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Book Club Kits by Author

#madisonvotes2020

While Justice Sleeps
Stacey Abrams

An inside-Washington thriller about an ambitious law clerk thrown into a life-or-death treasure hunt with major national implications when the Supreme Court justice she works for slips into a sudden coma.

Crescent
Diana Abu-Jaber

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.

Family Lore
Elizabeth Acevedo

Flor has a gift: she can predict, to the day, when someone will die. So when she decides she wants a living wake--a party to bring her family and community together to celebrate the long life she's led--her sisters are surprised. Has Flor foreseen her own death, or someone else's? Does she have other motives? She refuses to tell her sisters, Matilde, Pastora, and Camila. But Flor isn't the only person with secrets: her sisters are hiding things, too. And the next generation, cousins Ona and Yadi, face tumult of their own.

Call Me By Your Name
André Aciman

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.

The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story
Diane Ackerman

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.

Americanah
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A young woman experiences racism for the first time after she leaves her native Nigeria, which is under oppressive military dictatorship, to attend college in the United States. Meanwhile, her boyfriend lives a miserable life in London as an illegal immigrant.

Purple Hibiscus
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

Chain-Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America's own in this explosive, hotly-anticipated debut novel.

American Dervish
Ayad Akhtar

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.

Homeland Elegies
Ayad Akhtar

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.

Leave the World Behind
Rumaan Alam

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.

The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town
Brian Alexander

An intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America's healthcare crisis and offers a blueprint for how we created it.

The New Jim Crow : Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Michelle Alexander

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.

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie

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.

Daughter of Fortune
Isabel Allende

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 Long Petal of the Sea
Isabel Allende

This epic novel spanning decades and crossing continents follows two young people as they flee the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in search of a place to call home.

Afterlife
Julia Alvarez

Antonia Vega has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves, but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words. Now she questions: How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves?

The Cemetery of Untold Stories
Julia Alvarez

When celebrated writer Alma Cruz inherits a small plot of land in the Dominican Republic, she turns it into a place to bury her untold stories--literally. She creates a graveyard for manuscript drafts and revisions and the characters whose lives she tried and failed to bring to life and who still haunt her. Alma wants her characters to rest in peace, but they have other ideas, and the cemetery becomes a mysterious sanctuary for their true narratives.

How the García Girls Lost Their Accents
Julia Alvarez

Interwoven stories of four Latina sisters chronicling their assimilation into the United States and their visits back to the Dominican Republic.

From Hardship to Hope: Crossing the Great Divides of Age, Race, Wealth, Equity, and Health
Judith Gwinn Adrian and Jaylin M. Stueber

A fictionalized autobiography of two women and the parallel worlds in which they live. The work asks us to consider where our strongly held beliefs and assumptions come from and the influence they have on our lives.

Mad Honey
Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan

Olivia McAfee left her husband and moved with her son, Asher, to a small town. When tragedy occurs and Asher becomes a suspect, Olivia must face whether he is revealing the same dark side as his father.

The Personal Librarian
Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

The remarkable, little-known story of Belle da Costa Greene, J. P. Morgan's personal librarian, who became one of the most powerful women in New York despite the dangerous secret she kept in order to make her dreams come true: Belle's complexion isn't dark because of her alleged Portuguese heritage that lets her pass as white-her complexion is dark because she is African American. 

Brush
Penn Anderson

A glittering new adaptation of an ancient folktale, Brush is the story of two strangers. Chris is a successful entrepreneur who gets his hands on a magic paintbrush. Jo is a woman with secrets who lives above her quaint store on Main Street. Their lives intersect during one transformative year, in a mysterious journey punctuated by delightful detours. (All copies of this title are in Large Print format.)

Carry the One
Carol Anshaw

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.

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan

Behind the Scenes at the Museum
Kate Atkinson

Ruby Lennox gives an account of family life above a petshop in England, revealing the lives of the women in her family, from her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer to her mother's unfulfilled dreams of Hollywood glamour.

Case Histories
Kate Atkinson

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.

Life After Life
Kate Atkinson

On a snowy evening in 1910, Ursula Todd is born.  And dies.  And is born again.  Fated to return to life over and over, Ursula witnesses pivotal events and eventually proves that one woman can change history.   

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

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.

The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood

This 1986 classic has found a new audience through a popular adaptation on Hulu. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate "Handmaids" under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred's persistent memories of life in the "time before" and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. 

Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen

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. 

Honey and Spice
Bolu Babalola

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.

Anxious People
Fredrik Backman

Taken hostage by a failed bank robber while attending an open house, eight anxiety-prone strangers--including a redemption-seeking bank director, two couples who would fix their marriages, and a plucky octogenarian--discover their unexpected common traits.

A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman

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. 

The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery

The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes

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.

Driving Miss Norma: One Family's Journey Saying "Yes" to Living
Tim Bauerschmidt and Ramie Liddle

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. 

The Sellout
Paul Beatty

A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court.
 

The Immortalists
Chloe Benjamin

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.
 

The Vanishing Half
Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past.

The Postmistress
Sarah Blake

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.

Away
Amy Bloom

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.

The Poison Squad: One Chemist's Single-minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Deborah Blum

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. Chosen as the 2019-2020 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

In the Unlikely Event
Judy Blume

This novel, based on true events in the author’s childhood, portrays the community of Elizabeth, New Jersey in the early 1950’s, when it was hit by  three major plane crashes within a few months, leaving residents to struggle with the repeated tragedies.

The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story
Aaron Bobrow-Strain

When Aida Hernandez was born in 1987 in Agua Prieta, Mexico, the nearby U.S. border was little more than a worn-down fence. Eight years later, Aida's mother took her and her siblings to live in Douglas, Arizona. By then, the border had become one of the most heavily policed sites in America. Undocumented, Aida fought to make her way. She learned English, watched Friends, and, after having a baby at sixteen, dreamed of teaching dance and moving with her son to New York City. But life had other plans.

The Double Bind
Chris Bohjalian

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.

Blue Lake
Jeffrey D. Boldt

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.

The Tortilla Curtain
T.C. Boyle

Two couples, an undocumented Mexican husband and wife camping in a canyon and well-heeled Americans living in a gated community, cross paths repeatedly and usually unknowingly in this novel set in Southern California.

Fleishman is in Trouble
Taffy Brodesser-Akner

Toby Fleishman thought he knew what to expect when he and his wife of almost fifteen years separated: weekends and every other holiday with the kids, some residual bitterness, the occasional moment of tension in their co-parenting negotiations. He could not have predicted that one day, in the middle of his summer of sexual emancipation, Rachel would just drop their two children off at his place and simply not return.

Horse
Geraldine Brooks

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.

The Yellow House
Sarah M. Broom

A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. Located in the gap between the "Big Easy" of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows.

The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics
Daniel James Brown

The nine boys who made up the Olympic rowing team, sons of western loggers and hardworking laborers, may not have had the pedigree of the elite teams of the east, but they set out to prove themselves to the world at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.  Author Brown captures the struggles, including the Great Depression, poverty, and the loss of family, of a team that showed the nation what pulling together meant.

I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made for Whiteness
Austin Channing Brown

From a leading voice on racial justice, an eye-opening account of growing up Black, Christian, and female that exposes how white America's love affair with "diversity" so often falls short of its ideals.

The Weird Sisters
Eleanor Brown

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.

At Home: A Short History of a Private Life
Bill Bryson

Bill Bryson relates the history of a household by touring his own home, a Church of England rectory built in the nineteenth century, and relating stories of everyday objects and how they transformed the way people lived.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid
Bill Bryson

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

A Walk in the Woods
Bill Bryson

After living 20 years in England, Bryson reacquaints himself with America by walking the Appalachian Trail and shares his comic insight into the trail's people, politics and history. The full title is A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

We Need New Names
NoViolet Bulawayo

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. 

Cold Sassy Tree
Olive Ann Burns

A humorous and loving look at small town life at the beginning of the 20th century. Young Will Tweedy narrates the tale of his grandfather's romance with a younger woman, his purchase of the first automobile in the county, and life at the general store owned by his family.

Little Faith
Nickolas Butler

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

Parable of the Sower
Octavia E. Butler

Forced to flee an America where anarchy and violence have completely taken over, empath Lauren Olamina--who can feel the pain of others and is crippled by it--becomes a prophet carrying the hope of a new world and a new faith christened "Earthseed".

Shotgun Lovesongs
Nickolas Butler

This novel tells the story of five friends who grew up together in the fictional small town of Little Wing, Wisconsin: a famous musician, a wealthy commodities trader, a former rodeo star, and a married couple who stayed in the community as farmers.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Susan Cain

Farm City: the Education of an Urban Farmer
Novella Carpenter

32 Candles
Ernessa T. Carter

The deftly wry, deeply romantic story of Davie Jones -- an "ugly duckling" from small-town Mississippi with a voice like Tina Turner, who escapes to Los Angeles to try to make it big, and risks losing her soul along the way to finding her fairy tale ending.

