Welcome to Book Bar's official Historical Fiction Book Club. For December, the selected book is Under the Stars by Beatriz Williams (book description is located at the bottom of this listing).
So come out, grab a drink at our beverage bar, and join us for a lively book discussion! When you purchase this book club pick from us, your support will help us be here for a long time and put on more events! Purchasing options are below:
In Store: Stop by our location at 50 N. Railroad St. in Palmyra, PA!
Shipped: To purchase from Bookshop and get it delivered straight to your door, order from the following link (If you purchase here, we will receive a percentage of this sale):
https://bookshop.org/a/98905/9780593724255
Ebook: Bookshop now offers Ebooks for indie booksellers. Find it here (we will receive a percentage of this sale):
https://bookshop.org/a/98905/9780593724262
Audiobook: You can purchase audiobooks from us on Libro.fm. This audiobook can be easily found on our Dec 2025 Book Club Picks playlist here (we will receive a percentage of the sale):
https://libro.fm/playlists/10478?bookstore=bookbarus
We look forward to seeing you!
Book Description:
Audrey Fisher has struggled all her life to emerge from the shadow of her famous mother by forging a career as a world-class chef. Meredith Fisher’s glamorous screen persona disguises the trauma of the tragic accident that haunts her dreams. Neither woman wants to return to the New England island they left behind and its complicated emotional ties, but Meredith has one last chance to sober up and salvage her big comeback, and where else but discreet, moneyed Winthrop Island can a famous actress spend the summer without the intrusion of other people? Until Audrey discovers an old wooden chest among the belongings of her estranged bartender father, Mike Kennedy, and the astonishing contents draw the women deep into Winthrop’s past and its many secrets…attracting the interest of their handsome neighbor, Sedge Peabody. How did a trove of paintings from one of America’s greatest artists wind up in the cellar of the Mohegan Inn? And who is the mysterious woman portrayed on every canvas?
On a stormy November night in 1846, Providence Dare flees Boston and boards the luxury steamship Atlantic one step ahead of the law….or so she believes. But when a catastrophic accident leaves the ship at the mercy of a mighty gale, Providence finds herself trapped in a deadly game of cat and mouse with the one man who knows her real identity—the detective investigating the suspicious death of her employer, the painter Henry Irving. As the Atlantic fights for her life and the rocky shore of Winthrop Island edges closer, a desperate Providence searches for her chance to escape…before the sea swallows her without a trace.
In Under the Stars, the destinies of three women converge across centuries, as a harrowing true disaster at the dawn of the steamship era evokes a complex legacy of family secrets in modern-day New England. Williams has written a timeless epic of mothers and daughters, of love lost and found, and of the truths that echo down generations.