A selection of titles by and longer list of fiction authors who were born or have lived in Wisconsin for a significant period of time, whose books you can find in the Madison Public Library collection.
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Selected Titles
A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home. From the author of American Dervish and the Pulitzer-prize winning Disgraced.
Piper Hart has poured all her energy into raising her son, Fred, while her often-absent husband, Isaac, has poured all his energy into a career defending the wrongly accused. She's always told herself her son is perfectly normal, but somewhere deep inside her rests a tiny suspicion that all is not well. Her whole world is leveled when her son is diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder.
Lyle Hovde is at the onset of his golden years, living a mostly content life in rural Wisconsin with his wife, Peg, daughter, Shiloh, and six-year old grandson, Isaac. After a troubled adolescence and subsequent estrangement from her parents, Shiloh has finally come home. But while Lyle is thrilled to have his whole family reunited, he’s also uneasy: in Shiloh’s absence, she has become deeply involved with an extremist church, and the devout pastor courting her is convinced Isaac has the spiritual ability to heal the sick.
Available to download: ebook and audio
After a disastrous summer spent at her family’s home on Cape Cod when she is seventeen, Ann Gordon is very happy to never visit Wellfleet again. If only she’d stayed in Wisconsin, she might never have met Anthony Shaw, and she would have held onto the future she’d so carefully planned for herself. Instead, Ann ends up harboring a devastating secret that strains her relationship with her parents, sends her sister Poppy to every corner of the world chasing waves (and her next fling), and leaves her adopted brother Michael estranged from the family.
Available to download: ebook
With the beautiful and cunning Poppaea at his side, Nero Augustus commands the Roman empire, ushering in an unprecedented era of artistic and cultural splendor. Although he has yet to produce an heir, his power is unquestioned. But in the tenth year of his reign, a terrifying prophecy comes to pass and a fire engulfs Rome, reducing entire swaths of the city to rubble. Rumors of Nero's complicity in the blaze start to sow unrest among the populace--and the politicians... Follow-up to The Confessions of Young Nero.
As the Vietnam War grinds on and the Nixon presidency collapses, Minnow Finwick's small world in Wisconsin has blown apart. His father, a deputy sheriff, has been murdered by the unknown 'Highway 41 Killer.' When the sheriff seems in no hurry to solve the murder, Minnow must seek justice by partnering with unlikely allies and discovering his own courage.
Award-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry briefly attended the University of Wisconsin Madison in the late 1940’s. Her classic, A Raisin in the Sun, was ground-breaking in 1959 for its portrayal of a Black family on the south side of Chicago, and tackled issues of feminism and racial struggle during the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement.
Available to download: ebook
As one of the most popular influencers on social media, Mia Bell has lived her life online for years. With her celebrity dog and gorgeous fiancé, she is planning the ultimate virtual wedding—expensive, elaborate, and entirely paid for by sponsors. But off-camera, her world is far from picture perfect. After being jilted by her fiancé and faking her nuptials to please her sponsors, Mia finally has had enough. She heaves her phone off a cliff, ready to live—and maybe find love—offline for a change.
Novelist Henry “Coop” Cooper is contemplating a new book between sipping rum and lounging on a Baja beach with hotel owner Grady Doyle. When Grady tries to save a drunk from two thugs, he stumbles upon the stolen manuscript of Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which is more than just a rare piece of literary history. It reveals clues to an even bigger prize: the location of a suitcase the young, unpublished Hemingway lost in Paris in 1922. What starts as a hunt for a legendary writer's lost works becomes a deadly adventure.
Madison author Sherry Lucille’s trilogy explores issues of love and interracial relationships in 1950’s & 60’s Chicago. The series includes Love Changes, Love Dreams, and Love Promises.
Losing ground in his fight against post-traumatic claustrophobia, war veteran Peter Ash has no intention of getting on an airplane--until a grieving woman asks Peter to find her eight-year-old grandson. The woman's daughter has been murdered. Erik, the dead daughter's husband, is the sole suspect, and he has taken his young son and fled to Iceland for the protection of Erik's lawless family. From the northernmost European capital to a rustbound fishing vessel to a remote farm a stone's throw from the arctic, Peter must confront his growing PTSD and the most powerful Icelandic snowstorm in a generation to find a killer, save an eight-year-old boy, and keep himself out of an Icelandic prison--or a cold Icelandic grave. Fifth in the series of Peter Ash novels. Available to download: ebook and audio
Rick Nagano is a graduate student in the history department at USC, struggling to make rent on his South Los Angeles apartment near the neighborhood where his family once lived. When he lands a job as a research assistant for the elderly Mrs. W--, the heir to an oil fortune, he sees it first simply as a source of extra cash. But as he grows closer to the iconoclastic, charming, and feisty Mrs. W--, he gets drawn into a world of privilege and wealth far different from his racially mixed, blue-collar beginnings.
