac People: A Novel
Written by: Milo Todd
In 1932 Berlin, a trans man named Bertie and his friends spend carefree nights at the Eldorado Club, the epicenter of Berlin’s thriving queer community. An employee of the renowned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexual Science, Bertie works to improve queer rights in Germany and beyond. But everything changes when Hitler rises to power. The Institute is raided, the Eldorado is shuttered, and queer people are rounded up. Bertie barely escapes with his girlfriend, Sofie, to a nearby farm. There they take on the identities of an elderly couple and live for more than a decade in isolation.
In the final days of the war, with their freedom in sight, Bertie and Sofie find a young trans man collapsed on their property, still dressed in Holocaust prison clothes. They vow to protect him—not from the Nazis, but from the Allied forces who are arresting queer prisoners while liberating the rest of the country. Ironically, as the Allies’ vise grip closes on Bertie and his family, their only salvation is to flee to the United States.
Brimming with hope, resilience, and the enduring power of community, The Lilac People tells an extraordinary story inspired by real events and recovers an unknown moment of World War II and trans history.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (July)
Discussing
Blob: A Love Story
Written by: Maggie Su
The daughter of a Taiwanese father and white mother, Vi Liu has never quite fit into her Midwestern college town. Aimless after getting dumped by her boyfriend and dropping out of college, Vi works at the front desk of a hotel where she greets guests, refills cucumber water samovars, and tries to evade her bubbly blond coworker, Rachel. Little does Vi know her life is about to be permanently transformed when she agrees to a night out with Rachel. In the alley outside the bar, Vi discovers a strange blob—a small living creature with beady black eyes. In a moment of concern and drunken desperation, she takes it home.
But the blob is no ordinary pet. Becoming increasingly sentient, it begins to grow, shift shape, and obey Vi’s commands. As the entity continues to change, Vi is struck with a daring idea: she’ll mold the creature into her ideal partner. Feeding it a stream of sweet breakfast cereals and American pop culture, the creature grows into a movie-star handsome white man. But when Vi’s desire to be loved unconditionally threatens to spiral out of control, she is forced to confront her lonely childhood, her aloof ex-boyfriend, and the racial marginalization that has defined her relationships—a journey of self-discovery that teaches her it’s impossible to control those you love.
Blending the familiar with the surreal, Blob is a witty, heartfelt story about the search for love and self and what it means to be human.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (August)
Discussing
Purple Hibiscus
Written by: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating.
As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.
Purple Hibiscus is an exquisite novel about the emotional turmoil of adolescence, the powerful bonds of family, and the bright promise of freedom.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (September)
Discussing
The Dream Hotel
Written by: Laila Lalami
Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.
The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.
Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (October)
Discussing
Sour Cherry
Written by: Natalia Theodoridou
Book Summary
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (November)
Discussing
To The Moon and Back
Written by: Eliana Ramage
In this dazzlingly powerful story of family, ambition and belonging, one young woman’s obsessive quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut irrevocably alters the fates of the people she loves most.
Steph Harper is convinced that only space—outer space—can save her. From a childhood of fearful running and alienation; from a family and community that threaten to suffocate her with their reverence for the past. Equal parts tender, funny, and heartbreaking, To the Moon and Back charts the course of Steph’s singular dream: to become the first Cherokee astronaut, no matter who or what she has to leave behind.
But despite her self-prescribed loneliness and reckless ambition, Steph’s story isn’t hers alone. To the Moon and Back also brings to life the vibrant, complex women—a celebrity activist younger sister, an ex-Mormon college girlfriend, and a devoted mother with a crushing secret—who insist on loving her…even when she least deserves them.
From a simulated Mars habitat on a Hawaiian volcano, to a house in the Ozark foothills in Cherokee Nation, to a pressurized research station on the floor of the Atlantic and beyond, Steph will stretch her bonds with each of these women to the point of breaking, driving them to reconsider their own deepest desires in her shadow. An awe-inspiringly epic novel of mothers and daughters, sisters and sacrifice, love and loss, terror and wonder, To the Moon and Back is the unforgettable story of one astronaut’s most surprising discovery: how deeply she loves life on earth.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (May)
Discussing
Our Beautiful Boys
Written by: Sameer Pandya
When the star players on a high school football team are accused of violence by another student, their secrets—and the secrets of their parents—threaten to shatter their entire community in a gripping novel of race, class, and privilege from the author of Members Only.
