Roycroft Book Club

Hollywood, 1938: As soon as she learns that M-G-M is adapting her late husband’s masterpiece for the screen, seventy-seven-year-old Maud Gage Baum sets about trying to finagle her way onto the set. Nineteen years after Frank’s passing, Maud is the only person who can help the producers stay true to the spirit of the book—because she’s the only one left who knows its secrets. But the moment she hears Judy Garland rehearsing the first notes of “Over the Rainbow,” Maud recognizes the yearning that defined her own life story, from her youth as a suffragette’s daughter to her coming of age as one of the first women in the Ivy League, from her blossoming romance with Frank to the hardscrabble prairie years that inspired The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Judy reminds Maud of a young girl she cared for and tried to help in South Dakota, a dreamer who never got her happy ending. Now, with the young actress under pressure from the studio as well as her ambitious stage mother, Maud resolves to protect her—the way she tried so hard to protect the real Dorothy.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel’s doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.

2021
A Perfect Mother – By Aimee Malloy
Finding Dorothy – By Elizabeth Letts

2020
Little Women – By Louisa May Alcott
Inland – By Tea Obreht

2019
Pichinko – By Min Jin Lee
Educated: A Memoir – By Tara Westover
The Death of Mrs. Westaway – By Ruth Ware
The Dinner List – By Rebecca Serle
The Library Book – By Susan Orlean

2018
The Wonder – By Emma Donoghue
The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City: Spectacle and Assassination at the 1901 World’s Fair – By Margaret Creighton
The Handmaid’s Tale – By Margaret Atwood
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry – By Gabrielle Zevin
Killers of the Flower Moon – By David Grann
What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories – Laura Shaparo

2017
Commonwealth – By Ann Patchett
Underground Airlines – By Ben Winters
The Book of Speculation – By Erika Swyler
Leaving Before the Rains Come – By Alexandra Fuller
Grandma Gatewood’s Walk – By Ben Montgomery
The Lady in Gold – Anne-Marie O’Conner

2016
All the Light We Can Not See – By Anthony Doerr
West with the Night – By Beryl Markham
Shop Class as Soul Craft – By Matthew B. Crawford
The Alchemist – By Paulo Coelho
Station Eleven – By Emily St. John Mandel
A Fierce Radiance – By Lauren Belfer

 2015
Two in the Far North – By Margaret Murie
The Secret History of Wonder Woman – By Jill Lepore
Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy – By Diana Preston
Legendary Locals of East Aurora – By Rob Goller
Let the Great World Spin – By Colum McCann

2014
And the Mountains Echoed – By Khaled Hosseini
The Red Badge of Courage – By Stephen Crane
In the Garden of Beasts – By Erik Larson
Thomas Jefferson:The Art of Power – By Jon Meacham and Little Journeys:Thomas Jefferson – By Elbert Hubbard