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.

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.

This coming-of-age story centers on young Hayat Shah, a Pakistani-American living in Milwaukee. His family'’s dynamics, and their various levels of engagement with Islam, are at the center of the novel.

Civil rights advocate and legal scholar Michelle Alexander argues that a new permanent under-class has been created by the war on drugs and the denial of equal access to employment, housing, public benefits and education to ex-prisoners.

An orphan raised in Valparaiso, Chile, by a Victorian spinster and her rigid brother, Eliza Sommers follows her lover to California during the Gold Rush of 1849 and meets a Chinese herbalist, who becomes her soul mate, on the journey.

A young girl is killed in a car accident following Carmen's wedding. For 25 years after Carmen, her family and friends lives head in a variety of trajectories-- yet with each person carrying an emotional burden about that night.

London, a beautiful immigrant from Trinidad, was given to her husband by her father in order to settle a debt. Standing by her husband's side to make him the envy of his associates is a day in the life, but behind closed doors, the abuse that she encounters has her looking for a way out. When she meets a young thug named Kalil, he opens her eyes to a world she never knew. 

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.

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.

Austen's classic of social manners follows Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy as they try to achieve married bliss, in spite of bad first impressions and meddling families. 

Ove has always lived his life according to strict principles, earning him the status of lead curmudgeon in his neighborhood.  But when life threatens to overwhelm even the firmly stoic Ove, a comedic cast of characters comes to the rescue—and proves that help can come from the most surprising of sources. 

This Booker Prize winner is suspenseful tale of memory and self-knowledge. When Tony receives a classmate's diary from 40+ years before, it leads to a re-examination of his younger years and what he thought was true.

Anna Pigeon's first job as a National Park employee in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area basis for this book-- Barr's 17th in the series. The setting of the desert surrounding Lake Powell and the houseboat renting tourists that populate the park are central features of this story, which reveals a broken-hearted and widowed Anna just getting started on what we know to be a long career in solving crimes.

When Miss Norma was diagnosed with uterine cancer, she was advised to undergo surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. But instead of confining herself to a hospital bed for what could be her last stay, Miss Norma--newly widowed after nearly seven decades of marriage--told her doctor, "I'm ninety years old. I'm hitting the road." And so Miss Norma took off on an unforgettable around-the-country journey in a thirty-six-foot motorhome with her retired son Tim, his wife Ramie, and their dog Ringo. This book was the 2018 Fond du Lac Reads selection. 

If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life? In 1969 in New York City's Lower East Side, four teenage siblings visit a fortune-teller who is reputed to be able to predict the date of a person’s death; this bestselling novel by Madison author Chloe Benjamin follows them across the country and through next five decades.
 

According to everyone in the Windy City, Mayhem has an icebox in place of his heart and no lady has ever been able to penetrate it, except for Xenobia Bell, who shattered Mayhem’s heart into a million pieces. That was eight years ago, and the heartache still feels fresh to Mayhem. Then he meets Olena, who​ is content with keeping a rotation of male lovers until she is cornered aggressively by Mayhem, who claims her as his woman. Will Mayhem set aside his relationship paranoia to be the man that Olena wants, or will he take Olena down the same path of hurt that Xenobia took him down? 

A former nun recounts her cloistered life as well as her romance with a priest 25 years her senior that culminated in  marriage.  Joys and sorrows follow as she has two children, yet loses her husband to cancer and one daughter to murder.

Interwoven stories of three American women at the start of World War II: a single 40-year old postmistress in a small town on Cape Cod,  a newlywed new to the town, and a reporter in London working under Edward R. Morrow.

The dramatic true story of the fight for food safety in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, led by the inimitable Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley. Detailing the complex interchanges of industry, media, and government regulation with a bracing clarity, The Poison Squad offers a prescient perspective on the enormous social and political challenges we face today. The 2019-2020 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

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.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s life is explored through his relationships with four women in this novel narrated by his fictional Japanese apprentice.