"Timely and timeless . . . here is a novel that carefully plays with assumptions, expectations, and subversions." —Nic Stone, The New York Times Book Review
Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates, Diego and MJ, attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.
But when the kid emerges with injuries that prove to be more serious than the all-star boys intended, they are suspended for the rest of the season and the boys’ parents are brought in to manage the situation. As the parents try to protect their boys, they are also managing their own complicated family and professional lives. While the parents work with, and against, each other to figure out the truth about that night, the boys must come to terms with how much of their own secrets they’re willing to reveal to clear their names.
Insightful and deeply human, Our Beautiful Boys is about race and class, about parents trying to raise good boys in our fraught times, and the conflict we find when all of these slam together. It’s about the kids inside each parent, and the games the world makes each of us play.
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Sameer Pandya is the author of the novel Members Only, a finalist for the California Book Award and an NPR “Books We Love” of 2020, and the story collection The Blind Writer, longlisted for the PEN/Open Book Award. His cultural criticism has appeared in a range of publications, including the LA Review of Books, The Atlantic, Salon, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN. A recipient of the PEN/Civitella Fellowship, he is currently an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Author Residence: Carpinteria, CA
Author Hometown: Mumbai; Bay Area
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (April)
Discussing
Between Two Moons
Written by: Aisha Abdel Gawad
It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.
Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?
A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (March)
Discussing
The Lion Women of Tehran
Written by: Marjan Kamali
In 1950s Tehran, seven-year-old Ellie lives in grand comfort until the untimely death of her father, forcing Ellie and her mother to move to a tiny home downtown. Lonely and bearing the brunt of her mother’s endless grievances, Ellie dreams for a friend to alleviate her isolation.
Luckily, on the first day of school, she meets Homa, a kind girl with a brave and irrepressible spirit. Together, the two girls play games, learn to cook in the stone kitchen of Homa’s warm home, wander through the colorful stalls of the Grand Bazaar, and share their ambitions of becoming “lion women.”
But their happiness is disrupted when Ellie and her mother are afforded the opportunity to return to their previous bourgeois life. Now a popular student at the best girls’ high school in Iran, Ellie’s memories of Homa begin to fade. Years later, however, her sudden reappearance in Ellie’s privileged world alters the course of both of their lives.
Together, the two young women come of age and pursue their own goals for meaningful futures. But as the political turmoil in Iran builds to a breaking point, one earth-shattering betrayal will have enormous consequences.
“Reminiscent of The Kite Runner and My Brilliant Friend, The Lion Women of Tehran is a mesmerizing tale” (BookPage) of love and courage, and a sweeping exploration of how profoundly we are shaped by those we meet when we are young.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (February)
Discussing
Off-White
Written By: Astrid Roemer
Translated by: Lucy Scott & David McKay
It’s 1966 in Suriname, on the Caribbean coast of South America, and the long shadow of colonialism still hangs over the country. Grandma Bee is the proud, cigar-smoking matriarch of the Vanta family, which is an intricate mix of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish backgrounds. But Grandma Bee is dying, a cough has settled deep in her lungs.
The approaching end has her thinking about the members of her family she’s lost, and especially one of her favorite granddaughters, Heli, who has been sent away to the Netherlands because of an affair with her white teacher. Ultimately, there’s only one question Bee must answer: What is a family? If her descendants are spread across the world, don’t look similar, don’t share a heritage, and don’t even know each other, what bond will they have once she has died?
A moving portrait of a woman finding peace in the legacy that is her daughters and granddaughters, Off-White, keenly translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay, is also a searing and complex portrait of male violence, the legacy of colonialism, and a dismantling of what it means to be “white”. Written after a nearly 20-year break from publishing, Off-White is another masterpiece from the only Surinamese author to win the prestigious Dutch Literature Award.
