Upcoming Events
Composting 101: Turning Kitchen Food Scraps into Garden Gold With Master Composter Bob Lavorgna
One of the most significant steps we can take to reduce waste in our trash bins is to compost our food scraps. Removing food waste lowers the weight and amount of trash hauled to landfills and incinerators in and out of state.
Darn it—don’t throw it away! Give your favorite clothes a second life in this hands-on mending workshop led by Bristol, Connecticut instructor Dawn, also known as The Stitching Coach.
Join us for a relaxing get-together of fiber arts on the second Thursday of the month at 10:00 AM at the Barney Library, 71 Main Street.
News & Updates
What brings you joy? Whether it’s cozying up with a new story, learning a new skill, gathering with community or something else, you can find your joy at The Farmington Libraries.
The Passport to Connecticut Libraries Program invites you to visit all of the participating Connecticut public libraries. Take the opportunity to explore each library's architecture, ambiance and collection. The program is open to all ages!
Thank you to everyone who attended the 2026 Maker Fair! Each year, this event continues to grow, and this one was truly our best yet.
Community Archiving at the 2026 Maker Fair!
I’ve been talking for the last couple of months about the Farmington Room’s participation in our annual Maker Fair, so here I am one last time with more about the event!
New preservation kits
New Books
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Cherry Baby
#1 New York Times bestselling author Rainbow Rowell returns with a breathtakingly honest novel about a woman who lost everything -- and isn't sure she wants it back.
Everybody knows that Cherry's husband, Tom, is in Hollywood making a movie . . .
Almost nobody knows that he isn't coming home.
Tom is the creator of Thursday--a semi-autobiographical webcomic that's become an international phenomenon.
Semi-autobiographical. That means there's a character in this movie based on Cherry . . . "Baby."
Wide-hipped, heavy-chested, double-chinned Baby.
Cherry never wanted this. No fat girl wants to see herself caricatured on the page--let alone on the big screen. But there's no getting away from it. Baby looks so much like Cherry that strangers recognize her at the grocery store.
While her soon-to-be ex-husband is in Los Angeles getting rich and famous and being the internet's latest boyfriend, Cherry is stuck in Omaha taking care of the dog he always wanted and the house they were going to raise a family in . . . and wondering who she's supposed to be without him.
Cherry had promised to love Tom through thick and thin.
She'd meant it.
One night, Cherry decides to leave all her problems, including Tom's overgrown puppy, at home. She ventures out to see her favorite band play her favorite album . . . and someone recognizes her from across the room.
Russ Sutton knew Cherry when she was a young art student with a fondness for pin-up dresses and patent leather heels. Before Tom.
Russ knows Cherry. He likes Cherry.
And best of all . . . he's never heard of Thursday.
Tender, funny, and utterly human, Cherry Baby is Rainbow Rowell's richest, most surprising--sexiest--novel yet.
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The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton
A dual-timeline murder mystery set in an English country manor, when an ambitious professor discovers the long-lost manuscript of a Reformation-era prophetess
Historian Alison Sage has made a groundbreaking archival discovery—she found a manuscript containing the prophecies of a 16th century nun, Elizabeth Barton. Barton’s prophecy condemning Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn led to her execution and the destruction of all copies of her prophecies—or so the world believed.
With Alison’s discovery, she is catapulted to academic superstardom and scores an invitation to the exclusive Codex Consortium, a week of research among a select handful of fellow historians at a crumbling manor in England, located next to the ruins of the priory where Elizabeth herself once lived.
What begins as a promising conference turns into a nightmare as the eerie house becomes the site of a murder. Suddenly, everyone is a suspect, and it seems that answers lie at the root of a local legend about centuries-old hidden treasure. Alison’s research makes her best-suited to solve the mystery—but when old feelings resurface for a former colleague, and the stakes of the search skyrocket, everyone's motives become murky.