Three sisters, all named after Shakespearean characters by their English professor father, reunite in an Ohio college town when their mother is stricken with cancer. Drama ensues, but with a light comedic touch.

Bryson's own childhood in 1950s America is the focus this time.

In Bulawayo’s semiautobiographical novel, young Darling describes her chaotic but still happy childhood during Zimbabwe’s strife-filled Lost Decade.  In the second half of the novel, the teenage Darling reflects on the promises and failures of America after she emigrates to Destroyedmichigan (Detroit).  A work that considers what one embraces in a new culture and what can’t be left behind, We Need New Names was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Award. 

The devastation caused by hurricane Katrina is the backdrop for this novel of the investigation into the shooting of two looters in a wealthy neighborhood and the search for the third.

A Wisconsin family grapples with the power and limitations of faith when one of their own falls under the influence of a radical church. 

Written in 1918, this enduring classic tells the story of a Bohemian immigrant to Nebraska, Antonia, through the eyes of her orphaned friend Jim.

When her husband Brad returns from Iraq, Elise is thrilled to have him home.  But the traumatic brain injury he suffered on duty has turned the patient, thoughtful man she married into someone quite different.  Faced with potentially losing the man she loves, Elise receives help from an unlikely source.  

Chang tells the story of three generations of women in her family who survived the political upheaval of China during the 20th century, beginning with her grandmother, a concubine to a warlord in feudal China, her mother, who rose to a prominent position in the Communist Party, to the author, raised during the Cultural Revolution until she was sent to study in England in 1978, giving a history of China from a personal perspective.

This is a graphic memoir by a New Yorker cartoonist, both hilarious and horrifying,  in which she uses cartoons, hand-written text, and photographs to recount the story of her parents' last years and to explore  her difficult relationship with them.

A maid in the house of the artist Vermeer inspires the painter to do a portrait of her wearing his wife's pearl earring, causing a scandal that changes the young woman's life.

An honest and controversial memoir of a Chinese-American mother who parents her two high achieving daughters in a strict, authoritarian way.

In this National Book Award-winning memoir, journalist Coates recounts his experience growing up black and offers penetrating insight into the state of race relations in America today. 

Bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces Renee Ballard, a fierce young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat--the Late Show.

Young Henry was fascinated with his new school teacher, who was unconventional by the local standards of their seaside town. The adult Henry harbors a secret-- and it involves a murder in Chatham long ago.

The intertwined stories of three women in suburban Philadelphia: newly arrived Cornelia searching for a new life; judgmental, perfectionist Piper struggling with her best friend's cancer; and elusive, free-spirited Lake.

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.

The New York Times best-selling book exploring the counterproductive reactions white people have when their assumptions about race are challenged, how these reactions maintain racial inequality, and what we can do to engage more constructively.
 

Blind Marie-Laure has escaped war-torn Paris for the French seaside town of Saint-Malo along with her father and a precious jewel, determined to keep it out of Nazi hands.  German boy Gunther’s talent with radios makes him a valuable asset to the Nazi war effort, but he struggles to cope with the human cost of his intelligence.  By the end of the war, the two children’s stories intertwine as they try to hold on to their humanity in Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller. 

Set on an Indian reservation in Montana, this saga of three generations of Indian women is told from each of their viewpoints and depicts the hardships they encounter both on and off the reservation.

Kidnapped and held captive for 18 years by a man and woman in their backyard, Dugard shares the details of her life in captivity, the birth of her children while there, and how she was finally discovered and freed.

A story of how the actions taken by a father, done with good intentions, can lead to the destruction of his family.

Questions of identity and reality in contemporary American society are explored in this novel with three intersecting main characters: a New York model who's face is destroyed in a traffic accident; an aspiring internet magnate; and a Middle-Eastern terrorist living in NYC. Published the week before 9/11, the novel strikes some reviewers as having remarkable prescience.

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.

