
We know how difficult it is to choose a book for your next book group meeting, and to find enough copies for all the members of your group. We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag. We've included discussion questions and information about each author in a folder for each collection.
There are at least 8 copies of the book in each kit. At this time we have over 400 kits for you to choose from.
Printable lists of titles are also available, without cover art, sorted by title and by author.
How can we get a kit?
Call us at 608-266-6300 and we will help you check out a kit. The kit will be checked out on the library card of the person picking them up. The person checking out the kit may choose a due date for the kit, up to 3 months from the day they pick it up. Due to high demand, please take only one or two kits at a time. Kits can be shipped to any library in Madison as well as any public library in the South Central Library System.
What if a book is lost?
If your group happens to lose a book, we ask that you replace it with another copy of the book, new or second hand, that is clean and readable.
Search our collection of kits
Crescent
An Iraqi-American is the chef at a small Los Angeles café, where Arab-Americans come to feel at home. A folkloric family story is interwoven with this contemporary tale of love, food and home.
Olive Kitteridge
This ‘novel in stories,’ set in small town Maine, centers on Olive Kitteridge, a difficult-to-like retired teacher and her friends and acquaintances. Together they reveal their follies, foibles, difficulties and capacity for change.
Call Me By Your Name
Call Me by Your Name is the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during the restless summer weeks that follow, unrelenting buried currents of obsession and fear, fascination and desire, intensify their passion as they test the charged ground between them.
For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance
In a series of essays, women writers of all ages discuss the impact of time and illness on their bodies and the process of taking control of their body image.
Away
Lillian Leyb, survivor of a Russian massacre, immigrates to New York in 1924. Upon learning her 3-year-old daughter may still be alive, she journeys across North America through the Yukon wilderness and over the Bering Strait to find her.
Loving Frank
A fictionalized portrayal of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright, and the scandal it created.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Kingsolver and her family eat only local food for a year, including home-raised turkeys and chickens and garden grown and canned veggies.
Run
Adoption, race, class, and family are explored in this novel about three brothers and their widowed father.
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
The story of Jan Zabinsky, the director of the Warsaw zoo, and his wife Antonina, who sheltered 300 Jews and Polish resisters in the zoo's cages and sheds during WWII.
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
A humorous, gritty, autobiographical novel of a budding cartoonist, who leaves his troubled school on a Spokane Indian reservation to attend an all-white town school.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Sweet ghetto nerd Oscar dreams of being a famous writer… and of falling in love. He may not get either wish, due to a curse that’s dominated his Dominican family for generations. A Pulitzer Prize winner.
The Double Bind
A literary thriller with a tricky, intriguing premise and a fictional backdrop from The Great Gatsby begins with the attempted rape and murder of a young woman bicyclist on a rural Vermont road and involves the mysterious past of a homeless man.
The World Without Us
A ‘fantasy’ nonfiction book by a science writer that explores what would happen to the earth’s flora and fauna, as well as our built environment, if suddenly all humans disappeared.
The Glass Devil
A police procedural mystery set in Sweden, where Inspector Huss solves violent crimes, yet manages a happy home life including teenage twin daughters and a husband.
The Lottery
Perry Crandall (IQ 76) narrates his life after the death of his Gran, who raised him after his parents abandoned him. When he wins a $12 million lottery, his avaricious family schemes to appropriate his prize.
The Virgin of Small Plains
The discovery of the naked frozen body of a beautiful teenage girl during a 1987 Kansas blizzard and the subsequent disappearance of the son of a judge begin this novel with surprising twists and a convincing portrait of small town life.
Enrique's Journey
A Honduran young man rides the tops of trains through Mexico to the U.S. to reunite with his mother as chronicled by Pulitzer Prize winning author Nazario. From his family’s life of poverty in Honduras to life-risking attempts to cross the border to political realities in Mexico and the U.S., this highly engaging work is sure to challenge some of our beliefs about immigration. Chosen as UW's 2011 Go Big Read selection.
Water for Elephants
90+ year-old Jacob Jankowski reminisces in a nursing home about his days caring for animals in a travelling circus during the Great Depression.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
This nonfiction book is a compelling history of the American Dust Bowl of the 1930's, showing how years of heat and drought combined with the destruction of native prairie to cause terrible destruction to the land and misery to the farmers in Oklahoma.
Still Life
This traditional mystery begins with the finding of the body of Jane Neal, a retired school teacher and talented amateur artist in the woods near a small Quebec village, the apparent victim of a tragic hunting accident.
Truck: A Love Story
The author chronicles a year spent restoring an old pickup, gardening, and falling in love. This memoir is filled with eccentric characters, keen observation, and humorous storytelling.
I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
A candid, wry, amusing collection of essays on women getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests---and life itself.
The Book Thief
Narrated by Death, this novel for adults and teens tells the story of Liesl Memeinger, a German girl living through the Holocaust who finds strength and wisdom in the books she steals.
Rise and Shine
While her mic is accidentally on, morning talk show host Meghan calls a guest a vulgar name on national television. Her entire world changes, including her career and relationships with her husband, grown son and social worker sister.
The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bryson's own childhood in 1950s America is the focus this time.
The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
The history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is traced through the personal histories of two who occupied the same house at separate times: Dalia, a woman whose family of Bulgarian Jews immigrated to Israel in 1948, and Bashir, a man whose family was driven out of Palestine.
A Spot of Bother
In this darkly comic novel, the family patriarch mistakenly believes he is dying of cancer (it’s really eczema) while his wife and grown children swirl around him getting ready for a wedding.
Digging to America
A humorous exploration of personal relations and cultural clashes between two families. The traditional American Donaldsons and the Iranian-American Yazdans adopt Korean girls at the same time, with different plans and parenting styles.
