Booksweet events are a great place to stay connected to your community, meet cool new people, and add a little bright spot to your week. Join us for our upcoming events in January!
Keep an eye on our calendar for additional events as we add them!
Book Clubs
We hope to invite a group of people who have read the book (or don’t mind a spoiler) to discuss their thoughts about the book (the plot, the characters, and anything else you want to discuss!). We will bring prompts but invite anyone to pose a question or share their thoughts!
After a fun discussion, the group votes on the next session’s read. Feel free to pitch an on-theme book you’ve enjoyed recently or want to read with the group.
While we will have water and light refreshments (including nut-free and gluten-free options), Booksweet is located in The Courtyard Shops, filled with AMAZING dining options. Food and drinks are totally welcome at the meet-up; don’t feel shy about sipping boba while we chat!
Your Eventbrite RSVP is so helpful to our planning. Hope to see you there!
Ann Arborville Horror Book Club
Friday, January 9, 7pm
Book: Nestlings by Nat Cassidy
Nat Cassidy is at his razor-sharp best again with his horror novel Nestlings, which harnesses the creeping paranoia of Rosemary’s Baby and the urban horror of Salem’s Lot, set in an exclusive New York City residential building.
Ana and Reid needed a lucky break.
The horrifically complicated birth of their first child has left Ana paralyzed, bitter, and struggling: with mobility, with her relationship with Reid, with resentment for her baby. That’s about to change with the words any New Yorker would love to hear—affordable housing lottery.
They’ve won an apartment in the Deptford, one of Manhattan’s most revered buildings with beautiful vistas of Central Park and stunning architecture.
Reid dismisses disturbing events and Ana’s deep unease and paranoia as the price of living in New York—people are odd—but he can’t explain the needle-like bite marks on the baby.
Other Worlds- A Sci-fi/Fantasy Book Club
Friday, January 16, 7pm
Book: The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
The New York Times bestselling first novel in the sensational Bone Season series, a heart-pounding epic fantasy by the author of The Priory of the Orange Tree.
Welcome to Scion. No safer place.
The year is 2059. For two centuries, the Republic of Scion has led an oppressive campaign against unnaturalness in Europe.
In London, Paige Mahoney holds a high rank in the criminal underworld. The right hand of the ruthless White Binder, Paige is a dreamwalker, a rare and formidable kind of clairvoyant. Under Scion law, she commits treason simply by breathing.
When Paige is arrested for murder, she meets the mysterious founders of Scion, who have designs on her uncommon abilities. If she is to survive and escape, Paige must use every skill at her disposal – and put her trust in someone who ought to be her enemy.
With its intricate worldbuilding, slow burn romance, and “complex, ever evolving, scrappy yet touching” (NPR) heroine, the Bone Season series shows Samantha Shannon at the height of her considerable powers.
(Book)Sweet on Romance Book Club!
Monday, January 26, 7pm
Book: Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun
A swoon-worthy sapphic romance following two women who are thrown together on a European adventure, from the Lambda Literary Award–winning author of the “sexy, insightful, and utterly charming” (BuzzFeed) Kiss Her Once for Me.
Thirty-five-year-old Seattleite Sadie Wells needs an escape. She’s desperate to escape her monotonous routines, the family business that has consumed her entire life, and the unexpected gay panic that has her questioning everything she thought she knew about herself. So when her injured sister offers Sadie her place on a tour along Portugal’s Camino de Santiago, she decides this is the perfect chance to get away from it all.
After three glasses of wine on the plane and some turbulence convince Sadie she won’t even survive the flight, she confesses all her secrets to her seatmate, Mal. The problem: the plane doesn’t crash, and it turns out Mal is on her Camino tour. Worst of all, Sadie learns that she is on a tour specifically for queer women, and that her two-hundred-mile trek will be a journey of self-discovery, whether she wants it to be or not.
Fascinated by the woman who drunkenly came out to her on the plane, Mal offers to help Sadie relive the queer adolescence she missed out on as they walk the Camino. As Sadie develops her newfound confidence, Mal grapples with a complicated loss and unexpected inheritance. But as their relationship blurs the lines between reality and practice, they both must decide if they will forever part at the end of the tour or chart a new course together.
