OutBook Book Club

The OutBook Book Club is supported by the Palm Springs Public Library. Selections are chosen by group members and highlight a mix of new LGBTQ+ releases and influential classics.

OutBook meets on the first Wednesday of the month at the LGBTQ+ Community Center of the Desert at at 6:00- 8:00 p.m. There are no meetings in August and September. For questions and information about the OutBook Book Club, please email book club coordinator Hubertus Zegers in advance of the meeting.

OutBook OutLoud is a speakers series connected to OutBook providing opportunities to engage with LGBTQ+ authors nationwide. If you're an author and/or know someone who might be a great speaker—please contact Hubertus Zegers.

Most titles are available as Downloadable Audiobooks and/or eBooks from PSPL.

February 3, 2027

The Recent East by Thomas Grattan

—Finalist for the 2022 Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

—Longlisted for the PEN/Hemmingway Award for Debut Novel 

Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Beate Haas, who defected from East Germany as a child, is notified that her parents’ abandoned mansion is available for her to reclaim. Newly divorced and eager to escape her bleak life in upstate New York, where she has lived as an adult, she arrives with her two teenagers to discover a city that has become an unrecognizable ghost town. The move fractures the siblings’ close relationship, as Michael, free to be gay, takes to looting empty houses and partying with wannabe anarchists, while Adela, fascinated with the horrors of the Holocaust, buries herself in books and finds companionship in a previously unknown cousin. Over time, the town itself changes, too―from dismantled city to refugee haven and neo-Nazi hotbed, and eventually to a desirable seaside resort town. In the midst of that change, two episodes of devastating, fateful violence come to define the family forever.

Moving seamlessly through decades and between the thoughts and lives of several unforgettable characters, Thomas Grattan’s spellbinding novel The Recent East is a multigenerational epic that illuminates what it means to leave home, and what it means to return. Masterfully crafted with humor, gorgeous prose, and a powerful understanding of history and heritage, The Recent East is the profoundly affecting story of a family upended by displacement and loss, and the extraordinary debut of an empathetic and ambitious storyteller.

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