The History Book Group will discuss Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” at 6:30 p.m. Thurs. June 20th on the 2^nd floor of the library. In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of The Troubles. The violence affected not only people like McConville’s children, but also members of the Irish Republican Army embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united country. “Say Nothing” chronicles the conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath.

The Friday Book Group will meet at 2:00 p.m. Fri. June 21st on the 2^nd floor of the library to discuss Rachel Kadish’s “The Weight of Ink.” Set in London of the 1660s and of the early twenty-first century, “The Weight of Ink” is the interwoven tale of two women: Ester Velasquez, an emigrant from Amsterdam who is permitted to scribe for a blind rabbi; and Helen Watt, an ailing historian with a love of Jewish history. Helen is summoned by a former student to view a cache of seventeenth-century Jewish documents newly discovered in his home during a renovation. Enlisting the help of an American graduate student, Helen embarks on one last project: to determine the identity of the documents’ scribe, the elusive “Aleph.”

The Happy Hour Book Group will meet at Rubaiyat on Wed. July 17^th at 5:15 p.m. to discuss Francisco Cantú’s “The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches from the Border.” As part of the Border Patrol, Francisco Cantú and his partners learned to track other humans, hauling in the dead and delivering to detention those they found alive. Plagued by nightmares, he eventually abandoned the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú decides that he must know the whole story.

August meetings will not be held for the Happy Hour Book Group or the History Book Group. Monthly meetings for both groups will resume in September.

For more information, contact Carmen Buss (Friday Book Group) or Kristin Torresdal (Happy Hour and History Book Groups) at 563-382-3717.

The History Book Group will discuss Nathaniel Philbrick’s “In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex” at 6:30 p.m. Thurs. July 18^th on the 2^nd floor of the library. In 1820, the Essex set sail from Nantucket on a routine voyage for whales. Fifteen months later, in the farthest reaches of the South Pacific, it was repeatedly rammed and sunk by an eighty-ton sperm whale. Its twenty-man crew, fearing cannibals on the islands to the west, made for the 3,000-mile-distant coast of South America in three tiny boats. During ninety days at sea, the survivors clung to life as one-by-one, they succumbed to hunger, thirst, disease, and fear.

August meetings will not be held for the Happy Hour Book Group or the History Book Group. Monthly meetings for both groups will resume in September.

For more information, contact Carmen Buss (Friday Book Group) or Kristin Torresdal (Happy Hour and History Book Groups) at 563-382-3717.

The Friday Book Group will meet at 2:00 p.m. Fri. July 19^th on the 2^nd floor of the library to discuss Martha Hall Kelly’s “Lilac Girls.” The lives of three women in 1939—New York socialite Caroline Ferriday, who has a post at the French consulate; Kasia Kuzmerick, a Polish teenager who works as courier for the underground resistance movement; and Herta Oberheuser, an ambitious young German doctor—are set on a collision course when Kasia is sent to Ravensbrück, the notorious Nazi concentration camp for women. Their stories cross continents as Caroline and Kasia strive to bring justice to those whom history has forgotten.

For more information, contact Carmen Buss (Friday Book Group) or Kristin Torresdal (Happy Hour and History Book Groups) at 563-382-3717.