The story of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath is told through the experiences of  Zeitoun, a Syrian-American and Muslim who stays in New Orleans to watch over his home and business. He helps rescue his neighbors, but is later arrested and imprisoned.

A candid, wry, amusing collection of essays on women getting older and dealing with the tribulations of maintenance, menopause, empty nests---and life itself.

A love triangle between Brown University students Madeleine, an English major writing her senior thesis; Leonard, a brilliant student with bipolar disorder; and Mitchell, a religious studies major,  is the backdrop for this novel set in the 1980s.

In chapters that alternate between the history of the Hmong and a highly personal story of a young Hmong girl who is severly ill with seizures, we learn about Hmong culture and the dramatic clash between it and American medicine in the early 1990s. The full title is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

The first in Italian author Ferrante’s four-book series, My Brilliant Friend introduces Lila and Elena, two girls growing up in the slums of 1950s Naples.   Bookish and quiet, Elena contrasts with her brash best friend Lila, whose path in life seems destined for marriage and motherhood in spite of her dreams of becoming a writer.  An acclaimed study of women’s friendship and the changing aspects of their lives, Ferrante masterfully captures the strengths and struggles of two extraordinary women.

The remarkable true story of a man who lived alone in the woods of Maine for 27 years--not out of anger at the world, but simply because he preferred to live on his own.  

The novel on which the popular movie was based, this account of four women's lives in the Depression-era South is humorous, while also threaded with the more serious themes of racism, feminism, and domestic violence.

On the fifth anniversary of a seemingly ideal couple, wife Amy disappears and her husband Nick becomes the chief suspect. The novel alternates between Nick's point of view and Amy's (via her diary entries), engaging the reader in which version of events is accurate-- if any.

A group of six (including one man) meet monthly to discuss Jane Austen's novels. As the reader listens in on their discussions we hear not just about the books, but their lives and loves as well.

Toby is a happy-go-lucky charmer until a night out with friends takes a turn that will change his life - he surprises two burglars who beat him and leave him for dead. Struggling to recover from his injuries, he takes refuge at his family's ancestral home to care for his dying uncle Hugo. Then a skull is found in the trunk of an elm tree in the garden - and as detectives close in, Toby is forced to face the possibility that his past may not be what he has always believed.
 

While modern medicine has developed breathtaking advances in the pursuit to extend life, the ability of doctors treat the realities of aging and dying often runs counter to the best interests of the patient.  Surgeon Gawande examines the limitations of medicine at the end of life, and speaks with those in the profession who are turning ‘a good death’ into a quality life to the very end. 

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 author of Eat, Pray, Love examines her decision to marry and broadens her book to include interviews with married people from a variety of cultures as well as Western research on marriage.

The Signature of All Things

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.

Opening up a vintage clothing shop in Madison has always been Violet’s dream, but making it a success is entirely different challenge.  Teenager April is trying to recover from a broken engagement and the looming birth of her child.  Amithi struggles with the betrayal of her husband and tension with her tradition-averse daughter.  These different women connect over vintage cloth and learn to face down the upheavals of their lives to emerge stronger together. 

A gothic tale set in 1907 Wisconsin told from two viewpoints: Ralph Truitt, a wealthy businessman who advertises for a wife for practical reasons, and Catherine Land, a beauty hungry for riches, posing as a dowdy daughter of a missionary.

Bestselling author Grann presents a twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, the early twentieth-century murders of dozens of wealthy Osage and law-enforcement officials, citing the contributions and missteps of a fledgling FBI that eventually uncovered one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history.
 

In a major novel unlike anything he has written before, John Grisham takes the reader on an incredible journey, from the Jim Crow South to the jungles of the Philippines during World War II; from an insane asylum filled with secrets to the Clanton courtroom where upstanding citizen and World War II hero Pete Banning's defense attorney tries desperately to save him from conviction for the murder of the esteemed Reverend Bell, the most mysterious and unforgettable crime Ford County had ever known.
 