Born in a small town in the desolate reaches of western Texas and shaped by her girlhood in an industrial wasteland on the outskirts of Dallas, Bonnie Parker was a natural performer and a star student. But her dramatic nature, contorted by her limited opportunities and her overwhelming love for Clyde Barrow, pushed her into a course from which there was no escape but death. Infusing the psychological acuity of literary fiction with the relentless pacing of a thriller, the novel follows Bonnie from her bright, promising youth to her final month of shoot-outs, kidnappings, and desperate car chases through America's hinterland in the grip of the Great Depression, as the noose of the law tightened around her.
When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days, decades years earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she'd been to her three, now-grown children. In All Adults Here, Emma Straub's unique alchemy of wisdom, humor and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.
List of Authors
- Akhtar, Ayad
- Akins, Ellen
- Amos, Beth (also writes as Annelise Ryan and Allyson K. Abbott)
- Ansay, A. Manette
- Baker, Deb
- Bakopoulos, Dean
- Bebow-Reinhard, Monette
- Benjamin, Chloe
- Benjamin, David
- Bergland, Martha
- Bledsoe, Alex
- Blei, Norbert
- Bloch, Robert
- Boeshaar, Andrea
- Bogdan, D.L.
- Bowen, Michael
- Brafman, Michelle
- Briggs, Hazel
- Brown, Rebecca
- Buchholz, Benjamin
- Butler, Nickolas
- Callanan, Liam
- Campbell, R.R.
- Celello, Erin
- Cherry, Kelly
- Chiaverini, Jennifer
- Clancy, Christina
- Cook, Marshall
- Cote, Lyn
- Daly, Maureen
- Derleth, August
- DeSmet, Christine
- Devita, James
- De Weese, Gene
- Dopp, Peggy
- Dorner, Marjorie
- Draine, Betsy
- Ellis, Mel
- Engberg, Susan
- Enright, Elizabeth
- Ernst, Kathleen
- Eunson, Dale
- Ferber, Edna
- Fink, Chris
- Finney, Jack
- Fromm, Pete
- Frucht, Abby
- Gaiman, Neil
- Gale, Zona
- Galligan, John
- Gard, Robert
- Garland, Hamlin
- Garvin, Ann Wertz
- George, Margaret
- Giorgio, Kathie
- Gloss, Susan
- Griffin, Neal
- Guhl, Jim
- Hamilton, Jane
- Handeland, Lori
- Hansberry, Lorraine
- Harms, Kelly
- Harris, Shaun
- Hinden, Michael
- Houston, Victoria
- Hribal, C.J.
- Hunnicutt, Ellen
- Hunter, Maddy
- Kagen, Leslie
- Kercheval, Jesse Lee
- Kittredge, Mary
- Knipfel, Jim
- Kring, Sandra
- Kubly, Herbert
- Kushner, Dale
- Laken, Valerie
- Landers, Gunnard
- Logan, Ben
- Lucille, Sherry
- Magnuson, Mike
- McLain, Paula
- Meadows, Rae
- Melby, Becky
- Merrill, Christine
- Miller, Tom
- Mitchard, Jacquelyn
- Mitchell, Judith Claire
- Monette, Sarah (also writes as Katherine Addison)
- Moore, Lorrie
- Mori, Kyoko
- Nania, Jeff
- North, Sterling
- Olds, Bruce
- Olsen, Theodore V.
- Olson, Melissa F.
- Owens, Rex
- Page, Jean Reynolds
- Perry, Michael
- Pesetsky, Bette
- Peterson, Jerry A.
- Petrie, Nicholas
- Phillips, Larry
- Rasmussen, Rebecca
- Renz, Gregory
- Revoyr, Nina
- Rhodes, David
- Ribar, Joy
- Rice, Craig (born Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig)
- Ridley, John
- Rothfuss, Patrick
- Ruchti, Cynthia
- Rusch, Kristine Kathryn
- Russell, Kara Lynn
- Sanna, Lucy
- Savage, Sam
- Schwandt, Stephen
- Schwarz, Christina
- Sebold, Alice
- Sharp, Paula
- Sharpe, Isabel
- Simak, Clifford
- Simpson, Mona
- Skalka, Patricia
- Sparkman, Catrina
- Steuber, William
- Straub, Emma
- Straub, Peter
- Suhr, Kim
- Swanson, Cynthia
- Thalasinos, Andrea
- Toomer, Jean
- Vreeland, Susan
- Vukelich, George
- Watson, Larry
- Wescott, Glenway
- Wick, Lori
- Wilder, Thornton
- Wildgen, Michelle
- Wroblewski, David
updated ls 7/23/20