Book Club Kits

In 2027, August Helm is working as a biochemist at the University of Chicago. After he finds out about a liaison between the director of his lab and a much younger student, his position is eliminated. With his world in shambles, August goes to visit his parents in Wisconsin, where he reconnects with old friends, takes a job in a gated community, and falls madly in love with a woman whose revelations will change everything.

On the eve of her fortieth birthday, Alice's life isn't terrible... but if she could live it all again, is there anything that she would change if she could? When she wakes up the next morning somehow back in 1996, in her 16-year-old-body, she has the chance to find out. 

A discarded painting in a junk pile, a skeleton in an attic, and the greatest racehorse in American history: from these strands, a Pulitzer Prize winner braids a sweeping story of spirit, obsession, and injustice across American history.

A charmingly eccentric hotel maid discovers a guest murdered in his bed, turning her once orderly world upside down--and inspiring a motley crew of unexpected allies to band together to solve the mystery.

A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir by Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy about her struggles as a former child actor--including eating disorders, addiction, and a complicated relationship with her overbearing mother--and how she retook control of her life.

The story of two wealthy New Yorkers in the 1920s, and at what cost they have acquired their immense fortune, is at the center of Bonds, a fictional novel that exists in conversation with the narrative of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction in this novel about money, power, intimacy, and perception that spans over a century.

A young poet tells the inspiring story of his migration from El Salvador to the United States at the age of nine in this "gripping memoir" (NPR) of bravery, hope, and finding family.  
 

They've spent their lives as assassins in a clandestine international organization, but at 60 years old, four women find they can't just retire - it's kill or be killed. 

One lapse in judgment lands Frida Liu, a 39-year-old Chinese-American single mother in Philadelphia, in a government reform program where bad mothers are retrained using robot doll children with artificial intelligence, and custody of her 18-month-old daughter Harriet hangs in the balance.

Five summers to fall in love. One moment to fall apart. A weekend to get it right. A magazine writer has to make a choice when she returns to the lake she grew up on, and to the man she thought she'd never have to live without.

True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history final, and have doctors, politicians, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers into the halls of a residential school for the deaf in a story of sign language and lip-reading, cochlear implants and civil rights, isolation and injustice, first love and loss, and, above all, great persistence, daring, and joy. 

Wisconsin state judge Jason Erickson finds himself embroiled in several high-stakes ethical dilemmas involving powerful political figures, groundwater polluters, a corrupt developer, and his feelings for Tara, a married environmental journalist, in this thrilling mystery set against the rich beauty of black spruces, white pines, and austere Upper Midwest lakes.

Two estranged siblings must set aside their differences to deal with their mother's death and her hidden past--a journey of discovery that takes them from the Caribbean to London to California and ends with her famous black cake. 

A luminous debut novel about a widow's unlikely friendship with a giant Pacific octopus reluctantly residing at the local aquarium-and the truths she finally uncovers about her son's disappearance 30 years ago.

Bodie Kane, a successful film professor and podcaster, must reckon with her past when new details surface about a tragedy at her elite New England boarding school.

Inspired by true events that rocked the nation, a searing and compassionate novel about a Black nurse in post-segregation Alabama who blows the whistle on a terrible injustice done to her patients.

In an inspiring follow-up to her acclaimed memoir Becoming, former First Lady Michelle Obama shares practical wisdom and powerful strategies for staying hopeful and balanced in today's highly uncertain world.

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn't know what happened to her--only that her books have been banned--and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her.

An electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself--a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America, set in Milwaukee.

Luz "Little Light" Lopez, a tea leaf reader and laundress, is left to fend for herself after her older brother, Diego, a snake charmer and factory worker, is run out of town by a violent white mob. As Luz navigates 1930s Denver, she begins to have visions that transport her to her Indigenous homeland in the nearby Lost Territory.