Books on Tap - Stratford, CT

Home
United States
Stratford, CT
Books on Tap - Stratford, CT

Books, brews, and banter Tuesdays; coordinated by the Stratford Library The "hoppiest" book group in town!

Stratford librarians Lauren & Beth are hosting a new book discussion group at The Sitting Duck Tavern (3694 Main Street, Stratford, CT) or Zoom. We'll meet one Tuesday a month from 7:00pm to 8:30pm to discuss offbeat books and enjoy local brews. (Participants pick up the tab for their own food and drink.) To get a copy of the book of the month, stop by Stratford Library at 2203 Main Street. We hav

e print, audio, and Kindle versions available at the checkout desk. You can also download the books to your own smartphone or tablet by downloading the free OverDrive app!

06/01/2026

Tomorrow's Books on Tap is postponed until Next Tuesday June 9th due to a scheduling conflict. I apologize. See everyone next week.

04/29/2026

Join us for the next BOT Tuesday, June 2nd at Riverview Bistro, 946 Ferry Blvd, Stratford, CT 06614. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. We will be discussing Tilt by Emma Pattee. Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.

For more information: https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/16810049

Book Synopsis:

Set over the course of a single day, an electrifying debut novel from “a powerful new literary voice” (Vogue) following one woman’s journey across a transformed city, carrying the weight of her past and a fervent hope for the future.

“Utterly gripping.” —NPR, All Things Considered

Last night, you and I were safe. Last night, in another universe, your father and I stood fighting in the kitchen.

Annie is nine months pregnant and shopping for a crib at IKEA when a massive earthquake hits Portland, Oregon. With no way to reach her husband, no phone or money, and a city left in chaos, there’s nothing to do but walk.

Making her way across the wreckage of Portland, Annie experiences human desperation and kindness: strangers offering help, a riot at a grocery store, and an unlikely friendship with a young mother. As she walks, Annie reflects on her struggling marriage, her disappointing career, and her anxiety about having a baby. If she can just make it home, she’s determined to change her life.

“Shocking and full of heart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), Tilt is a “moving adrenaline rush” (The New York Times Book Review) and “epic odyssey” (NPR) about the disappointments and desires we all carry, and what each of us will do for the people

03/05/2026

Join us for a casual, and unique book discussion on Tuesday, April 14th at Riverview Bistro, 946 Ferry Blvd, Stratford, CT 06614. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. We will be discussing Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton. Copies are available at the checkout desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.
For more information: https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/16526596

Book Synopsis:
Imagine you could hold a baby hare and bottle-feed it. Imagine that it lived under your roof and lolloped around your bedroom at night, drumming on the duvet cover when it wanted your attention. Imagine that, over two years later, it still ran in from the fields when you called it and slept in your house for hours on end and gave birth to leverets in your study. For political advisor and speechwriter Chloe Dalton, who spent lockdown deep in the English countryside, far away from her usual busy London life, this became her unexpected reality.

In February 2021, Dalton stumbles upon a newborn hare—a leveret—that had been chased by a dog. Fearing for its life, she brings it home, only to discover how impossible it is to rear a wild hare, most of whom perish in captivity from either shock or starvation. Through trial and error, she learns to feed and care for the leveret with every intention of returning it to the wilderness. Instead, it becomes her constant companion, wandering the fields and woods at night and returning to Dalton’s house by day. Though Dalton feared that the hare would be preyed upon by foxes, stoats, feral cats, raptors, and even people, she never tried to restrict it to the house. Each time the hare leaves, Chloe knows she may never see it again. Yet she also understands that to confine it would be its own kind of death.

Raising Hare chronicles their journey together, while also taking a deep dive into the lives and nature of hares, and the way they have been viewed historically in art, literature, and folklore. We witness first-hand the joy at this extraordinary relationship between human and animal, which serves as a reminder that the best things, and most beautiful experiences, arise when we least expect them.

01/22/2026

Our next book discussion will be on Tuesday, March 3rd at Riverview Bistro, 946 Ferry Blvd, Stratford, CT 06614. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. We will be discussing Audition by Katie Kitamura. Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.

To register and more information:
https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/16268921

Book Synopsis:

One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

01/14/2026

We will meet next Tuesday 01/20 at Riverview Bistro, 946 Ferry Blvd, Stratford, CT. See you at 7pm

01/12/2026

Join our next book discussion on Tuesday, January 20th. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. We will be discussing Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks. Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.

Location will be announced ASAP.

For more information: https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/16180927

Book Synopsis:

A heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on Memorial Day 2019, Geraldine received the phone call we all dread. The demands were immediate and many. Without space to grieve, the sudden loss became a yawning gulf.

Three years later, she booked a flight to a remote island off the coast of Australia with the intention of finally giving herself the time to mourn. In a shack on a pristine, rugged coast she often went days without seeing another person. There, she pondered the various ways in which cultures grieve and what rituals of her own might help to rebuild a life around the void of Tony’s death.

