More Book Club Books (2/5/25)

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Posted on by Hallie Young

Get together with your community with these amazing books for your book club!

SIKE by Fred Lunzer
9781250343123 | 5/20/25

Adrian earns his living writing lyrics for rappers he never meets, and finds success with a hit song about his own fruitless search for love. After his last relationship ends in a spiral of angst, Adrian decides it’s time to try Sike: the new lauded and elite AI psychotherapy app that tracks your every move and emotion, and guides you toward mental contentment.
He soon falls for Maquie, a smart and pragmatic venture capitalist scouring London’s tech scene for the next business boom. She can see no potential investments though, nothing sparkles. She wants to find a business as successful as Sike, and yet she is also one of the holdouts who refuse to use it. Shifting between Adrian and Maquie’s perspectives as it tracks the fraught first year of their relationship, SIKE is a story of two people wrestling with connection, identity, anxiety, success, and the limits of our obsession with self-analysis and awareness.

DOMINION by Addie E. Citchens
9780374609337 | 8/19/25

Reverend Sabre Winfrey, shepherd of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, believes in God, his own privilege, and enterprise. Besides the barbershop and radio station he owns, he has an iron hand on every aspect of Dominion, Mississippi, society. He and his wife, Priscilla, have five boys; the youngest, Emanuel, is called Wonderboy—no one sings prettier, runs as fast, or turns as many heads. After a surprising encounter with a stranger, Wonderboy finds himself confronted by questions he’d never imagined, and his response will send shockwaves through the entire community. Told from the point of view of the women who love these two men, DOMINION illustrates how we enable the everyday violence and casual sins of the patriarchy.
A Black Southern family drama that deals as much in tenderness and humor as it does in brutality, Addie E. Citchens’s DOMINION reveals the many sinister ways in which we are shaped by fear and patriarchy.

HAPPINESS FOREVER by Adelaide Faith
9780374608668 | 5/13/25

Sylvie is in love with her therapist; she thinks about her every second they’re not together (roughly 167 hours and 10 minutes per week). In that room, Sylvie is able to talk about everything. Her true pleasures, which include hitting a piñata so the candy falls out, and her thoughts about the false hope promised by eighties music and what a dog’s inner life is really like. She’s aware she has an obsession, but whether it’s extreme transference, “erotic transference,” or a lost person’s need to connect, Sylvie isn’t sure.
Sylvie has what she considers to be a small life: a job as a veterinary nurse, companionship from her tattooist friend via text, and her little brain-damaged dog, Curtains. One day, she meets Chloe, who understands Sylvie completely. Chloe becomes her friend that day and for the rest of her life. When the therapist delivers devastating news, Sylvie has to imagine new and lasting ways of coping (that don’t include being adopted by the therapist). Her world has begun to open up, inching beyond the pain, confusion, and fear that have confined her, and she must decide whether she’s ready for a bravery of feeling.
With irresistible charm and a rare, warm wit, HAPPINESS FOREVER is one woman’s search inside—and for—herself. In this stunning debut, Adelaide Faith encapsulates the great vulnerability, difficulty, and joy of being a person and of being alive.

LUSH by Rochelle Dowden-Lord
9781639736591 | 5/27/25

Four wine experts receive a mysterious invitation to an exclusive weekend tasting at a famous French vineyard. Avery is a cash-strapped sommelier and wine social media influencer; Sonny, a rich American who owns a popular but unimpressive wine brand; Maëlys, a French food and drink critic; and Cosmo, a sommelier who is one of the youngest Masters in the world.
It seems at first that these four have little in common except for their love of wine and their belief in its transformative power. But, as the quartet awaits the penultimate night of the trip, when they will taste the only bottle of one of the rarest wines in the world, it becomes clear that each of them grapples with a private crisis and projects their ultimate hopes and fears onto the contents of this bottle, a bottle rendered divine by age and scarcity.
 
Unfolding over several days of indulgence in delicious food and drink, raucous debauchery, and transformative truths that will leave each character changed forever, LUSH is a sensuous tour of the wine industry’s extreme pleasures and pains, a captivating summer read that, like a fine vintage, will linger long after you’ve finished turning the pages.

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