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. Or, you can join The R Club Online.
BOOKCLUB DATES FOR 2025
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
To join, choose the session time that suits you best below and click on Add to Cart to pay and join for 2025! Please note, some session times are sold out and will not appear below.
2025 CALENDAR
Expression of Interest
Please register your interest below if your preferred group is unavailable and Riverbend staff will notify you when space opens up in one of the groups you've selected.
Please note: joining our bookclubs requires an annual membership fee of $120, to be paid before you start in order to secure your place.
Reading for NOVEMBER
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties - successful, competent and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women - his enduring first love Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret, an older woman emerging from her own turbulent past, and their lives become rapidly and intensely intertwined.
For two grieving brothers and the people they love, this is a new interlude - a period of desire, despair and possibility - a chance to find out how much one life might hold inside itself without breaking.
Reading for FEBRUARY
Same as it ever was by Claire Lombardo
At fifty-seven, Julia Ames has found herself with an improbably lovely life. Despite her inclination towards self-sabotage, she has a husband she loves, two happy children and a quiet, contented existence in the suburbs.
But, out of the blue, things begin to change.
Her always well-behaved son, Ben, is acting strangely, and will soon make a shocking announcement.
Her beloved but belligerent teenage daughter is about to depart for college, leaving Julia unexpectedly terrified of an empty nest.
And, in the local grocery store, Julia encounters a woman she hasn't seen for 20 years - a woman whose friendship was once both her lifeline and, very nearly, her downfall.
Consumed with her checkered past and the chaos of her present, Julia starts to spin out of control, at risk of destroying all she most loves.
Following Julia over the course of a few tumultuous months, bookended by a birthday party and a wedding, and examining the fifty-plus years before, Same as It Ever Was examines the complete and complicated trajectory of one woman's life and asks what it takes to make - and to not break - a family.
What we've read recently:
Facilitated by
Britt Knudsen
Vicky Tosh
LAURA SWEENEY