With “funny, poignant” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) prose, Alison Cochrun explores the power of letting go of your past and realizing that it’s never too late to live as your authentic self.
Rainbows and Unicorns – An LGBTQ+ Book Club
Wednesday, January 28, 7pm
Book: Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian
A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.
Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.
In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.
Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.
Other Events
Author Event – Jihyun Yun Discusses And the River Drags Her Down
Saturday, January 3, 5pm
Jihyun Yun, author of the recent YA horror novel And the River Drags Her Down, will join us at Booksweet for a book reading and signing event!
About the Book
She has always known the rules – never resurrect anything larger than the palm of her hand, but that was before her sister died. A chilling, compulsive exploration of sisterhood, loss, and revenge.
When her older sister is found mysteriously drowned in the river that cuts through their small coastal town, Soojin Han disregards every rule and uses her ancestral magic to bring Mirae back from the dead. At first, the sisters are overjoyed, reveling in late-night escapades and the miracle of being together again, but Mirae grows tired of hiding from the world. She becomes restless and hungry . . .
Driven by an insatiable desire to finish what she started in life, to unravel the truth that crushed her family so many years ago, Mirae is out for revenge.
When their town is engulfed by increasingly destructive rain and a series of harrowing, unusual deaths, Soojin is forced to reckon with the fact that perhaps the sister she brought back isn’t the one she knew.
Author Event: Austin Channing Brown discusses Writing Workshops
Saturday, January 10, 2pm
Austin Channing Brown, author of the recent biography Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession, will join us at Booksweet to describe her upcoming writing workshop series, to include a one-hour overview and “ask me anything about publishing” Q&A event, followed by a book signing starting at 3pm!
Your Inside Voice: writing workshops with Austin Channing Brown, hosted by Booksweet
Austin will be hosting an ongoing writing workshop series in 2026, with monthly meetings at Booksweet beginning in January! The workshop schedule will be: January 27, February 24, March 24, and April 28.
Who’s the educator?
Austin Channing Brown is a Black woman author whose writing career started during the age of blogging. For four years she wrote compellingly about racial justice in America. In 2018 she published her first book, Im Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness which became a NYT and USA Today bestseller. It was also chosen for Reese’s Book Club and featured in the show Bel-Air. Austin also wrote a young readers version of Im Still Here. In 2025 she released Full of Myself: Black Womanhood and the Journey to Self-Possession. It also became a USA Today bestseller. In addition to publishing books, Austin writes a successful newsletter with more than 20,000 readers, and she is currently working on her next two book projects. Austin has a business management degree, a masters in social justice and has been awarded an honorary doctorate for her racial justice work and writing.
Author Event – Scott Ellsworth Discusses Midnight on the Potomac
Monday, January 12, 7pm
Scott Ellsworth, author of the recent Midnight on the Potomac, will join us at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital (1st Floor Auditorium*) for a discussion, book reading, and signing event!
About the Book
Midnight on the Potomac: The Last Year of the Civil War, the Lincoln Assassination, and the Rebirth of America is a new and revealing look at the last year of the Civil War and the assassination of President Lincoln. Based on extensive research in often overlooked historical sources, the book presents compelling evidence that our portrait of John Wilkes Booth has been seriously flawed, while a sweeping Union victory was far from assured even during the war’s final, fraught months. Hailed by the Wall Street Journal as “a suspenseful narrative brimming with engaging insights”; an Amazon Editors Pick for Best History, and #2 on the Civil War Monitor’s Best-Selling Civil war books of 2025, author Scott Ellsworth will set the stage for a re-examination of the last, climatic year of the nation’s bloodiest war.
Described by one reviewer as “a historian with the soul of a poet,” Scott Ellsworth is a New York Times bestselling author of five books, including the winner of a PEN Book Award and a National Book Award longlist. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he has written about American history for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times, and has appeared on the TODAY Show, PBS’s The American Experience, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, and other media outlets. He lives in Ann Arbor where, for the past eighteen years, he’s taught at the University of Michigan.
*1st Floor Auditorium, St. Joseph Mercy Hospital; Admin. Bldg. & Educ. Center, 5305 Elliott Dr., Ann Arbor, MI
Keep an eye on our calendar for additional events as we add them!