LYNCHBURG, Tenn. — The Moore County Public Library’s Brown Bag Book Club is back on the fourth Friday of the month, and May’s pick is Prayers for Sale by Sandra Dallas, a New York Times bestselling novel set against the hard winters and close-knit bonds of a Depression-era Colorado mining town.

Dallas — a Colorado native whose fiction is rooted in the American West — has built a devoted following for her warmly rendered stories of women navigating loss, hardship, and friendship across the region’s history. Prayers for Sale is among her most celebrated works, and it’s easy to understand why.

The novel centers on Hennie Comfort, an 86-year-old woman who has lived in the isolated mountain town of Middle Swan for decades and is finally preparing to leave. When a young bride named Nit Spindle arrives — newlywed, homesick, and trying to find her footing in a place that has worn down harder people — the two form an unlikely friendship. Over cups of coffee and long winter afternoons, Hennie shares the story of her life: the grief that brought her to Middle Swan, the love that kept her there, and the secrets she’s carried across a century.

Dallas writes with the kind of quiet authority that comes from deep familiarity with her subject — the rhythms of small-town life, the particular grit of mountain winters, and the way women in isolated communities built their own forms of community and resilience. The novel is less concerned with plot twists than with the texture of a life fully lived, and the way stories passed between generations can carry both comfort and reckoning.

For a book club, it’s rich territory: the nature of friendship across age gaps, what it means to belong to a place, how women preserved community in circumstances that worked against it, and what we owe each other in the telling of our own stories.

The group will meet Friday, May 29, at 1 p.m. at the Moore County Public Library, located at 17 Majors Boulevard in Lynchburg. For more information about upcoming book club picks or library events, visit the library’s Facebook page. •

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