Nutty for Novels is o meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Discussion (January)
Discussing
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop: A Novel
Written by: Satoshi Yagisawa
Translated by: Eric Ozawa
Twenty-five-year-old Takako has enjoyed a relatively easy existence—until the day her boyfriend Hideaki, the man she expected to wed, casually announces he’s been cheating on her and is marrying the other woman. Suddenly, Takako’s life is in freefall. She loses her job, her friends, and her acquaintances, and spirals into a deep depression. In the depths of her despair, she receives a call from her distant uncle Satoru.
An unusual man who has always pursued something of an unconventional life, especially after his wife Momoko left him out of the blue five years earlier, Satoru runs a second-hand bookshop in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s famous book district. Takako once looked down upon Satoru’s life. Now, she reluctantly accepts his offer of the tiny room above the bookshop rent-free in exchange for helping out at the store. The move is temporary, until she can get back on her feet. But in the months that follow, Takako surprises herself when she develops a passion for Japanese literature, becomes a regular at a local coffee shop where she makes new friends, and eventually meets a young editor from a nearby publishing house who’s going through his own messy breakup.
But just as she begins to find joy again, Hideaki reappears, forcing Takako to rely once again on her uncle, whose own life has begun to unravel. Together, these seeming opposites work to understand each other and themselves as they continue to share the wisdom they’ve gained in the bookshop.
Nutty for Novels Book Club meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection.
New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
2025 Book Club Year-End Social
Whether you’re a regular or just curious about our Book Club, come hang out and kick back with us! Share a favorite book or reading memory from the year, grab a free ARC, and soak up some cozy, festive vibes.
Feel free to bring a snack, drink, or treat to share—but no pressure. No formal discussion here, just a relaxed way to celebrate books, reading, and community.
We’d love to see you there!
November Book Club Meeting
November Pick:
The Berry Pickers
by Amanda Peters
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
October Book Club Meeting
October Pick:
Tender is the Flesh
by Agustina Bazterrica
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
August Book Club Meeting
August Pick:
Margo’s Got Money Troubles
by Rufi Thorpe
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
July Book Club Meeting
July Pick:
House of Frank
by Kay Synclaire
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
June Book Club Meeting
June Pick:
Blackouts
by Justin Torres
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
May Book Club Meeting
May Pick:
Catalina
by Kala Cornejo Villavicenio
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
April Book Club Meeting
April Pick:
Land of Milk and Honey
by C Pam Zhang
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
March Book Club Meeting
March Pick:
Detransition Baby
by Torrey Peters
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
February Book Club Meeting
February Pick:
Vegetarian
by Han Kang
Translated by Deborah Smith
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
January Book Club Meeting
January Pick:
James
by Percival Everett
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Meeting - November
November Pick:
The Sentence
by Louise Erdrich
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Meeting - October
October Pick:
Camp Damascus
by Chuck Tingle
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Meeting - September
September Pick:
The Thirty Names of Night
by Zeyn Joukhadar
Nutty for Novels meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Nutty for Novels Book Club Meeting - August
Nutty for Novels: Curious Squirrel Bookshop's Fiction Book Club
Meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
In August we will be discussing the No One Dies Yet by Kobby Ben Ben
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Book Club: Nutty for Novels
Nutty for Novels: Curious Squirrel Bookshop's Fiction Book Club
Meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
In July we will be discussing the An Unkindness of Ghosts by River Solomn
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.
Young Adult Book Club
Ruthless Readers: Curious Squirrel Bookshop's Young Adult Book Club
Meets bi-monthly to discuss a range of titles chosen by the group .
In July we will be discussing the All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
First 15 readers to sign up for our YA book club can pick up a copy of the book at for FREE, thanks to the generosity of our donors Requests can be made by visiting the link in bio.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
Book Club: Nutty for Novels
Nutty for Novels: Curious Squirrel Bookshop's Fiction Book Club
Meets monthly to discuss a range of fiction titles.
In June we will be discussing the "Yellowface" by R.F. Kuang.
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All CSB book clubs are no-pressure clubs, open to everyone. You can skip months when you are busy or don’t like the selection. New participants are welcome at any time!
The current month’s selected titles are 20% off when you mention the book club.