My Antonia
Willa Cather

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

Birnam Wood
Eleanor Catton

An abandoned farm cut off from the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island by a landslide is a thrilling opportunity for Birnam Wood, a guerilla gardening group that grows crops anywhere they can; however, American billionaire Robert Lemoine also has an interest in the remote land. After he buys it to begin construction on an end-times bunker and catches Mira, the group’s leader, trespassing on the property, he’s willing to make a deal with the group to share the space... but at what cost? And can they trust him?

Learning to Stay
Erin Celello

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.  

Unshakeable Confidence: The Freedom to be Our Authentic Selves: Mindfulness for Women
Mare Chapman

This warm and practical book by Madison area author, psychotherapist, and mindfulness teacher Mare Chapman, M.A., based on Chapman’s ‘Mindfulness for Women’ course, guides the reader through an intimate journey, showing how women form disempowering beliefs that cause them to lose themselves in relationships, and how to regain connection with their true selves through mindfulness. 

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

Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast

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.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky

The critically acclaimed debut novel from Stephen Chbosky follows observant "wallflower" Charlie as he charts a course through the strange world between adolescence and adulthood. First dates, family drama, and new friends. Sex, drugs, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Devastating loss, young love, and life on the fringes. Caught between trying to live his life and trying to run from it, Charlie must learn to navigate those wild and poignant roller-coaster days known as growing up.
 

The Man Who Was Thursday
G.K. Chesterton

This hilarious, fast-paced tale about a club of anarchists in turn-of-the-century London is a rediscovered classic by an author best known as the creator of the "Father Brown" detective stories.

Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker
Jennifer Chiaverini

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Cho Nam-Joo

The runaway bestseller that helped launch Korea's new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman's psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny. 

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
Amy Chua

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

The Person You Mean to Be
Dolly Chugh

Many of us believe in equality, diversity, and inclusion, but how do we stand up for those values in our turbulent world? Chugh reveals the surprising causes of inequality, and offers practical tools to respectfully and effectively talk politics with family, to be a better colleague to people who don't look like you, and to avoid being a well-intentioned barrier to equality. Being the person we mean to be starts with a look at ourselves.
 

Shoulder Season
Christina Clancy

The small town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin is an unlikely location for a Playboy Resort, and nineteen-year old Sherri Taylor is an unlikely bunny. But when her parents die in quick succession in 1981, she leaves the only home she's ever known for the chance to be part of a glamorous slice of history. 

The Girls
Emma Cline

In this novel, set in Northern California in 1969, and based loosely on the stories of Charles Manson’s followers, a disaffected and lonely teenager meets a group of girls who follow a manipulative, charismatic, and dangerous man, and joins them.

The President is Missing
Bill Clinton and James Patterson

The White House is the home of the President of the United States, the most guarded, monitored, closely watched person in the world. So how could a U.S. President vanish without a trace? And why would he choose to do so? An unprecedented collaboration between President Bill Clinton and the world's bestselling novelist, James Patterson, The President Is Missing is a breathtaking story from the pinnacle of power. 
 

State of Terror
Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny

This high-stakes thriller follows a novice Secretary of State who has joined the administration of her rival, a president inaugurated after four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage. A series of terrorist attacks throws the global order into disarray, and the secretary is tasked with assembling a team to unravel the deadly conspiracy, a scheme carefully designed to take advantage of an American government dangerously out of touch and out of power in the places where it counts the most. 

Between the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. 

The Water Dancer
Ta-Nehisi Coates

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her--but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he's ever known.

Educating Esme
Esme Codell

Your first year teaching at a poor urban school can really be tough. Esme, however, has energy, wit, big ideas and a touch of cynicism. Written in diary form, we read about her successes and failures as a teacher as she experiences them over the course of a year.

Connecting Across Differences: Finding Common Ground With Anyone, Anywhere, Anytime
Jane Marantz Connor

Dr. Dian Killian and Dr. Jane Marantz Connor offer a comprehensive and accessible introductory guide to exploring the concepts, applications, and transformative power of the Nonviolent Communication process. 

Blacktop Wasteland
S.A. Cosby

A gritty, voice-driven thriller about a former getaway driver who thought he had escaped the criminal life who is pulled back in by race, poverty, and his own former life of crime. 

Finlay Donovan is Killing It
Elle Cosimano

The first in a witty, fast-paced mystery series following struggling suspense novelist and single mom Finlay Donovan, whose fiction treads dangerously close to the truth as she becomes tangled in real-life murder investigations. 

The Paper Palace
Miranda Cowley Heller

A story of summer, secrets, love, and lies: in the course of a singular day on Cape Cod, one woman must make a life-changing decision that has been brewing for decades. Tender yet devastating, The Paper Palace considers the tensions between desire and dignity, the legacies of abuse, and the crimes and misdemeanors of families.

Dominicana
Angie Cruz

In bright, musical prose that reflects the energy of New York City, Cruz's Dominicana is a vital portrait of the immigrant experience and the timeless coming-of-age story of a young woman finding her voice in the world.

Parkland: Birth of a Movement
Dave Cullen

Published one year after the February 14, 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the acclaimed, New York Times bestselling author of Columbine offers an intimate, deeply moving account of the extraordinary teenage survivors who became activists and pushed back against the NRA and feckless Congressional leaders--inspiring millions of Americans to join their grassroots #neveragain movement.

The Nest
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

In this humorous novel about a dysfunctional family, three siblings find that their reckless brother has drained the $2 million dollar bank account their father left them at his death, money they have all been planning to use to solve their own financial problems. 

You Had Me at Hola
Alexis Daria

After a messy public breakup, soap opera darling Jasmine Lin Rodriguez finds her face splashed across the tabloids. When she returns to her hometown of New York City to film the starring role in a bilingual romantic comedy for the number one streaming service in the country, Jasmine figures her new "Leading Lady Plan" should be easy enough to follow, until a casting shake-up pairs her with telenovela hunk Ashton Suárez.
 

The Last Thing He Told Me
Laura Dave

When her husband of a year disappears, Hannah quickly learns he is not who he said he was and is left to sort out the truth with just one ally- her husband's teenage daughter, who hates her.

Belong to Me
Marisa De los Santos

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.

The Inheritance of Loss
Kiran Desai

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.

Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond

In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem.

White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Robin DiAngelo

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.
 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Diaz

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.

Trust
Hernan Diaz

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.

All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Doerr

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. 

Cloud Cuckoo Land
Anthony Doerr

Narratives from the past, present, and future intertwine in this soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope, and a book.

Mink River
Brian Doyle

This stream-of-consciousness novel tells the story, part realistic and part fantastic, of a quirky little town on the Oregon coast, and the lives of its inhabitants, including Salish Indians, Irish immigrants, and a crow who talks.

Untamed
Glennon Doyle

In her most revealing and powerful memoir yet, the activist, speaker, and bestselling author explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet others' expectations and start trusting the voice deep within us.

Spare
Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother's coffin as the world watched in sorrow--and horror. As Princess Diana was laid to rest, billions wondered what Prince William and Prince Harry must be thinking and feeling--and how their lives would play out from that point on. 

For Harry, this is that story at last.

Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
Firoozeh Dumas

Dumas chronicles her life in America with a collection of zany-but-true family stories.

My Family and Other Animals
Gerald Durrell

A naturalist's account of his childhood on the exotic Greek island.
 

The Death and Life of the Great Lakes
Dan Egan

A portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come, written by two-time Pulitzer-Prize finalist and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Dan Egan. Chosen as the 2018-2019 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

Manhattan Beach
Jennifer Egan

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Egan turns to historical fiction, telling the story of Anna Kerrigan, who grows up during the Great Depression to eventually become the first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Yard, while also unraveling the mysteries of her father’s disappearance and caring for her mother and disabled sister.
 

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
Timothy Egan

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.

Zeitoun
Dave Eggers

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.

You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty
Akwaeke Emezi

A New York Times bestselling author, National Book Award finalist, and "one of our greatest living writers" (Shondaland) reimagines the love story in this fresh and seductive novel about a young woman seeking joy while healing from loss.

The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng

Yun Ling Teoh, a survivor of the brutal Japanese occupation of Malaya during World War II, discovers a beautiful garden tended by the emperor’s exiled former gardener Aritomo.  Haunted by the death of her sister during the war, Yun Ling asks Aritomo to help her build a garden in memory of her sister.  But as she learns more about the garden’s intricacy and beauty, its connection to the pain and deceit of the past are also revealed.   

Infinite Country
Patricia Engel

Moving their family to what they believe will be a safer but temporary home in Houston, two young parents are forced to choose between an undocumented status in America and returning to the violence of war-torn Bogotá.
 

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman
Nora Ephron

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

LaRose
Louise Erdrich

After a tragic hunting accident in which Landreaux Irons accidentally shoots and kills his neighbor’s five-year-old-son, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition - the sweat lodge - for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and his wife will give their own five-year-old-son, LaRose, to their grieving neighbors to raise as their own. 
 

