Named in honor of Political Science Professor Emerita Ruth W. Grant, who used fiction as a staple in her courses on ethics and political theory, this program supports Duke alumni book clubs.
Ruth W. Grant book clubs create space for Duke alumni to build community and deepen their engagement with the intellectual life of the University through regional book clubs. Clubs select a book to read and are then paired with a Duke professor who leads a discussion of the book with the club.
If you have interest in starting an alumni book club, please contact Margaret Campbell Krause at margaret.campbell@duke.edu.
Current Book Selection
Our book selections for 2025–2026 encompass a wide range of themes: climate change and its global impacts, war, racial injustice, and personal and familial connections to place.
Short descriptions are provided below. You can also click on the cover image to visit the publisher’s website for more information about each book.
In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Briefly Very Beautiful is a magnetic novel about love and resilience. Against a wider backdrop of a world imploding, it is an exploration of hope and fear, beauty and joy, as well as seismic betrayal.
When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. This book was also selected as the Duke Common Experience reading for the Class of 2029.
Is climate change today rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism? At the center of Amitav Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our current environmental crisis.
America is in upheaval, battered by violent weather and extreme politics. Join a group of ecologists as their intertwined odysseys unfold against a stark backdrop of accelerating chaos. As their stories hurtle toward a spectacular climax, each faces a reckoning: what will they sacrifice to salvage humanity’s last chance at a future?
When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. This magisterial and highly inventive novel follows the cycles of history, nature, and even language. North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another and asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?
A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, they all must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late―and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.
Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, in 1865, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the same school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Charles envisions a future away from the institutional violence that has followed his bloodline.
Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. After being selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, the new astronauts become unlikely friends, and Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.
In India’s Malabar Coast, three generations of a family suffer a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere.
A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, "The Covenant of Water" is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the difficulties undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today.
Rosalie Iron Wing returns to her childhood home in a search for family, identity, and a community where she can finally belong. She learns what it means to be descended from women with souls of iron—women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools. "The Seed Keeper" is a beautifully told story of reawakening, of remembering our original relationship to the seeds and, through them, to our ancestors.
List by Title and Author
“Briefly Very Beautiful” by Roz Dineen
“James” by Percival Everett
“The Nutmeg’s Curse” by Amitav Ghosh
“The Deluge” by Stephen Markley
“North Woods” by Daniel Mason
“Wild Dark Shore” by Charlotte McConaghy
“Wandering Stars” by Tommy Orange
“Atmosphere” by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“The Covenant of Water” by Abraham Verghese
“The Seed Keeper” by Diane Wilson
About the Book Clubs’ Namesake
Ruth W. Grant is Professor Emerita of Political Science at Duke University, specializing in political theory with a particular interest in early modern philosophy and political ethics. She is the author of "John Locke's Liberalism and of Hypocrisy" and "Integrity: Machiavelli, Rousseau and the Ethics of Politics." Her most recent book is "Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives."