The Inheritance of Loss
Winner of the Booker Prize, this novel has two story threads: a granddaughter in the Himalayan foothills fall in love with her tutor, and an immigrant from the same place tries to make it in NYC.
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
The story of Lily Yi and Snow Flower, intimate friends who used a secret written language to correspond, and how they were brought together and torn apart by their letters in 19th century rural China.
The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Walls recalls growing up in a dysfunctional yet creative family with a brilliant, charismatic father, who was destructive and dishonest when he drank, and a free-spirited artist mother, who hated domesticity and the responsibility of raising a family.
Have Mercy on Us All
In this detective novel/biothriller French medievalist and archaeologist author Fred Vargas combines historical cryptology, the history of the plague and street life in modern day Paris.
The Hungry Tide
An Indian-American researcher arrives in a remote area of India to study the freshwater dolphins and meets two very different men, each important to her work and life there.
The Turk and My Mother
A down-to-earth multigenerational tale of a Croatian family who journey from their Balkan village to Siberia and ultimately to Milwaukee, WI.
Case Histories
Private detective Jackson Brodie investigates three cases: two disappearances from long ago and a search for a witness to a murder. In typical fashion for this series, however, Brodie's personal life shares center stage with the detective work.
Broken for You
A septuagenarian invites a young woman to live in her mansion while both heal from their troubled pasts.
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
In this collection of humorous essays, David Sedaris discusses childhood, family and relationships, revealing that "normal" is truly a relative term.
Purple Hibiscus
When she visits her liberated and loving aunt, life dramatically changes for a 15-year old Nigerian girl who has grown up in sheltered privilege with a wealthy father who is politically courageous but religiously fanatic.
Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Dumas chronicles her life in America with a collection of zany-but-true family stories.
Lucy
Young Lucy Mercer Rutherford is hired as the private secretary for Eleanor Roosevelt but soon falls deeply in love with Eleanor’s ambitious and charismatic husband Franklin. When the affair is discovered by Eleanor and threatens Franklin’s presidential chances, Franklin ends it with Lucy, vowing to never betray Eleanor’s trust again. But the connection is strong between the two, and when Franklin is in declining health, the two meet again. This novel, told from Lucy’s perspective, is based on historical events and sources.
The Devil in the White City
Two events focused attention on Chicago in 1893: the World’s Fair with it’s hundreds of newly built structures (all white), and the investigation into the crimes of Dr. Henry Holmes, reputedly the first American serial killer.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
An autistic teen narrates this story of his adventure trying to solve a mystery surrounding the discovery of the murdered corpse of his neighbor’s pet poodle.
The Time Traveler's Wife
Claire and Henry have a loving, passionate marriage with one big problem: Henry is a time traveler, involuntarily dropping in and out of time. This unusual love story follows Claire and Henry's relationship, as the two meet out of sync, with different memories of each other or none at all, testing the strength of their devotion in a world which could change in an instant.
Persepolis
Marijane’s years as a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution are the focus of this graphic novel. Satrapi’s style is minimalist; her young self is charming and defiant.
The Bookseller of Kabul
A western reporter shares what she learned as a burka wearing woman living with a bookseller's family in Afghanistan. Life after the fall of the Taliban includes stories both horrifying and uplifting.
The Dive from Clausen's Pier
A college-aged woman is faced with difficult decisions when her boyfriend dives off a pier and becomes a quadriplegic. Set in Madison, with many small details local readers will love.
The Secret Life of Bees
Small-town Georgia in 1964 is the setting for this novel of beekeeping, civil rights, and a girl's yearning for her deceased mother. Despite the difficult subjects, this novel is sad but warm and, ultimately, uplifting.
Middlesex
Calliope's friendship with a classmate and her sense of identity are compromised by the adolescent discovery that she is an intersex person, a situation with roots in her grandparent's desperate struggle for survival in the 1920s.
Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time
EMT and former nurse Perry moves back to his hometown - New Auburn, WI - after years away. His stories about his emergency calls are compelling and his ruminations on small town life unique.
Three Junes
A rich, layered family saga triptych that spreads over Greece, Scotland, New York City and Long Island during three summers. The family patriarch and his son are the focus of this 2002 National Book Award winner.
The Tears of the Giraffe
The further adventures of Precious Ramotswe, the cunning, insightful head of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana.
Blessings
Found in a box on the doorstep of the richest woman in town, a newborn baby brings the parallel worlds of 'upstairs' and 'downstairs' together.
Life of Pi
An Indian boy, Piscine Patel (aka ‘Pi’) and his zookeeping family are emigrating to Canada. While on a container ship enroute to their new life, an accident at sea leaves Pi and a tiger in a lifeboat floating on the Pacific Ocean.
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Two boys are sent to the countryside to be re-educated in this fable set during China's Cultural Revolution. They discover hope through forbidden western literature, but find hope can be cruel and corrupting.
Crossing Over: a Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
Martinez investigates the deaths of three migrant workers, the Chavez brothers. Martinez spends a year with the brothers’ extended family as they work their way across the U.S., including a stint at a Wisconsin meat packing plant.
The Blind Assassin
In this multi-layered novel, a dying octogenarian recalls her past, including her forced marriage, her sister's suicide, and the publication of her sister's science fiction novel, The Blind Assassin.
Prodigal Summer
Summer in a corner of southern Appalachia serves as the setting for the adventures and struggles of three free-spirited women, who have intimate ties to the natural world.
Welcome to the Great Mysterious
A Broadway actress returns home to small town Minnesota to care for her Down's syndrome nephew. This larger-than-life woman learns how far she's drifted from her core values, but with trademark Landvik humor.