The Master Butchers Singing Club
Louise Erdrich

The Round House
Louise Erdrich

The Sentence
Louise Erdrich

A small independent bookstore in Minneapolis is haunted from November 2019 to November 2020 by the store's most annoying customer. Flora dies on All Souls' Day, but she simply won't leave the store. Tookie, who has landed a job selling books after years of incarceration that she survived by reading with murderous attention, must solve the mystery of this haunting while at the same time trying to understand all that occurs in Minneapolis during a year of grief, astonishment, isolation, and furious reckoning.

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides

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.

The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories
Danielle Evans

The award-winning author brings her signature voice and insight to the subjects of race, grief, apology, and American history.

Girl, Woman, Other
Bernardine Evaristo

From Newcastle to Cornwall, from the birth of the twentieth century to the teens of the twenty-first, Girl, Woman, Other follows a cast of twelve characters on their personal journeys through Britain and the last hundred years. They're each looking for something - a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to call home, somewhere to fit in, a lover, a missed mother, a lost father, even just a touch of hope . . .

James
Percival Everett

A harrowing and ferociously funny retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view, showing his agency, intelligence and compassion in a radically new light.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
Anne Fadiman

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.

Woman of Light
Kali Fajardo-Anstine

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.

Lucy
Ellen Feldman

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.

My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante

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.

Bossypants
Tina Fey

A comic memoir by the former Saturday Night Live writer, actress and star of the sitcom “30 Rock”.

The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
Michael Finkel

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 Woman in the Window
A.J. Finn

Anna Fox lives alone -- a recluse in her New York City home, drinking too much wine, watching old movies ... and spying on her neighbors. Then the Russells move next door: a father, a mother, their teenaged son. The perfect family. But when Anna sees something she shouldn't, her world begins to crumble -- and its shocking secrets are laid bare. In this gripping Hitchcockian thriller, no one and nothing are what they seem.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café
Fannie Flagg

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.

The Turner House
Angela Flournoy

The Turners have lived on Yarrow Street for over fifty years. But now, as ailing matriarch Viola finds herself forced to leave her home, the family discovers that the house is worth just a tenth of its mortgage. The Turner children are called home to decide its fate and to reckon with how each of their pasts haunts--and shapes--their family's future.

Gone Girl
Gillian Flynn

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.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford

A chance discovery of items left behind by Japanese-Americans forced into internment camps during World War II causes Henry Lee, a Chinese-American and recent widower, to reflect on his first romance with Keiko, which ended when her family was evacuated.

Every Summer After
Carley Fortune

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.

Send for Me
Lauren Fox

A sweeping, achingly beautiful novel that moves between Germany on the eve of World War II and present day Wisconsin, unspooling a story of love, longing, and the ceaseless push and pull of motherhood.
 

The Witch Elm
Tana French

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.
 

The Ocean at the End of the Lane
Neil Gaiman

Bad Axe County
John Galligan

In this atmospheric thriller, the first female sheriff in rural Bad Axe County, Wisconsin, searches for a missing girl, battles local drug dealers, and seeks the truth about the death of her parents.
 

Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy
Angela Garbes

An in-depth look at pregnancy through a scientific and feminist lens that challenges popular assumptions, offers help for navigating contradictions, and provides facts to aid with making informed decisions.

One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

This novel, first published in Latin America in 1967 and written in the style of magical realism, tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo, Colombia, and the family that founded it.

Lessons in Chemistry
Bonnie Garmus

Set in 1960s California, this blockbuster debut is the hilarious, idiosyncratic and uplifting story of a female scientist whose career is constantly derailed by the idea that a woman's place is in the home, only to find herself starring as the host of America's most beloved TV cooking show. 

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Atul Gawande

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. 

Still Alice
Lisa Genova

Maame
Jessica George

Maddie, a young British Ghanaian woman and self-acknowledged late bloomer, navigates her twenties and finds her place in the world in this novel that explores what it feels like to be torn between two homes and cultures―and celebrates finally being able to find where you belong.

The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh

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.

All We Ever Wanted
Emily Giffin

Three very different people must choose between their families and their most deeply held values when one devastating photo causes scandal in an already divided community in this timely exploration of wealth, privilege, and power.
 

City of Girls
Elizabeth Gilbert

Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love.

The Signature of All Things
Elizabeth Gilbert

Three Junes
Julia Glass

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.

Vintage
Susan Gloss

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. 

Janesville: An American Story
Amy Goldstein

A Washington Post reporter's intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors' assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin--Paul Ryan's hometown--and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.

Olga Dies Dreaming
Xochitl Gonzalez

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.

Strangers No Longer: Latino Belonging and Faith in Twentieth-century Wisconsin
Sergio M. González

Strangers No Longer reframes the history of Latinos in Wisconsin by revealing religion's central role in the settlement experience of immigrants, migrants, and refugees.
 

A Reliable Wife
Robert Goolrick

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.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, HER Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed
Lori Gottlieb

From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist's world--where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
Henry Grabar

An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life--the humble parking spot.

Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI
David Grann

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.
 

Libertie
Kaitlyn Greenidge

An unforgettable story about one young Black girl's attempt to find a place where she can be fully, and only, herself, inspired by the life of one of the first Black female doctors in the United States.

Less
Andrew Sean Greer

In this 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, after receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur Less, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

The Reckoning
John Grisham

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.
 

Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff

Lotto and Mathilde’s marriage seems charmed, beginning with a whirlwind romance and withstanding years of poor idealism to yield financial and artistic success.  But every story has two sides, and Groff masterfully portrays a complex marriage, first from Lotto’s perspective and then a very different version from Mathilde’s point of view.

Matrix
Lauren Groff

Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. 

Ape House
Sara Gruen

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.

Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen

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 Wedding Date
Jasmine Guillory

A groomsman and his last-minute guest are about to discover if a fake date can go the distance in a fun and flirty debut novel. 

The Rabbit Hutch
Tess Gunty

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.

Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi

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. 

Transcendent Kingdom
Yaa Gyasi

A novel about faith, science, religion, and family that tells the deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief, narrated by a fifth year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford school of medicine studying the neural circuits of reward seeking behavior in mice. Chosen as the 2021-22 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection. For information about Madison Public Library book discussions and more, see madisonpubliclibrary.org/gobigread.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon

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.

A Spot of Bother
Mark Haddon

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.

The Midnight Library
Matt Haig

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of a person's life as it is, along with another book for the other life they could have lived if they had made a different choice at any point in their life. While everyone wonders how their lives might have been, what if someone had the chance to go to the library and see for themself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

I Could Live Here Forever
Hanna Halperin

A gripping portrait of the tumultuous, consuming relationship between Leah, a graduate student at UW-Madison, and Charlie, a recovering heroin addict.

Blood, Bones and Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef
Gabrielle Hamilton

A memoir of the owner and chef of Prune, a famous NYC restaurant. Hamilton writes 'the whole truth' of her life and work, including her happy young childhood, the petty crime and drug abuse of her teen years, her grueling early restaurant jobs, unconventional marriage and success as a restauranteur and chef.

The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett

The classic hard-boiled detective novel in which Sam Spade searches for a rare statue and Hammett introduces a new style of mystery novel.

The Four Winds
Kristin Hannah

 Texas, 1934. One of the darkest periods of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl era, has arrived with a vengeance. In this uncertain and dangerous time, Elsa Martinelli-like so many of her neighbors-must make an agonizing choice: fight for the land she loves or go west, to California, in search of a better life. 
 

The Great Alone
Kristin Hannah

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)
 

The Nightingale
Kristin Hannah

This novel tells the story of two French sisters, one married with children, and the other a rebellious teenager, who struggle to survive the many hardships and abuses of German occupation during World War II, each finding her own path to resistance.

The Art of Fielding: A Novel
Chad Harbach

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.

The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir
Michele Harper

A series of connected personal stories drawn from the author's life and work as an ER doctor that explores how we are all broken--physically, emotionally, and psychically--and what we can do to heal ourselves as we try to heal others.

The Other Black Girl
Zakiya Dalila Harris

A whip-smart and dynamic thriller about the tension that unfurls when two young Black women meet against the starkly white backdrop of New York City book publishing.

The Sweetness of Water
Nathan Harris

A profound debut about the unlikely bond between two freedmen who are brothers and the Georgia farmer whose alliance will alter their lives, and his, forever. 

The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table
Minda Harts

Most business books provide a one-size-fits-all approach to career advice that overlooks the unique barriers that women of color face. In The Memo, Minda Harts offers a much-needed career guide tailored specifically for women of color. Drawing on knowledge gained from her past career as a fundraising consultant to top colleges across the country, Harts now brings her powerhouse entrepreneurial experience as CEO of The Memo LLC,  a career development platform for women of color, to the page.

