The Riverbend Readers Book Club

For Riverbend Readers Book Club members, please scroll down to find out what your current and next book club books are. You will also find a calendar of dates and the list of books that you've read over the past year. For guests, please feel free to peruse the Riverbend Readers page, and fill out an Expression of Interest form if you would like to join the Riverbend Readers waiting list.

Keep in mind that if you live outside Brisbane and cannot physically attend our book clubs, you can still read the books! Sign up for our Book of the Month program and receive the latest offering from Riverbend Readers.

TO JOIN, CHOOSE YOUR PREFERED SESSION TIME BELOW!*

*BOOKCLUB WILL OPEN FOR BOOKINGS AGAIN IN JANUARY!

BOOKCLUB DATES FOR 2027

Mondays - 6pm and 7:30pm | Tuesdays - 10am, 6pm, and 7:30pm | Wednesdays - 10am, 1pm, 6pm, and 7:30pm | Thursdays - 6pm and 7:30pm | Sundays 2pm

2026 CALENDAR

Reading for October

JOHN OF JOHN BY DOUGLAS STUART

From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father's expectations and a son's desires. 

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted. 

John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.

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