In this novel of drama and satire, the bombing of the Great Ape Language Lab and the subsequent removal of their bonobo apes to a new life on reality TV brings together married reporter John Thigpen and primate-loving scientist Isabel Duncan.

This novel follows the fate of two half-sisters born in eighteenth century Ghana, and their descendants.  One sister marries the British head of a slave trading colony, while the other is captured in the same colony and sold into American slavery. 

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.

After his young wife suffers brain damage and is left with the mind of a 6-year old, Aaron Maciver quietly divorces her and marries her nurse, and the two raise her as their child along with their daughter and son in this chronicle of an unusual family.

Leni and her troubled family embark on a new way of life in Alaska’s wilderness in 1974 – hoping this is finally the solution for her troubled POW father. In Alaska, Leni and her family are tested and when change comes to their small community her father’s anger threatens to explode and divide the town. (from LibraryReads)
 

Hank Skirmshander looks to be a rising baseball star, but his talents take a serious dive while playing for Westish College.  His one errant throw impacts the lives of five people in unexpected ways.

Set in a small town in the plains of Colorado, this novel tells the interrelated stories of eight characters whose lives undergo radical change during the course of one year.

The drowning pool at Beckford had been a spot where accused witches were ‘tried’—drowned to prove their innocence.  Lately the pool has claimed more women, ostensibly from suicide.  But when women of the town and relatives of the dead women begin to suspect a more sinister motive behind the deaths, they reveal deceptions and betrayals at the core of their small town.  

Louis Zamperini, a champion runner in the 1930s, joined the U.S. Army Air Force in 1941. As a bombardier in World War II, he crash-landed in the Pacific, surviving forty-seven days on a raft and two years of abuse in Japanese POW camps.  His post-war life was a happy and productive one, a relief to the reader that Hillenbrand recounts in the final quarter of the book.

A fictionalized portrayal of Mamah Borthwick Cheney, her love affair with Frank Lloyd Wright, and the scandal it created.

 In 1952, a poor Afghan father travels across the desert with his young son and daughter, about to make a decision that will have complex repercussions for years to come in this saga of family love, honor and sacrifice.   

P.I. Holland Taylor reluctantly agreed to help Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and media darling Carol Catherine Monroe. A scandal that could rattle the skeletons in her closet had to be diffused. But the murder of an innocent campaign worker hit Taylor where it hurt and taught him a simple truth--some sins can never be forgotten or forgiven.
 

An illuminating debut memoir of a woman in science; a moving portrait of a longtime friendship; and a stunningly fresh look at plants that will forever change how you see the natural world.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy, the living embodiment of the New South, are settling into the routine of their life together when Roy is sent to prison for a crime he didn't commit. This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the lives of of people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control, who must reckon with the past while moving forward--with hope and pain--into the future.

The author of this memoir was a neurosurgeon who was diagnosed with lung cancer in his mid-thirties. Writing in his last months of life, he talks about his childhood and college studies, explains why he decided to become a doctor, and describes his experiences with his illness. 

This memoir, which inspired a television series, was written by a middle-class college graduate who describes the thirteen months she spent in a federal prison for drug trafficking crimes she committed in her younger days.

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.

Inspired by events in the life of anthropologist, Margaret Mead, this is the fictional story of a love triangle among three anthropologists working in New Guinea, who display three completely different approaches to studying other cultures.

Young, independent Taylor heads west from Kentucky to Tucson, seeking a life change. Young, independent Taylor heads west from Kentucky to Tucson, seeking a life change.

Harrison William Shephard, whose father is American and mother is Mexican, lives in Mexico in the 1930s with Diego Rivera, his wife Frida Kahlo, and their houseguest Leon Trotsky.

The compulsively readable story of two families, in two centuries, who live at the corner of Sixth and Plum in Vineland, New Jersey, navigating what seems to be the end of the world as they know it. With history as their tantalizing canvas, these characters paint a startlingly relevant portrait of life in precarious times when the foundations of the past have failed to prepare us for the future.
 