Plainsong
Kent Haruf

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 Girl on the Train
Paula Hawkins

Rachel, whose life has spiraled into depression and alcoholism, becomes intrigued by a couple she dubs Jess and Jason who she spots from her commuter train every day.  One day as she is passing their home, she sees Jess kissing a man who is not her husband.  Shortly after, Jess disappears entirely.  Told from the intersecting perspectives of Rachel, Jess and Anna, Jess’s neighbor, an intriguing thriller unfolds.  But who is telling the truth?

Before the Fall
Noah Hawley

One foggy night, a private plane takes off from Martha’s Vineyard.  Sixteen minutes later, it plunges straight into the sea.  Only two survive.  Was it an accident?  Murder?  Just a simple twist of fate?  As each of the passengers’ stories is revealed, the answer becomes more elusive. 

Early Morning Riser
Katherine Heiny

Jane loves most things about Duncan, aside from running into his many old girlfriends everywhere in Boyne City. While she may be able to come to terms with dating the world's most prolific seducer of women, any notion Jane had of love and marriage changes with one terrible car crash in this alternately bittersweet and laugh-out-loud funny novel of love, disaster, and unconventional family.

The Great Divide
Cristina Henríquez

A novel about the construction of the Panama Canal, following the intersecting lives of the local families fighting to protect their homeland, the West Indian laborers recruited to dig the waterway, and the white Americans who gained profit and glory for themselves.

Happy Place
Emily Henry

A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends. 

People We Meet on Vacation
Emily Henry

A travel writer has one last shot at reconnecting with the best friend she just might be in love with. (Kirkus)

Dead Lines: Slices of Life from the Obit Beat
George Hesselberg

In a lively collection of feature obituaries and related news stories, longtime Wisconsin State Journal reporter George Hesselberg celebrates life, sharing the most fascinating stories that came from decades of covering the obit and public safety beats.

28 Summers
Elin Hilderbrand

Based on the classic film Same Time Next Year, 28 Summers explores the agony and romance of a one-weekend-per-year affair and the dramatic ways this relationship complicates and enriches the lives of two people, as well as the lives of the people they love.

Summer of ‘69
Elin Hilderbrand

Four siblings experience the drama, intrigue, and upheaval of the '60s summer when everything changed.

Clark and Division
Naomi Hirahara

In 1944 Chicago, a young woman’s search for the truth about her revered older sister's death brings to focus the struggles of one Japanese American family released from mass incarceration at Manzanar during World War II.

The Removed
Brandon Hobson

Steeped in Cherokee myths and history, a novel about a fractured family reckoning with the tragic death of their son long ago.

Calling for a Blanket Dance
Oscar Hokeah

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.

It Ends with Us
Colleen Hoover

A workaholic with a too-good-to-be-true romance can't stop thinking about her first love in this unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price.

Loving Frank
Nancy Horan

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

Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide
Tony Horwitz

In his final book, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Tony Horwitz retraces landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted's journey across the American South in the 1850s, on the eve of the Civil War.
 

And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini

 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.   

All the Things You Are
Declan Hughes

A childhood Halloween prank with horrible consequences comes back to haunt a man and his family in this Madison-set thriller.  

Klara and the Sun
Kazuo Ishiguro

From her place in the store that sells artificial friends, Klara--an artificial friend with outstanding observational qualities--watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass in the street outside. She remains hopeful a customer will soon choose her, but when the possibility emerges that her circumstances may change forever, Klara is warned not to invest too much in the promises of humans. 

Pineapple Street
Jenny Jackson

A deliciously funny, sharply observed novel of family, wealth, love and tennis, this zeitgeisty debut follows three women in an old Brooklyn Heights clan: one who was born with money, one who married into it, and one, the millennial conscience of the family, who wants to give it all away. 

Lab Girl
Hope Jahren

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.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf
Marlon James

In the stunning first novel in Marlon James's Dark Star trilogy, myth, fantasy, and history come together to explore what happens when a mercenary is hired to find a missing child. 

Death Comes to Pemberley
P. D. James

In this sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, set six years after Elizabeth and Darcy’s marriage, the domestic tranquility of their estate at Pemberley is disrupted when a visitor is found murdered in the woods.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows
Balli Kaur Jaswal

After her father's death, Nikki, a modern young Punjabi woman, takes a job teaching creative writing. The Sikh widows who show up expect an English literacy course. But Nikki never expected what she would learn from them. This lively, sexy, and thought-provoking debut novel is about community, friendship, and women's lives at all ages.

What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
Claire Jiménez

A powerful novel of a Puerto Rican family in Staten Island who discovers their long‑missing sister is potentially alive and cast on a reality TV show, and they set out to bring her home.

All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto
George M. Johnson

In a series of personal essays, prominent journalist and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson explores his childhood, adolescence, and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. From the memories of getting his teeth kicked out by bullies at age five, to flea marketing with his loving grandmother, to his first sexual relationships, this young-adult memoir weaves together the trials and triumphs faced by Black queer boys.

An American Marriage
Tayari Jones

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.

That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America
Amanda Jones

Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of our vicious culture wars.

The Uninvited Guests
Sadie Jones

A dark and stormy night turns sinister when a nearby train wreck lands dozens of stranded travelers on the Torrington family and their decayed English manor on the occasion of twenty-year-old Emerald’s birthday dinner.   By the end of the evening, class distinctions are muddled, an after-dinner game turns nasty, family skeletons are revealed and youngest daughter Smudge’s Great Undertaking comes to fruition.  An odd and surprising romp set in a Downton Abbey-esque milieu, The Uninvited Guests takes many surprising twists to its unexpected end. 

When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi

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. 

Broken for You
Stephanie Kallos

A septuagenarian invites a young woman to live in her mansion while both heal from their troubled pasts.

The Problem of Alzheimer's: How Science, Culture, and Politics Turned a Rare Disease into a Crisis and What We Can Do About It
Jason Karlawish

Part case studies, part meditation on the past, present and future of the disease, The Problem of Alzheimer’s traces Alzheimer's disease from its discovery and tells the story of the biomedical breakthroughs that may allow it to finally be prevented and treated by medicine.

Ask Again, Yes
Mary Beth Keane

A lifelong friendship and love blossoms between Kate Gleeson and Peter Stanhope, born six months apart, both children of rookie NYPD cops and neighbors in the suburbs. One shocking night their loyalties are divided, and their bond will be tested again and again over the next thirty years.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe

A stunning, intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland in 1972, during the vicious conflict known as The Troubles, and its devastating repercussions.

How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi

Bestselling author and scholar Ibram X. Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas--from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities--that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves in this essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Ibram X. Kendi

The National Book Award winning history of how racist ideas were created, spread, and deeply rooted in American society.

Darius the Great is Not Okay
Adib Khorram

Clinically-depressed Darius Kellner, a high school sophomore, travels to Iran to meet his grandparents, but it is their next-door neighbor, Sohrab, who changes his life in this young adult novel.

The Book of Longings
Sue Monk Kidd

An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny in Nazareth, where she marries Jesus.

The Invention of Wings
Sue Monk Kidd

Sarah Grimke, a well-to-do daughter of antebellum Charleston receives a ten-year old slave girl, Hetty ‘Handful’ Grimke, on her eleventh birthday.  Both women know they are meant to do more in the wider world, and yearn to escape the respective paths of life they were born to.  Over the course of their thirty-five year relationship, their destinies overlap and intertwine through slavery, freedom and the complexities of love, against the backdrop of the abolition and early women’s movements.   

The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd

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.

The Strength in What Remains
Tracy Kidder

Escaping from civil war and genocide in his home country of Burundi, Deogratias, a young medical student, comes to New York city with $200. Despite  facing many obstacles, Deo becomes an Ivy League student and eventually goes back to Burundi to found a public health clinic.

The Last Story of Mina Lee
Nancy Jooyoun Kim

Margot Lee's mother isn't returning her calls. It's a mystery to twenty-six-year-old Margot, until she visits her childhood apartment in Koreatown and finds her mother, Mina, dead under suspicious circumstances. The discovery sends Margot digging through the past, unraveling the facts of Mina's life as a Korean War orphan and undocumented immigrant, only to realize how little she truly knew about her mother. 

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders, family, and history that the Potawatomi, as well as a majority of other cultures indigenous to this land, consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowing together to reveal what it means to see humans as "the younger brothers of creation."

Euphoria
Lily King

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.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver and her family eat only local food for a year, including home-raised turkeys and chickens and garden grown and canned veggies.

The Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver

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.

Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver

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. 
 

Flight Behavior
Barbara Kingsolver

After witnessing a massive congregation of monarch butterflies, a young Tennessee farm wife sparks a debate between science and faith that leads her into a wider world than she knew before.

The Lacuna
Barbara Kingsolver

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.

Prodigal Summer
Barbara Kingsolver

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.

Unsheltered
Barbara Kingsolver

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.
 

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
Maxine Hong Kingston

A memoir of the American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants who lived within the traditions and fears of the Chinese past as well as the realities of the alien modern American culture. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities—immigrant, female, Chinese, American. 