A spare and profoundly moving memoir that joins the classics of the genre, Memorial Days is a portrait of a larger-than-life man and a timeless love between souls that exquisitely captures the joy, agony, and mystery of life.

12/02/2025

We will meet next Tuesday 12/09 at Two Roads, 1700 Stratford Ave, Stratford, CT. See you at 7pm

11/18/2025

BOT goes on Tour of Stratford - Run for the Hills by Kevin Wilson. Tuesday, December 9, 2025.

Join us at Two Roads, 1700 Stratford Ave, Stratford, CT. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.

For More information and to register:
https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/15198309

Book Synopsis:

Ever since her dad left them twenty years ago, it’s been just Madeline Hill and her mom on their farm in Coalfield, Tennessee. While it’s a bit lonely, she sometimes admits, and a less exciting life than what she imagined for herself, it’s mostly okay. Mostly.

Then one day Reuben Hill pulls up in a PT Cruiser and informs Madeline that he believes she’s his half sister. Reuben—left behind by their dad thirty years ago—has hired a detective to track down their father and a string of other half siblings. And he wants Mad to leave her home and join him for the craziest kind of road trip imaginable to find them all.

As Mad and Rube—and eventually the others—share stories of their father, who behaved so differently in each life he created, they begin to question what he was looking for with every new incarnation. Who are they to one another? What kind of man will they find? And how will these new relationships change Mad’s previously solitary life on the farm?

Infused with deadpan wit, zany hijinks, and enormous heart, Run for the Hills is a sibling story like no other—a novel about a family forged under the most unlikely circumstances and united by hope in an unknown future.

08/26/2025

Join us for our next meeting

Date: Tuesday, October 7th.
Place: Whiskey Barrel, 251 East Main St, Stratford, CT.
Time: 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm.
Book: Catalina by Karla Cornejo Vllavicencio.

Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.
For more information and to register: https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/15198296

Book Synopsis:

When Catalina is admitted to Harvard, it feels like the fulfillment of destiny: a miracle child escapes death in Latin America, moves to Queens to be raised by her undocumented grandparents, and becomes one of the chosen. But nothing is simple for Catalina, least of all her own complicated, contradictory, ruthlessly probing mind. Now a senior, she faces graduation to a world that has no place for the undocumented; her sense of doom intensifies her curiosities and desires. She infiltrates the school’s elite subcultures—internships and literary journals, posh parties and secret societies—which she observes with the eye of an anthropologist and an interloper’s skepticism: she is both fascinated and repulsed. Craving a great romance, Catalina finds herself drawn to a fellow student, an actual budding anthropologist eager to teach her about the Latin American world she was born into but never knew, even as her life back in Queens begins to unravel. And every day, the clock ticks closer to the abyss of life after graduation. Can she save her family? Can she save herself? What does it mean to be saved?

Brash and daring, part campus novel, part hagiography, part pop song, Catalina is unlike any coming-of-age novel you’ve ever read—and Catalina, bright and tragic, circled by a nimbus of chaotic energy, driven by a wild heart, is a character you will never forget.

07/21/2025

The next BOT is Tuesday, August 19th @ 7pm

We meet at the Whiskey Barrel, 251 East Main St, Stratford, CT. We will meet at 7:00pm and then start our discussion at 7:30pm. Please tell all your friends this is so exciting. We will be discussing The Sing Sing Files by Dan Slepian. Copies are available at the check out desk. Let me know if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing everyone.

For more and information and to register: https://stratfordlibrary.libcal.com/event/14443287

Book Synopsis:

In 2002, Dan Slepian, a veteran producer for NBC’s Dateline, received a tip from a Bronx homicide detective that would change his life. Two men were serving twenty-five years to life in prison for a murder in 1990, the cop said, and he knew for a fact that they did not commit that crime.

Haunted by what he had heard, Slepian began an investigation that eventually led to freedom for those two men, and launched him on a two-decade personal and professional journey through a system fiercely resistant to rectifying—or even acknowledging—its mistakes and their consequences.

The Sing Sing: One Journalist, Six Innocent Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice is an investigative journalist’s account of how he took on that system and of the years of prison visits, court hearings and powerful Dateline reporting it took to bring justice to those two men and four others imprisoned for crimes they did not commit. It is also the story of the deep and lasting friendships Slepian formed with the men whose cases he pursued, and how one of them—Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez—provided aid and counsel to him from his cell in Sing Sing prison until his own release in 2021 after decades behind bars.

Like Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy, The Sing Sing Files is a deeply personal account of wrongful imprisonment and the enormous effort required to redress it, and a powerful argument for reckoning and accountability. This extraordinary book, at once painful and full of hope, shines a light on a kind of injustice whose consequences we have only begun to confront.
Less

Address

Stratford, CT

Telephone

(203) 385-4164

Website

http://stratfordlibrary.org/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Books on Tap - Stratford, CT posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Want your organization to be the top-listed Government Service in Stratford?