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. Set in New York and China, The Leavers is the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he's loved has been taken away--and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.

Cleaning guru Marie Kondo outlines her method of ‘tidying up,’ going beyond a simple how-to manual to ask what our stuff means to us emotionally and what we consider to be truly precious.  

In the summer of 1961, life in New Bremen, Minnesota moves slowly for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum.   The tragic death of a child in a train accident prompts old memories to resurface between the Drum and Brandt families, revealing the pain and dark shadows that lurked just under the surface of an idyllic life, and introducing Frank to the harsh realities of adulthood.

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.

An account of the 1900 hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas and killed 6,000 people. Larson uses personal papers, letters, newspapers and government archives as the source material for this engrossing tale.

Pachinko follows one Korean family through the generations, beginning in early 1900s Korea with Sunja, the prized daughter of a poor yet proud family, whose unplanned pregnancy threatens to shame them all. Deserted by her lover, Sunja is saved when a young tubercular minister offers to marry and bring her to Japan. So begins a sweeping saga of an exceptional family in exile from its homeland and caught in the indifferent arc of history. 

British naturalist Macdonald undertakes the training of a goshawk as a means of working through the grief at the sudden loss her father, himself a falconer.   

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.

Twelve narratives spanning the twentieth century are twined together in this novel of an African-American mother and her children.  

This is the first in a series of gentle mysteries. Precious Ramotswe operates in Botswana, running an agency where the solving of the ‘mystery’ is often secondary to the exploration of family, customs and alternate methods of justice.

New York City in the early 1970s is portrayed in this set of connected stories including a street priest, a judge, heroin addicts, mothers of sons killed in Vietnam, and a man who walks on a cable between the World Trade Center towers in August, 1974.

Hadley Richardson’s marriage to Ernest Hemingway, then a young reporter, took her from small-town St. Louis to the glamour of Paris in the 1920’s. Based on letters, biographies, and memoirs, this is a fictional account of their marriage, told from Hadley's point of view.

Written for anyone who has or anticipates caring for an aging loved one, Holding the Net, the author’s story of caring for her own mother as a hospice consultant, offers practical details about caregiving and challenges the notion that anyone can be an expert when it comes to caring for an aging parent; all we can do is our best.
 

A deeply moving and resonant story of love, identity, and belonging, A Place for Us follows an Indian family through the marriage of their daughter, from the parents' arrival in the United States to the return of their estranged son.
 

Le Cirque des Reves (The Dream Circus) appears unexpectedly on the outskirts of towns and treats its audiences to dazzling illusions. Danger lurks behind the scenes, however, as two powerful teachers have set up a duel-to-the-death between their two magician proteges.

Nine people gather at a remote health resort. Some are there to lose weight, some are there to get a reboot on life, some are there for reasons they can't even admit to themselves. Amidst all of the luxury and pampering, the mindfulness and meditation, they know these ten days might involve some real work. 
But none of them could imagine just how challenging the next ten days are going to be.
 

The personal costs of slavery are explored in this novel of 4 abandoned women together on a farm in upstate New York.

A young Englishwoman, Louisa Clark finds herself unemployed when the restaurant she works in is closed.  She takes a job as caretaker for Will Traynor, a recently paralyzed man, and throws herself

A cat found in the book return at a small town Iowa library became a library resident and enchanted customers for nearly 20 years with his winsome personality.

Every action has a consequence and everyone has a story. Rico is a nineteen year old college student who is the youngest member of the FAM. He struggles with his past and his future. He is torn between two women who he has feelings for but he is only in love with one. 

This book club kit was purchased with the support of the Madison Public Library Foundation for a Street Lit Book Club Collection at the Goodman South Madison Library. Please call the Goodman South Madison Library at 608-266-6385 to check out this kit.
 

The first two parts of an epic drama of the Nazi occupation of France written by a Russian Jewish refugee who lived in France and died in Auschwitz in 1942. This novel was rediscovered and published over 60 years after her death.