Orphan Train
Christina Baker Kline

A troubled teenaged girl, who is helping an old woman organize her house, learns about the woman's early life as an Irish immigrant in New York City and in Minnesota, where she was sent at the age of nine, on an orphan train.

The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune

Linus Baker is a by-the-book case worker in the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's tasked with determining whether six dangerous magical children are likely to bring about the end of the world. Arthur Parnassus is the master of the orphanage. He would do anything to keep the children safe, even if it means the world will burn. And his secrets will come to light.

The Leavers
Lisa Ko

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.

Gender Queer: A Memoir
Maia Kobabe

Maia's intensely cathartic autobiographal graphic novel charts eir journey of self-identity, which includes the mortification and confusion of adolescent crushes, grappling with how to come out to family and society, bonding with friends over erotic gay fanfiction, and facing the trauma and fundamental violation of pap smears.

Where They Bury You
Steven W. Kohlhagen

In August 1863, during Kit Carson's roundup of the Navajo, Santa Fe's Provost Marshal, Major Joseph Cummings, is found dead in an arroyo near what is now the Hubbell Trading Post in Ganado, Arizona. The murder, as well as the roughly million of today's dollars in cash and belongings in his saddlebags, is historically factual. Carson's explanation that he was shot by a lone Indian, which, even today, can be found in the U.S. Army Archives, is implausible. Who did kill Carson's ''brave and lamented'' Major?

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
Robert Kolker

The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Ordinary Grace
William Kent Krueger

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.

This Tender Land
William Kent Krueger

The acclaimed author of Ordinary Grace crafts a powerful novel about an orphan's life-changing adventure traveling down America's great rivers during the Great Depression, seeking both a place to call home and a sense of purpose in a world sinking into despair.

Crazy Rich Asians
Kevin Kwan

Envisioning a summer vacation in the humble Singapore home of a boy she hopes to marry, Chinese American Rachel Chu is unexpectedly introduced to a rich and scheming clan that strongly opposes their son's relationship with an American girl.
 

The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri

Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
Stephanie Land

A journalist describes the years she worked in low-paying domestic work under wealthy employers, contrasting the privileges of the upper-middle class to the realities of the overworked laborers supporting them.

Welcome to the Great Mysterious
Lorna Landvik

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.

We Are the Brennans
Tracey Lange

When twenty-nine-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. But it's not easy. She deserted them all--and her high school sweetheart--five years before with little explanation, and they've got questions.

The Devil in the White City
Erik Larson

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.

In the Garden of Beasts: love, terror, and an American family in Hitler's Berlin
Erik Larson

This non-fiction page turner, set in Berlin during the rise of Adolph Hitler, tells the story of the American ambassador and his daughter, whose many love affairs blinded her to the increasing menace of the new Germany.

Isaac's Storm
Erik Larson

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.

The Splendid and the Vile
Erik Larson

An intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz--an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened : (A Mostly True Memoir)
Jenny Lawson

Agent Running in the Field
John Le Carré

Set in London in 2018, this thriller follows a twenty-six year old solitary figure who, in a desperate attempt to resist the political turbulence swirling around him, makes connections that will take him down a dangerous path. 

Go Set a Watchman
Harper Lee

An earlier written sequel of To Kill a Mockingbird set in the 1950s, Go Set a Watchman casts the beloved characters of Scout and Atticus in a new light, and poses the question of how far we have really come in the battle against discrimination. 

Pachinko
Min Jin Lee

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. 

Small Mercies
Dennis Lehane

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.

Luster
Raven Leilani

Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties -- sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick and clocking in and out of her admin job. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including a wife who has agreed to an open marriage -- with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and invited into Eric's home -- though not by Eric. She becomes a hesitant ally to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie may be the only Black woman young Akila knows.

Fifty Words for Rain
Asha Lemmie

The child of a married Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Her grandparents take her in, only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. But when chance brings her older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him an unlikely ally with whom she forms a powerful bond--a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. 

The Soloist
Steve Lopez

Journalist Lopez befriends a schizophrenic former Juilliard student playing a battered violin beside a shopping cart of belongings in L.A. Chosen by Porchlight as their Madison Cares community read. The full title is The Soloist: a Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

Prophet Song
Paul Lynch

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning toward tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what-or who-is she willing to leave behind?
 

H Is for Hawk
Helen Macdonald

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.   

A Burning
Megha Majumdar

An electrifying debut novel about three unforgettable characters who seek to rise-- to the middle class, to political power, to fame in the movies -- and find their lives entangled in the wake of a catastrophe in contemporary India.

I Have Some Questions for You
Rebecca Makkai

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.

The Glass Hotel
Emily St. John Mandel

A captivating novel of money, beauty, white-collar crime, ghosts, and moral compromise in which a woman disappears from a container ship off the coast of Mauritania and a massive Ponzi scheme implodes in New York, dragging countless fortunes with it.

Sea of Tranquility
Emily St. John Mandel

A novel of art, time travel, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father
David Maraniss

A personal story of the author's father's involvement in HUAC that offers a rich portrait of McCarthy era America.

Life of Pi
Yann Martel

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.

Crossing Over: a Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail
Ruben Martinez

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.

All This Could Be Different
Sarah Thankam Mathews

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.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Katherine May

Sometimes you slip through the cracks: unforeseen circumstances like an abrupt illness, the death of a loved one, a break up, or a job loss can derail a life. These periods of dislocation can be lonely and unexpected. For May, her husband fell ill, her son stopped attending school, and her own medical issues led her to leave a demanding job. Wintering explores how she not only endured this painful time, but embraced the singular opportunities it offered, leading her to form a guiding philosophy for transforming the hardships that arise before the ushering in of a new season.

Diary of a Young Naturalist
Dara McAnulty

From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it.

The Color of Water
James McBride

This memoir combines accounts of McBride’s childhood in a mixed-race family and his mother’s life history, and is a powerful portrait of growing up, a meditation on race and identity, and a poignant hymn from a son to his mother.

Deacon King Kong
James McBride

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .45 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of this  funny, moving novel.

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
James McBride

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.  

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency
Alexander McCall Smith

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.

The Tears of the Giraffe
Alexander McCall Smith

The further adventures of Precious Ramotswe, the cunning, insightful head of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency in Botswana.

Let the Great World Spin
Colum McCann

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.

I’m Glad My Mom Died
Jennette McCurdy

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 Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together
Heather McGhee

One of today's most insightful and influential thinkers offers a powerful exploration of inequality and the lesson that generations of Americans have failed to learn: Racism has a cost for everyone--not just for people of color.

Circling the Sun
Paula McLain

Beryl Markham has grown up in the wilds of 1920s Kenya, raised by her British father and members of the local tribes.  Her unlikely upbringing gives her a boldness that helps her become a pioneering aviator and author, as well as a deep appreciation for the beautiful and wild spirit of Africa.  But affairs of the heart are a different matter, challenging even a woman as independent and strong as Markham. 

The Paris Wife
Paula McLain

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.

One Last Stop
Casey McQuiston

For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don't exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. And there's certainly no chance of her subway commute being anything more than a daily trudge through boredom and electrical failures. But then, there's this gorgeous girl on the train. Jane. Dazzling, charming, mysterious, impossible Jane, showing up in a leather jacket to save August's day when she needed it most.

How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion
David McRaney

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.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President
Candice Millard

This nonfiction book tells the story of James Garfield, one of America’s least known Presidents, showing that his shooting by a deranged man, and subsequent death at the hands of his inept doctors, deprived the nation of a man who could have been an excellent leader.

Circe
Madeline Miller

Circe, the banished witch daughter of Helios, hones her powers and interacts with famous mythological beings before a conflict with one of the most vengeful Olympians forces her to choose between the worlds of the gods and mortals.

The Song of Achilles
Madeline Miller

Patroclus, an awkward young prince, follows Achilles into war, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they have learned, everything they hold dear. And that, before he is ready, he will be forced to surrender his friend to the hands of Fate. Set during the Trojan War.

A Place for Us
Fatima Farheen Mirza

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.
 

A Gate at the Stairs
Lorrie Moore

In this pre- and post-9/11 novel Tassie, a student at thinly veiled UW-Madison, hires on as a nanny for the owner of a pricey French restaurant who adopts a mixed-race child.

The God of the Woods
Liz Moore

In 1975, Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her family’s Adirondack summer camp, fourteen years after her brother similarly disappeared, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds, unveiling the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow.

Mexican Gothic
Silvia Moreno-Garcia

A darkly enchanting reimagining of Gothic fantasy, in which a spirited young woman discovers the haunting secrets of a beautiful old mansion in 1950s Mexico.

The Night Circus
Erin Morgenstern

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.

 

Apples Never Fall
Liane Moriarty

The Delaney family is a communal foundation. Stan and Joy are the envy of all of their friends. One night a stranger named Savannah knocks on Stan and Joy's door. Everyone will wonder what exactly went on in that household after Savannah entered their lives that night. Because now Joy is missing, no one knows where Savannah is, and the Delaneys are reexamining their parents' marriage and their shared family history with fresh, frightened eyes.

