Name: Downtown Book Club: The Briar Club
Start: 2026-04-09T18:00:00-05:00
Location: The Creamery Arts Center

Join the Downtown Book Club every second Thursday of the month at 6 p.m. in the Creamery Arts Center Arts Library.
April’s read is "The Briar Club" by Kate Quinn.
This is the Springfield-Greene County Library’s One Read. Almost every book discussion group with the library is reading the same book at the same time, including the Downtown Book Club! The library also has several activities happening associated with the book and the author Kate Quinn will visit Springfield on April 23 at 7 p.m. in the new Library Center Hatch Auditorium. You can learn more about the activities and getting tickets for the author visit at www.thelibrary.org/oneread/2026.
BOOK DESCRIPTION: Washington, DC, 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 room, 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; policeman’s daughter Nora, who finds herself entangled with a shadowy gangster; frustrated baseball star Beatrice, whose career has come to an end 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 the house apart, the Briar Club women must decide once and for all: who is the true enemy in their midst?
Capturing the paranoia of the McCarthy era and evoking the changing roles for women in postwar America, The Briar Club is an intimate and thrilling novel of secrets and loyalty put to the test.