In this prize-winning novel of the Vietnam War, a double-agent, half-French and half-Vietnamese, leaves his homeland and comes to America after the Fall of Saigon. While building a new life in California, he continues to report back to his Communist supervisors.

A gothic ghost story and tale of sibling rivalry begins with the death of Elspeth Noblin, who bequeaths her London flat bordering on historic Highgate Cemetery to the twin daughters of her long estranged twin sister in Chicago.

In this groundbreaking collection, American Muslim women writers sweep aside stereotypes to share their real-life tales of flirting, dating, longing, and sex. Their stories show just how varied the search for love can be--from singles' events and college flirtations to arranged marriages, all with a uniquely Muslim twist.

This title was added to the collection as part of a 2018 Library Takeover Event. See madisonpubliclibrary.org/engagement/library-takeover [232] for more information.
 

Twelve Native Americans came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. As we learn the reasons that each person is attending--some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent--momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything.  
 

Chosen as UW-Madison's 2013 Go Big Read. In Japan, a teenage girl is struggling-- and writing to a future anonymous reader about it in a diary. Ten years later the diary, along with letters in Japanese and French, wash ashore in a metal lunchbox on the coast of British Columbia. The woman who finds it sets out to identify the girl to see how she's fared in the intervening years.

This psychological mystery and romance set in suburban Washington, D.C. focuses on a veterinarian, her sister and mother, and the death of her father in an automobile accident when she was a child.

Adoption, race, class, and family are explored in this novel about three brothers and their widowed father.

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.

Funny, humble and pensive—Michael’s life is changing as he’s pulled in different directions all at once.

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.

Jacob Hunt, a teen with Asperger’s syndrome, becomes a suspect in a terrible murder which shines the spotlight on his family.  This medical courtroom drama deals with issues of what it means to be different, how autism affects the family, and how the legal system can fail people who cannot communicate well.

Death row prisoner seeks atonement through donation of his heart to his victim's sister.

A teenager, whose mother, a scientific researcher, disappeared ten years earlier after a tragic accident at an elephant sanctuary, searches through her mother’s old journals in hope of finding clues that will solve the mystery of her disappearance.

Ruth, an experienced African-American delivery nurse, is forbidden to tend to the baby of a white supremacist family, but when the child goes into cardiac arrest and no one else is able to help, she makes a fateful decision.  When the baby dies in her care, she is charged with a serious crime, and must reconsider what she thought she knew about others—and herself.  

Deb has always known that her artist husband Jack hasn’t always been faithful, even while she gave up her career to be a wife and mother to their two children.  But when evidence of his latest betrayal lands in their 11 year old daughter’s hands, Deb must make a choice:  try to save a marriage when her children know all of the dirty secrets of their father’s infidelity, or end the marriage permanently.

A tough, witty discourse on why food is more than the sum of its nutritional parts.

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.

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.

Radioactive is an an innovative type of book: a graphic biography that adeptly combines the author’s vibrant cyanotype prints with a narrative story of Marie and Pierre Curie and their discovery of radioactivity and its applications in the last century. Weaving her own narrative and images together with historical documents, photographs, and artwork, Redniss has created a reading and viewing experience that uniquely blends art and science.

Narrated with humor, suspense, and empathy, a diverse cast of characters in small town in Wisconsin get entangled in family secrets, legal battles with a corrupt milk cooperative, gambling, dogfighting, and a miracle cure, amongst other things.

After fifteen years and two kids, writer Georgie and Neal’s marriage is hurting.  With the appearance of a magical phone that gives her a line to the past, Georgie is presented with the chance to make things right with her husband before things get bad—or discover if she and Neal were really meant to be together. 

An epic novel of love and history and the perseverance of the human spirit in the face of loss and tragedy, following a variety of characters through some of the major events in modern Indian history.

A thirteen-year-old girl tries to save her family’s rundown alligator-themed Florida park after the death of her mother. A novel of magical realism, with a strong heroine, yet in a credible, believable world.