Nine Perfect Strangers
Liane Moriarty

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.
 

Truly Madly Guilty
Liane Moriarty

A last-minute invitation to a weekend barbeque has lasting effects for three couples, and leaves them questioning their friendships and the guilt underlying even the most commonplace moments. 

A Mercy
Toni Morrison

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

Hell of a Book
Jason Mott

Full title: Hell of a Book, or the Altogether Factual, Wholly Bona Fide Story of a Big Dreams, Hard Luck, American-Made Mad Kid

The Girl You Left Behind
Jojo Moyes

The Giver of Stars
Jojo Moyes

Set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey as the Horseback Librarians of Kentucky. Based on a true story rooted in America's past, this is a richly rewarding novel of women's friendship, of true love, and of what happens when we reach beyond our grasp for the great beyond.

Me Before You
JoJo Moyes

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 into trying to convince him to stay alive, despite his losses.

Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami

In Murakami’s poignant coming-of-age story, Toru, a college student in 1960s Japan, is devoted to Naoko, a thoughtful young woman who shares Toru’s sense of isolation and yearning for beauty.  But while Naoko struggles with the harsh realities of life, Toru discovers that he must make a choice between his love for her and the unknown possibilities of adulthood. 

Dewey: the Small Town Library Cat
Vicki Myron

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.

Dear Edward
Ann Napolitano

A twelve-year-old boy struggles with the worst kind of fame--as the sole survivor of a notorious plane crash--in this novel that is a transcendent coming-of-age story, a multidimensional portrait of an unforgettable cast of characters, and a breathtaking illustration of all the ways a broken heart learns to love again.

Hello Beautiful
Ann Napolitano

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.
 

Enrique's Journey
Sonia Nazario

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.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog: On Forgotten Roads With an Indian Elder
Kent Nerburn

Kent Nerburn draws the reader deep into the world of an Indian elder known only as Dan. It's a world of Indian towns, white roadside cafes, and abandoned roads that swirl with the memories of the Ghost Dance and Sitting Bull. Readers meet vivid characters like Jumbo, a 400-pound mechanic, and Annie, an 80-year-old Lakota woman living in a log cabin. Threading through the book is the story of two men struggling to find a common voice. 

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments
Aimee Nezhukumatathil

From beloved, award-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil comes a debut work of nonfiction--a collection of essays about the natural world, and the way its inhabitants can teach, support, and inspire us.

Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng

This story of a community and a family, whose attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby dramatically divides the town, explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood - and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.

Our Missing Hearts
Celeste Ng

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.

The Sympathizer
Viet Thanh Nguyen

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.

Under the Sky We Make: How to Be Human in a Warming World
Kimberly Nicholas, PhD

A hopeful, clear-eyed, and somehow also hilarious guide to effecting real change and saving ourselves from climate apocalypse, starting in our own lives. 

The Time Traveler's Wife
Audrey Niffenegger

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. 

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
Trevor Noah

The compelling, inspiring, and comically sublime story of one man's coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.

True Biz
Sara Nović

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. 

Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women
Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi

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 for more information.
 

Becoming
Michelle Obama

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America, she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private. 
 

The Light We Carry
Michelle Obama

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.

A Promised Land
Barack Obama

Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency--a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.

Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--and How You Can, Too
Ijeoma Oluo

Showing how people across America are working to create change for intersectional racial equity and illustrating various ways in which the reader can find entryways into change in these same areas, or can bring some of this important work being done elsewhere to where they live; this book is both an urgent chronicle of this important moment in history, as well as an inspiring and restorative call for action. 

So You Want to Talk About Race
Ijeoma Oluo

In this hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to "model minorities" in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life.

 

There There
Tommy Orange

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.  
 

Wandering Stars
Tommy Orange

In this masterful follow-up to his already classic first novel, There There, Tommy Orange extends his constellation of narratives into the past and future, tracing the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School through three generations of a family in a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous.

The Library Book
Susan Orlean

Weaving her lifelong love of books and reading into an investigation of the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library, award-winning reporter and author Susan Orlean delivers a mesmerizing and uniquely compelling book that manages to tell the broader story of libraries and librarians in a way that has never been done before.

1984
George Orwell

Written in 1949, 1984 was George Orwell's chilling prophecy about the future, where Big Brother is always watching.  And while 1984 has come and gone, his dystopian vision of a government that will do anything to control the narrative still resonates today.

I Know What You Did
Cayce Osborne

When a bestselling novel fictionalizes the death of her childhood best friend-and accuses her of the murder-Petal Woznewski must figure out who wrote it and why in this debut novel by a Madison-area author.

The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Where the Crawdads Sing
Delia Owens

For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved.

A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki

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.

Hamnet
Maggie O’Farrell

A short, piercing, deeply moving novel about the death of Shakespeare's 11 year old son Hamnet--a name interchangeable with Hamlet in 15th century Britain--and the years leading up to the production of his great play. 

The Marriage Portrait
Maggie O’Farrell

The award-winning author brings the world of Renaissance Italy to jewel-bright life in this unforgettable fictional portrait of the captivating young duchess Lucrezia de' Medici as she makes her way in a troubled court.

The Dive from Clausen's Pier
Ann Packer

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.

Commonwealth
Ann Patchett

A kiss at a christening party leads to the dissolution of marriages and the creation of a new blended family, the repercussions of which are traced through fifty years.  

The Dutch House
Ann Patchett

At the end of the Second World War, Cyril Conroy combines luck and a single canny investment to begin an enormous real estate empire, propelling his family from poverty to enormous wealth. His first order of business is to buy the Dutch House, a lavish estate in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. Meant as a surprise for his wife, the house sets in motion the undoing of everyone he loves. Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House digs deeply into questions of inheritance, love and forgiveness, of how we want to see ourselves and of who we really are.

Run
Ann Patchett

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

Tom Lake
Ann Patchett

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.

The Sanatorium
Sarah Pearse

A chilling debut in which a detective must uncover the dark history of a luxury hotel in the Alps if she has any hope of stopping the deaths that won't let up.

Northwoods
Amy Pease

Working for his mother, the sheriff of an idyllic resort town in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, Eli North, when the body of a teenage boy is found in the lake, is drawn into an investigation related to America's opioid epidemic that becomes much more than just a hunt for a killer.

Still Life
Louise Penny

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.

Take My Hand
Dolen Perkins-Valdez

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.

Mrs. Fletcher
Tom Perrotta

A coming-of-age novel about the sexual awakening of a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Fletcher is a provocative, witty look at contemporary sexual politics and timeless moral dilemmas - a moving and funny examination of sexuality, identity, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure who they are and where they belong.
 

Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting
Michael Perry

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

Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time
Michael Perry

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.

Truck: A Love Story
Michael Perry

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.

The Berry Pickers
Amanda Peters

A four-year-old Mi'kmaq girl goes missing from the blueberry fields of Maine, sparking a mystery that will haunt the survivors, unravel a family, and remain unsolved for nearly fifty years.

Detransition, Baby
Torrey Peters

The lives of three women--transgender and cisgender--collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires.

Fire Road: The Napalm Girl's Journey Through the Horrors of War to Faith, Forgiveness, and Peace
Kim Phúc

Kim Phúc, informally known as “the Napalm Girl,”  was immortalized as a badly burned child running from a bombing in one of the most horrifying, iconic images of the Vietnam war. Yet despite the physical and emotional pain she suffered, this memoir details how she found faith, forgiveness, and peace.
 

House Rules : a novel
Jodi Piccoult

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.

The Virgin of Small Plains
Nancy Pickard

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.

Change of Heart
Jodi Picoult

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

Small Great Things
Jodi Picoult

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.  

A Spark of Light
Jodi Picoult

The bestselling author returns with a powerful and provocative new novel about ordinary lives that intersect during a heart-stopping crisis at a women's reproductive health services clinic.
 

The Storyteller
Jodi Picoult

Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age
Mary Bray Pipher

In this guide to wisdom, authenticity, and bliss for women as they age, Pipher draws on her own experience as a daughter, sister, mother, grandmother, caregiver, clinical psychologist, and cultural anthropologist to explore ways women can cultivate resilient responses to the challenges they face.

The Overstory
Richard Powers

A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.

Dead Man Walking
Helen Prejean

A Catholic nun shares her perspective of our system of capital punishment after she is asked to counsel Patrick Sonnier, a death-row inmate. She writes of her experiences as she gets to know Patrick, including her shock at the brutality of his crime, her sympathy with his pain and her efforts to abolish the death penalty.

The Secrets We Kept
Lara Prescott

A thrilling tale of secretaries turned spies, of love and duty, and of sacrifice--inspired by the true story of the CIA plot to infiltrate the hearts and minds of Soviet Russia, not with propaganda, but with the greatest love story of the twentieth century: Doctor Zhivago.

