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Book Ends - The Briar Club In-Person

Join us for a discussion on The Briar Club (2024, Historical Fiction) by Kate Quinn (432 pages, 4.3 on Goodreads). This book was a Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Historical Fiction (2024).

A haunting and powerful story of female friendships and secrets in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse during the McCarthy era.

Washington, D.C., 1950. Everyone keeps to themselves at Briarwood House, a down-at-the-heels all-female boardinghouse in the heart of the nation’s capital, where secrets hide behind white picket fences. But when the lovely, mysterious widow Grace March moves into the attic, she draws her oddball collection of neighbors into unlikely friendship: poised English beauty Fliss whose facade of perfect wife and mother covers gaping inner wounds; police officer’s daughter Nora, who is entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Bea, whose career has ended along with the women’s baseball league of WWII; and poisonous, gung-ho Arlene, who has thrown herself into McCarthy’s Red Scare.

Grace’s weekly attic-room dinner parties and window-brewed sun tea become a healing balm on all their lives, but she hides a terrible secret of her own. When a shocking act of violence tears apart the house, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: Who is the true enemy in their midst?

Copies of the book will be distributed at the previous meeting and, afterward, are available by visiting the front desk at either Centerville or Woodbourne Library. The book is available in Regular Print, Large Print, eBook, and eAudiobook. No registration is necessary, but participants are encouraged to read the book prior to attending the discussion.