Cape Cod is the home of memories good and bad for Jack Griffin. When he returns there post-divorce for his daughter’s wedding, comedy and pathos join forces to create a memorable event.

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.

On February 22, 1862, two days after his death, Willie Lincoln was laid to rest in a marble crypt in a Georgetown cemetery. That very night, shattered by grief, Abraham Lincoln arrives at the cemetery under cover of darkness and visits the crypt, alone, to spend time with his son's body. The bold, imaginative first novel from critically acclaimed author Saunders.

A woman of intelligence, cunning and ambition intent on consolidating and maximizing her power emerges against the romanticized, melodramatic vixen portrayed in Western history in this thoroughly researched biography of Cleopatra.

Comedian and actress Schumer offers candid essays in her signature style about her experiences in comedy, relationships and the joys and perils of being a woman unafraid to speak her mind or bare her soul.  

Sedaris returns with comic essays employing keen observation, absurdity and hilarity to explore everyday life from smoking to family dysfunction and death.

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.

In this unconventional and funny novel, a teenage girl assembles a mixed collection of documents  to try to solve the disappearance of her mother, a former award-winning architect  who found herself increasingly at odds with her life in Seattle.

A novel in letters about the WWII German occupation of Guernsey, one of the Channel Islands between France and England. An often sweet and funny book, with tinges of sadness.

Amid the ashes of Nazi Germany's defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband's ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband's brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows.

A teenage boy struggling with schizophrenia in this deeply powerful and personal novel from one of today's most admired writers for teens.

Lifelong Madison resident Muriel Simms presents a brief history of African American settlement in Madison and a collection of oral histories from twenty-five African Americans whose families arrived, survived, and thrived here in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This kit was added to the collection with support from the Madison Public Library Foundation.
 

In this unconventional love story, scientist Don sets out to overcome his Asperger’s syndrome and find the Perfect Wife by concocting an exhaustive, mathematically precise questionnaire.  And then he meets Rosie, who should be all wrong for him but for some reason seems just right.   

The story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American cancer patient, wife and mother, and of her cells, known as HeLa cells. HeLa cells are used daily in labs worldwide, yet Lacks' family was unaware of their use until more than 20 years after her death.

A lighthouse keeper and his wife, who live on a remote island off Western Australia, are desperate to have children. When they find a baby miraculously washed up on shore, they adopt her-- a decision that leads to ethical dilemmas for everyone involved.

This deceptively simple story traces the lives and hopes of two couples who met as young parents in Madison, Wisconsin in the early part of the 20th century. This deceptively simple story traces the lives and hopes of two couples who met as young parents in Madison, Wisconsin in the early part of the 20th century.

After years of hard work and dedication, New York Law School graduate Janelle Alexandria Elizabeth-Ann Pickney has achieved her dream of being able to sit in on one of the biggest trials in the city. But then she meets him... Luke “Outlaw” Murray, everything she doesn’t want in a man. And this... this is a story about them. But beware, because it's not your average love story.

In 1960s Jackson, Mississippi aspiring author Skeeter, who is white, gains the trust of some of the town's black maids and departs from her newspaper advice column assignment to secretly write a book from their point of view about being 'the help.'

As Lucy Barton recovers from an operation, her mother comes to visit her and the two reflect on Lucy’s life in small town Amgash, Illinois.  Yet under their conversation is a tension that hints at deeper aspects to Lucy’s life. 

Jazmin always had the biggest crush on her childhood friend Sean since she could remember. Now they’re caught up in a love affair that Jazmin has been waiting her whole life for. There’s just one problem: Sean is married to Jazmin’s sister’s friend Rayven. To make matters worse, Jazmin has just given birth to Sean’s love child.

Frankee had everything a woman could desire. From the castle-like mansion she dwelled in to the fancy jewels she adorned; she had it all. She was the mother of two beautiful children whom she simply adored, and she was surrounded by a slew of servants who praised and worshipped her like she was royalty. Her fairytale life was every girl’s dream come true. But she never thought her shining knight in armor would come in the form of a megalomaniac!