We Are Not Like Them
Christine Pride and Jo Piazza

Told from alternating perspectives, an evocative and riveting novel about the lifelong bond between two women, one Black and one white, whose friendship is indelibly altered by a tragic event--a powerful and poignant exploration of race in America today and its devastating impact on ordinary lives.

The Maid
Nita Prose

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.

Blessings
Anna Quindlen

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.

Every Last One
Anna Quindlen

A suburban mother raising three teenage children and running a landscaping business has an ordinary life with ordinary problems until the family is engulfed in a violent tragedy.

Killers of a Certain Age
Deanna Raybourn

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. 

Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: a Tale of Love and Fallout
Lauren Redniss

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. Chosen as the 2012-13 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
Ruth Reichl

This memoir of family, friends and food by the former restaurant critic for The New York Times and current editor of Gourmet Magazine focuses on the early childhood and adulthood of the author, and shows what led to her love of food.

Daisy Jones & The Six
Taylor Jenkins Reid

A gripping novel about the whirlwind rise of an iconic 1970s rock group and their beautiful lead singer, revealing the mystery behind their infamous breakup.

Malibu Rising
Taylor Jenkins Reid

Set against the backdrop of the Malibu surf culture of the 1980s, this novel follows four famous siblings as they throw an epic party to celebrate the end of the summer; over the course of twenty-four hours, the family drama that ensues will change their lives forever.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid

An unforgettable and sweeping novel about one classic film actress's relentless rise to the top, the risks she took, the loves she lost, and the long-held secrets the public could never imagine.

Such a Fun Age
Kiley Reid

A page-turning and big-hearted story about race and privilege, set around a young black babysitter, her well-intentioned employer, and a surprising connection that threatens to undo them both.

Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South
Margaret Renkl

For the past four years, Margaret Renkl's columns have offered readers of The New York Times a weekly dose of natural beauty, human decency, and persistent hope from her home in Nashville. Now more than sixty of those pieces have been brought together in this sparkling new collection.

Driftless
David Rhodes

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.

Jewelweed
David Rhodes

Paroled after serving time for a crime he might not have committed, Brock Bookchester is back in his hometown of Words, Wisconsin.  As he slowly tries to reconnect with family and friends, the residents of Words find that only by taking risks and making sacrifices can a community make one of its own whole again.  Revisiting the world he created in Driftless, Rhodes creates a detailed, poignant portrait of those who call small towns home. 

Magic City
Jewell Parker Rhodes

A fictionalized account based on the true story of a white woman who accused a black man of rape in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, in order to avoid a forced marriage to the farmhand who actually raped her. The resulting riots pitted the National Guard against the community of Greenwood, known as the "Negro Wall Street," and resulted in the complete destruction of that town.

Painting Beyond Walls
David Rhodes

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.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
Kim Michele Richardson

Cussy Mary Carter is the last of her kind, her skin the color of a blue damselfly in these dusty hills. But that doesn't mean she's got nothing to offer. As a member of the Pack Horse Library Project, Cussy delivers books to the hill folk of Troublesome, hoping to spread learning in these desperate times. But not everyone is so keen on Cussy's family or the Library Project, and the hardscrabble Kentuckians are quick to blame a Blue for any trouble in their small town.

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal
Mary Roach

Fruit of the Drunken Tree
Ingrid Rojas Contreras

A mesmerizing debut set in Colombia at the height Pablo Escobar's violent reign about a sheltered young girl and a teenage maid who strike an unlikely friendship that threatens to undo them both.
 

Normal People
Sally Rooney

At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He's popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private. But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne's house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers--one they are determined to conceal. A year later, they're both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain.

The Guncle
Steven Rowley

A warm and deeply funny novel about a once-famous gay sitcom star whose unexpected family tragedy leaves him with his niece and nephew for the summer.

The Happiness Project: or, the Way I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right...
Gretchen Rubin

A chronicle of the author's year long quest to find happiness through testing ideas from age old wisdom, popular culture, and current scientific research.

We are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood
Jen Rubin

For eighty years, Radio Clinic operated on 98th and Broadway on Manhattan's Upper West Side. 'We are staying' chronicles the store's rise, struggles, and fall, and the family that owned it across those decades. Radio Clinic survived the 1977 blackout and looting but could not survive the rising rents. It is an immigrant story, a grandfather-father-daughter story, a story of a unique character a family business brings to a neighborhood, and a reflection on what has been lost as stores like these disappear.
 

Swamplandia!
Karen Russell

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.

Everybody's Fool
Richard Russo

In the Rust Belt town of North Bath, New York, police chief Doug Raymer is convinced he’s ‘everyone’s fool’ as he grapples with the revelation his now-dead wife cheated on him, engages in an ongoing feud with the curmudgeon Sully Sullivan and otherwise tries to maintain order in a town filled with down-on-their-luck but lovable characters. 

That Old Cape Magic
Richard Russo

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.

West with Giraffes
Lynda Rutledge

An emotional, rousing novel inspired by the incredible true story of two giraffes who made headlines and won the hearts of Depression-era America.

Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor
Layla F. Saad

Based on the author’s Instagram challenge that grew into a cultural movement, #meandwhitesupremacy, the book Me and White Supremacy teaches readers how to dismantle the privilege within themselves so that they can stop (often unconsciously) inflicting damage on people of color, and in turn, help other white people do better, too.

The Cherry Harvest
Lucy Sanna

In the summer of 1944, most of the men have been shipped off to war, and Door County’s cherry harvest is threatened.  Faced with the possibility of losing their livelihood, the Christiansen family lobbies to use Germans housed at a nearby POW camp for labor.  But when friendships are sparked between enemies and former servicemen begin coming home with an intense hatred of Germany, the prospects for trouble are inevitable.  

Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi

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.

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

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.

Cleopatra
Stacy Schiff

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.

An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting With Destiny
Laura Schroff

On a wet day in 1986, businesswoman Laura Schroff passed Maurice, an 11-year-boy panhandling for spare change.  She walked on, but something made her stop and go back.  That day, recounted in this true story, marked the beginning of a life-changing friendship that enriched both Schroff and Maurice, and underscores how one moment of kindness can have lasting benefits. 

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue
V.E. Schwab

Making a Faustian bargain to live forever but never be remembered, a woman from early eighteenth-century France endures unacknowledged centuries before meeting a man who remembers her name.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim
David Sedaris

In this collection of humorous essays, David Sedaris discusses childhood, family and relationships, revealing that "normal" is truly a relative term.

The Island of Sea Women
Lisa See

Mi-ja and Young-sook, two girls living on the Korean island of Jeju, are best friends that come from very different backgrounds. When they are old enough, they begin working in the sea with their village's all-female diving collective, led by Young-sook's mother. As the girls take up their positions as baby divers, they know they are beginning a life of excitement and responsibility -- but also of danger.

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
Lisa See

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 Bookseller of Kabul
Asne Seierstad

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.

Where'd You Go Bernadette?
Maria Semple

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.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann and Annie Barrows Shaffer

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.

The Women in the Castle
Jessica Shattuck

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.

 

Challenger Deep
Neal Shusterman

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

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dal Sijie

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.

Settlin': Stories of Madison's Early African American Families
Muriel Simms

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.
 

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Helen Simonson

In this humorous love story a proper, retired British army officer and a shopkeeper of Pakistani heritage begin a romance despite family problems and cultural barriers.

The Rosie Project
Graeame Simsion

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.   

Romantic Comedy
Curtis Sittenfeld

A comedy writer thinks she's sworn off love, until a dreamy pop star flips the script on all her assumptions.
 

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot

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. Chosen as the 2010-2011 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

The Violin Conspiracy
Brendan Slocumb

Ray McMillian is a Black classical musician on the rise--undeterred by the pressure and prejudice of the classical music world--when a shocking theft sends him on a desperate quest to recover his great-great-grandfather's heirloom violin on the eve of the most prestigious musical competition in the world.

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Clint Smith

A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.

Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Art Spiegelman

A brutally moving work of art--widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written--Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author's father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats. (Contains both volumes, I, My Father Bleeds History and II, And Here My Troubles Began)

The Chai House
Priti Srivastava

The Chai House is a haunting debut novel by a Madison-area author that explores the complexity of community when individuals are unaware of their own roles in upholding systems of oppression. Swati has spent her entire life trying to live up to her family's expectations of her. She has learned it is easiest to just do what is asked of her, without resistance; a skill that has helped her survive in the early years of the Knights, an authoritarian regime. When her mother has a request for Swati, she agrees to it as it is the only way to help her young niece have some sort of future.

Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel

In this National Book Award-nominated novel, a rag-tag group of traveling Shakespearean actors struggle to survive in a landscape that has been decimated by a global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population.  In flashbacks, members of the group recall their lives during the pandemic and what it took for them to survive, with some surprising connections. 

The Light Between Oceans
M. L. Stedman

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.

The Turk and My Mother
Mary Helen Stefaniak

A down-to-earth multigenerational tale of a Croatian family who journey from their Balkan village to Siberia and ultimately to Milwaukee, WI.