Alison’s cutthroat world of academia is almost as dangerous as Elizabeth Barton’s sixteenth-century England, where heretics are beheaded, visions can kill, and knowing who to trust is a deadly art. The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton is a thrilling novel, crackling with the voices of the past and propelled by a mystery that will leave readers in suspense until the very last page. -
The Take
A provocative, fast-paced novel about two creative women—a young writer fighting to be heard and an older producer clinging to relevancy—and the age reversal treatment that intertwines both of their lives…from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the beloved Front Desk series
Would you sell your youth for $3 million?
Maggie Wang, a broke young Asian American writer, needs a lifeline. Ingrid Parker, a veteran white Hollywood producer with her career on the edge, offers an irresistible deal: $3 million for ten experimental medical sessions to reverse her aging, using Maggie as a transfusion partner, and mentorship.
For Ingrid, it's a chance to reboot her fading career. For Maggie, it's access and freedom—money to support her parents and the connections to finally get her novel published.
What starts as a professional transaction exchanging blood quickly becomes a complex psychological dance. As Maggie gains unprecedented access to Ingrid's hard-earned wisdom, Ingrid sees in Maggie a weapon against an industry that's been trying to sideline her.
As their relationship intensifies, the rules around aging begin to shift. So does the balance of power between the two women, leaving both questioning who holds the upper hand and what they're willing to sacrifice to succeed.
Sharp, timely, and utterly compelling, The Take is perfect for readers of Yellowface and Such a Fun Age—a searing portrait of two women fighting to rewrite their story. -
The Patchwork Players
The cast of a smash TV show arrives at a quilter's retreat for a week of camaraderie and creativity that takes some surprising twists in this heartwarming new installment of Jennifer Chiaverini's much-beloved Elm Creek Quilts series.
Acclaimed TV actress Julia Merchaud almost can't believe her good fortune. Her beloved historical drama, A Patchwork Life, revived her career and made stars of several younger actors. But Julia's happiness turns to dismay when she learns that the hit show will have only one more season. Can she convince everyone to stay just a little longer?
Inspiration comes after a conversation with Summer Sullivan, one of the expert quilters who helped Julia prepare for her role. When Summer confides that Elm Creek Quilt Camp is in financial trouble, Julia concocts a brilliant plan that will help the Elm Creek Quilters and herself.
Julia sets about persuading the cast and crew to join her for what she promises will be a marvelous week at a luxurious nineteenth-century mansion amid the autumnal splendor of central Pennsylvania, a creative and dynamic working vacation they'll never forget. Secretly, she hopes the bonding experience will convince them to abandon their other plans and sign on for another few seasons. But after several joyful days of quilting and camaraderie, Julia's scheme takes an unexpected turn. Soon she'll have to make hard choices about which matters more--career or friendship.
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Problematic Summer Romance
The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!
What is wrong meets what feels right in this romance set in Italy by the New York Times bestselling author of Deep End.
Maya Killgore is twenty-three and still in the process of figuring out her life.
Conor Harkness is thirty-eight, and Maya cannot stop thinking about him.
It’s such a cliché, it almost makes her heart implode: older man and younger woman; successful biotech guy and struggling grad student; brother’s best friend and the girl he never even knew existed. As Conor loves to remind her, the power dynamic is too imbalanced. Any relationship between them would be problematic in too many ways to count, and Maya should just get over him. After all, he has made it clear that he wants her gone from his life.
But not everything is as it seems—and clichés sometimes become plot twists.
When Maya’s brother decides to get married in Taormina, she and Conor end up stuck together in a romantic Sicilian villa for over a week. There, on the beautiful Ionian coast, between ancient ruins, delicious foods, and natural caves, Maya realizes that Conor might be hiding something from her. And as the destination wedding begins to erupt out of control, she decides that a summer fling might be just what she needs—even if it’s a problematic one. -
How to Lose Your Mother
Instant New York Times Bestseller
“With propulsive humor and perspective on her annus horribilis, Jong-Fast achieves the memoir’s transformative work of alchemy, arming us all with lines so good you won’t just want to underline them, you will want to cut them out to share.” —The Washington Post
“This raw, intimate memoir is a stunning portrait of difficult relationships and how we survive them.” —People
“Molly Jong-Fast’s memoir is mesmerizing, intimate, wise, unputdownable, crazily honest, heartbreaking, funny, illuminating—beautiful and painful at the same time, just like real life.” —Anne Lamott
From the political writer and podcaster, a ferociously honest and disarmingly funny memoir about her elusive mother’s encroaching dementia and a reckoning with her complicated childhood
Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.