In this literary novel, a 13-year-old-boy survives a terrorist explosion at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which kills his mother.  He then finds himself the owner of a seventeenth century Dutch painting called “The Goldfinch,” and drawn into the dark and mysterious underworld of art dealing. 

As the slowing down of the earth's rotation portends a coming apocalypse, Julia also faces adolescent struggles with friendships, first love, and family problems in this combination coming-of-age and science fiction novel.

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.

In 1922, Count Alexander Rostov is deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, and is sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol, a grand hotel across the street from the Kremlin. Rostov, an indomitable man of erudition and wit, has never worked a day in his life, and must now live in an attic room while some of the most tumultuous decades in Russian history are unfolding outside the hotel's doors. Unexpectedly, his reduced circumstances provide him entry into a much larger world of emotional discovery.
 

Treuer, an Ojibwe scholar and cultural preservationist, answers the most commonly asked questions about American Indians, both historical and modern. He gives a frank, funny, and personal tour of what's up with Indians, anyway. 
 

Sold into a life of slavery at the Chinese silk factory in the early part of the 20th century, Pei finds friendship and independence amongst the women there despite the horrible conditions.

One doctor's passionate and profound memoir of his experience grappling with race, bias, and the unique health problems of black Americans.

The daily life of women in Afghanistan is documented in the true story of Kamila Sidiqi who, trained as a teacher, was confined to her house when the Taliban seized control of Kabul. After her father and brothers were forced to flee she supported her family by creating a thriving business, staffed by women.

When Joel, whose then-7-year-old brother was kidnapped in a Stockholm subway station in 1970, suddenly goes missing, his wife reaches out to an old friend for help. Danny Katz, a brilliant computer programmer and recovering heroin addict, as well as a divorced father of two young girls, begins to dig behind the digital veil in search of Joel, even though the investigation quickly interferes with his duties as a parent.

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.

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.

An intimate portrait of a family and an epic tale of hope and struggle, Sing, Unburied, Sing journeys through Mississippi's past and present, examining the ugly truths at the heart of the American story and the power--and limitations--of family bonds. 

Keys had been the typical hood boy for most of his life until he survived a shooting and decided to settle down with his girlfriend, Dream.  One rainy night, he met Ivy, and his life changed. After meeting her, Keys' life literally went from the normal day-to-day, to mystery, fantasia and the realization that forever will be a very long time for him. Despite their incredible connection, both Keys and Ivy take great lengths to distance themselves from this fairytale-like chemistry between them. However, when destiny has designed two people to be together there is nothing that can stop it...

Following a mysterious accident, a woman suffers amnesia and cannot remember her past or form new memories.  She desperately tries to uncover the truth in this psychological thriller concerned with questions of memory and identity.

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.

This Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning novel follows the route of Cora and Caesar, two slaves who escape a brutal plantation via the Underground Railroad.  But in this surreal world, the railroad is a literal track underground, and Cora and Caesar must follow a harrowing route through multiple states just ahead of a cruel slave catcher in search of real freedom. 

A UW student involved in an unrewarding love affair with a married TA takes a job as a caretaker for a 36-year-old stylish and accomplished woman who is almost completely paralyzed by ALS.

A paranoid schizophrenic, incarcerated in the Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum for murder, Dr. W.C. Minor provided tens of thousands of quotations for use in the Oxford English Dictionary for its first publication in the nineteenth century.

Shot in the head on her way home from her Pakistan school, Malala was targeted by the Taliban because she publicly advocated for girls’ education and attended school herself. In her book, Malala blends the politics and the personal into a story not just of what happened to her, but also the difficulties-- both politically and otherwise-- in Pakistan today. Chosen as UW-Madison's 2014 Go Big Read selection.

The true story of a 40-year friendship among 11 childhood friends through college, careers, marriage, motherhood, divorce, illness, and the mysterious death of one.