Book Club Kits

A portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world that asks where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil--can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written--is there still time to find a happy ending?

An Irish American teenage girl goes missing and a young Black Man is found dead in Boston in the summer of 1974. The two events seem unconnected. But the girl’s mother begins asking questions that bother the chieftain of the Irish mob, and the men who work for him, men who don't take kindly to any threat to their business.

A skeleton at the bottom of a well, unearthed in Pottstown, Pennsylvania in 1972, leads to the revelation of long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.  

Titus Crown is the first Black sheriff in the history of Charon County, Virginia. In recent decades, quiet Charon has had only two murders. But after years of working as an FBI agent, Titus knows better than anyone that while his hometown might seem like a land of moonshine, cornbread, and honeysuckle, secrets always fester under the surface. Then a year to the day after Titus's election, a school teacher is killed by a former student and the student is fatally shot by Titus's deputies.

William Waters, who grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him, finds his life changed when he meets spirited and ambitious Julia Padavano and her three sisters in his freshman year of college in this poignant and engrossing family story that pays homage to Louisa May Alcott's timeless classic, Little Women.
 

Recalling the past at her daughters' request, Lara tells the story of a famous actor with whom she shared both a stage and a romance, which causes her daughters to examine their own lives and reconsider the world and everything they thought they knew.

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.

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.

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.

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this novel inspired by Dickens’ David Copperfield tells the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father's good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. Relayed in his own unsparing voice, Demon braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. 
 

A status-driven New York City wedding planner grapples with her social ambitions, absent mother, and Puerto Rican roots--all in the wake of Hurricane Maria.

In this lively journey through human psychology, bestselling author and creator of the You Are Not So Smart podcast David McRaney investigates how minds change-and how to change minds. The 2023-24 UW Madison Go Big Read selection.

A stunning debut novel about four teenagers--recently aged out of the state foster-care system--living together in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest, exploring the quest for transcendence and the desire for love.

A young Native American boy in a splintering family grasps for stability and love, making all the wrong choices until he finds a space of his own.

Kiki Banjo has just made a huge mistake: she kissed Malakai Korede, the guy she just publicly denounced. They're soon embroiled in a fake relationship to try and salvage their reputations and save their futures.