How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother–daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre. -
Atmosphere: A GMA Book Club Pick
GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones & The Six comes an epic new novel set against the backdrop of the 1980s space shuttle program about the extraordinary lengths we go to live and love beyond our limits.
“Thrilling . . . heartbreaking . . . uplifting . . . the fast-paced, emotionally charged story of one ambitious young woman, finding both her voice and her passion.”—Kristin Hannah, author of The Women
“NASA? Space missions? The ’80s? This is a collection of all the things I love.”—Andy Weir, author of Project Hail Mary and The Martian
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.
Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.
As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.
Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars. -
Say You'll Remember Me
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Just for the Summer comes a playful yet deeply emotional romance where one date is all it takes for two people to know they're perfect for each other . . . until one of them moves 2,000 miles away the next day.
There's no such thing as a perfect guy, but Xavier Rush comes disastrously close. A gorgeous veterinarian giving Greek god vibes--all while cuddling a tiny kitten? Immediate yes. That is until Xavier opens his mouth and proves that even sculpted gods can say the absolute wrong thing. Like, really wrong. Of course, there's nothing Samantha loves more than proving an asshole wrong . . . unless, of course, he can admit he made a mistake.
But after one incredible and seemingly endless date, Samantha is forced to admit the truth, that her family is in crisis and any kind of relationship would be impossible. Samantha begs Xavier to forget her. To remember their night together as a perfect moment, as crushing as that may be. Only no amount of distance or time is enough to forget what's between them. And the only thing better than one single perfect memory is to make a life--and even a love--worth remembering. -
One Golden Summer
A radiant escape to the lake from #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After and This Summer Will Be Different
As featured in People ∙ Good Morning America ∙ Cosmopolitan ∙ TODAY ∙ E! News ∙ Buzzfeed ∙ ELLE ∙ Us Weekly ∙ The New York Post ∙ SheReads ∙ and more!
I never anticipated Charlie Florek.
Good things happen at the lake. That’s what Alice’s grandmother says, and it’s true. Alice spent just one summer there at a cottage with Nan when she was seventeen—it’s where she took that photo, the one of three grinning teenagers in a yellow speedboat, the image that changed her life.
Now Alice lives behind a lens. As a photographer, she’s most comfortable on the sidelines, letting other people shine. Lately though, she’s been itching for something more, and when Nan falls and breaks her hip, Alice comes up with a plan for them both: another summer in that magical place, Barry’s Bay. But as soon as they settle in, their peace is disrupted by the roar of a familiar yellow boat, and the man driving it.
Charlie Florek was nineteen when Alice took his photo from afar. Now he’s all grown up—a shameless flirt, who manages to make Nan laugh and Alice long to be seventeen again, when life was simpler, when taking pictures was just for fun. Sun-slanted days and warm nights out on the lake with Charlie are a balm for Alice’s soul, but when she looks up and sees his piercing green gaze directly on her, she begins to worry for her heart.
Because Alice sees people—that’s why she is so good at what she does—but she’s never met someone who looks and sees her right back. -
The Names: A Read with Jenna Pick
READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY
“Beautiful, heart-wrenching, utterly original.” —Miranda Cowley Heller, bestselling author of The Paper Palace
The story of one family told three different ways, leading to three different fates—a dazzling debut that asks: Can a name shape the course of a life?
In the wake of an enormous, history-making storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the child after him. But when the registrar asks which name she wants to pick, Cora hesitates . . .
What follows are three alternate and alternating versions of both Cora’s and her young son’s life, shaped by her brave last-minute choice of name. Spanning thirty-five years, the novel draws us in from the first page, as we follow three unforgettable journeys of one young man, but also his mother, grandmother, and sister. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.
With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, and shows us what we each can do with the “one precious life” we are given. The Names’ brilliantly imaginative structure, its propulsive storytelling, and the emotional, gut-wrenching power of the book itself are certain to make it a modern classic.