Crossing to Safety
Wallace Stegner

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.

The Art of Racing in the Rain
Garth Stein

A tale of love, loyalty, child custody, death and betrayal with parallels to the sport of auto racing... narrated by a dog.

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Bryan Stevenson

Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need. One of his first clients was Walter McMillian, a man on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. Here Stevenson details the legal journey to McMillian’s release as well as those of others he’s helped in his now thirty year career.

The Help
Kathryn Stockett

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.'

Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
J. Ryan Stradal

A story of a couple from two very different restaurant families in rustic Minnesota, and the legacy of love and tragedy, of hardship and hope, that unites and divides them.

This Time Tomorrow
Emma Straub

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. 

The Vacationers
Emma Straub

The Post family and friends embark on a celebratory two-week vacation in the island paradise of Mallorca.  But humorous revelations of secrets and infidelities promise to turn their holiday into one they’ll never forget. 

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
Cheryl Strayed

Brothers on Three: A True Story of Family, Resistance, and Hope on a Reservation in Montana
Abe Streep

From journalist Abe Streep, the story of coming of age on a reservation in the American West and a team uniting a community.

The Burgess Boys
Elizabeth Strout

Two brothers left their hometown in Maine to become New York City lawyers. One is now a hotshot corporate attorney, the other works for Legal Aid. When their sister in Maine needs help, both go back to assist—and secrets large and small are revealed.

My Name Is Lucy Barton
Elizabeth Strout

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. 

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout

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.

Olive, Again
Elizabeth Strout

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout continues the life of her beloved Olive Kitteridge, a character who has captured the imaginations of millions.

Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart

The unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland, and his alcoholic mother Agnes, whose love is only matched by her pride.

Three Women
Lisa Taddeo

A riveting true story about the sex lives of three real American women, based on nearly a decade of immersive reporting and told with astonishing frankness and immediacy.

The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt

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. 

The Secret History
Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

Sitting Pretty: The View from My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
Rebekah Taussig

From a disability advocate with a PhD in disability studies and creative nonfiction, and creator of the Instagram account @sitting pretty, an essay collection based on a lifetime of experiences in a paralyzed body, tackling themes of identity, accessibility, bodies, and representation. 

2024-2025 UW Madison Go Big Read selection. 
 

Real Life
Brandon Taylor

Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends--some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness.

Come Home, Indio
Jim Terry

In his memoir, we are invited to walk through the life of the author, Jim Terry, as he struggles to find security and comfort in an often hostile environment. Between the Ho-Chunk community of his Native American family in Wisconsin and his schoolmates in the Chicago suburbs, he tries in vain to fit in and eventually turns to alcohol to provide an escape from increasing loneliness and alienation.

Echoes from the Dead
Johan Theorin

In this debut novel, a runaway bestseller in Sweden, a mother, drawn by a mysterious clue back to the island where her 6-year-old son Jens disappeared 20 years ago, is determined to find out what really happened that gray September day. In the process, she finds a shocking connection to Öland's most notorious murder case: the killing spree of a wealthy young man who fled the island and died years before Jens was even born. 
 

The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker

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.

Brooklyn
Colm Toibin

In 1950s Ireland, when Ellis Lacey is unable to find a job in her home country, she leaves reluctantly for Brooklyn, NY.  After a period of isolation she begins to find happiness, yet when a tragedy takes her back to Ireland the limitations of her old life conflict with her newfound possibilities in America.

The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East
Sandy Tolan

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.

The Hobbit
J. R. R. Tolkien

In this acclaimed prequel to The Lord of the Rings, hobbit Bilbo Baggins has his peaceful existence interrupted when he is persuaded to join a band of dwarfs in retrieving a famous hoard of gold far beyond the Misty Mountains.  Along the way, he encounters trolls, elves and the ferocious dragon Smaug.

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles

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.
 

The Lincoln Highway
Amor Towles

In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians but Were Afraid to Ask
Anton Treuer

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. 
 

Black Man in a White Coat: A Doctor's Reflections on Race and Medicine
Damon Tweedy

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

Clock Dance
Anne Tyler

Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life. In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother, yet the prospect is dimming. So, when Willa receives a phone call from a stranger, telling her that her son's ex-girlfriend has been shot, she drops everything and flies across the country to Baltimore.

Digging to America
Anne Tyler

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 Dressmaker of Khair Khana
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

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.

How to Make a Life: A Tibetan Refugee Family and the Midwestern Woman They Adopted
Madeline Uraneck

When Madeline Uraneck said hello to the Tibetan woman cleaning her office cubicle, she never imagined the moment would change her life. After learning that Tenzin Kalsang had left her husband and four children behind in a Tibetan refugee settlement in India to try to forge a better life for them, Madeline took on the task of helping her apply for US visas. When the family reunited in their new Midwestern home, Madeline became swept up in their lives, from homework and soccer games to family dinners and shared holiday traditions.

The House of Broken Angels
Luis Alberto Urrea

In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel de La Cruz, affectionately called Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader in a single weekend. This indelible portrait of a complex family reminds us of what it means to be the first generation and to live two lives across one border.
 

The Boy in the Shadows
Carl-Johan Vallgren

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.

Remarkably Bright Creatures
Shelby Van Pelt

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.

Hillbilly Elegy
J. D. Vance

A personal reflection on upward mobility in America seen through the lens of a white, working-class family in the Midwest.  Chosen as the UW-Madison Go Big Read selection for 2017-2018

Have Mercy on Us All
Fred Vargas

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 Covenant of Water
Abraham Verghese

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, this epic of love, faith, and medicine is set in Kerala, on South India's Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning--and in Kerala, water is everywhere. 

Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese

Decolonizing Wealth
Edgar Villanueva

With great compassion--because the Native way is to bring the oppressor into the circle of healing, understanding that healing cannot occur unless everyone is part of the process-- Villanueva diagnoses the fatal flaws in financial institutions, unflinchingly drilling down to the core of colonialism and White supremacy. Integrating traditional indigenous wisdom with savvy financial experience, this book explains how money can be used to facilitate relationships, to help us thrive, and to bring things back into balance.

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born -- a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam -- and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity.

The Glass Castle: A Memoir
Jeannette Walls

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.

Half Broke Horses: A True-Life Novel
Jeannette Walls

A fictionalized biography of the author's  grandmother, Lily Casey Smith,  who was a mustang breaker, school teacher, bootlegger, poker player, racehorse rider, bush pilot, ranch wife and mother.

Hang the Moon
Jeannette Walls

Born at the turn of the 20th century into a life of comfort and privilege, Sallie Kincaid was later sent to live in poverty with her aunt after her involvement in an accident with her younger brother. After nine years away from her family, Sallie Kincaid returns to Virginia to find her place as a bold, sometimes reckless bootlegger. 
 

The Silver Star
Jeannette Walls

Chemistry
Weike Wang

A luminous coming-of-age novel about a young female scientist who must recalibrate her life when her academic career goes off track. She's tormented by her failed research--and reminded of her delays by her peers, her advisor, and most of all by her Chinese parents, who have always expected nothing short of excellence. But there's another, nonscientific question looming: the marriage proposal from her devoted boyfriend.

Let Us Descend
Jesmyn Ward

In the years before the Civil War, Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, struggles through the miles-long march, seeks comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother, opening herself to a world beyond this world.

Sing, Unburied, Sing
Jesmyn Ward

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. 

The Death of Mrs. Westaway
Ruth Ware

On a day that begins like any other, Hal receives a mysterious letter bequeathing her a substantial inheritance. She realizes very quickly that the letter was sent to the wrong person--but also that the cold-reading skills she's honed as a tarot card reader might help her claim the money. Soon, Hal finds herself at the funeral of the deceased...where it dawns on her that there is something very, very wrong about this strange situation and the inheritance at the center of it. 
 

The It Girl
Ruth Ware

After John Neville, the man convicted of killing her best friend April ten years earlier, dies in prison, expectant mother Hannah Jones, after new evidence surfaces proving his innocence, reconnects with old friends to solve the mystery of April's death and realizes they all have something to hide--including a murder.

Memorial
Bryan Washington

Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant. Benson is a Black day care teacher. They've been together for a few years, but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Houston for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he discovers the truth about his family and his past.

Winter Counts
David Heska Wanbli Weiden

A groundbreaking thriller about a vigilante on a Native American reservation who embarks on a dangerous mission to track down the source of a heroin influx. 

Big Summer
Jennifer Weiner

Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when Drue Cavanaugh walks back into her life, looking as lovely and successful as ever, with a massive favor to ask. Daphne hasn't spoken one word to Drue in all this time--she doesn't even hate-follow her ex-best friend on social media--so when Drue asks if she will be her maid-of-honor at the society wedding of the summer, Daphne is rightfully speechless. Drue was always the one who had everything--except the ability to hold onto friends.

Mrs. Everything
Jennifer Weiner

A smart, thoughtful, and timely exploration of two sisters' lives from the 1950s to the present as they struggle to find their places--and be true to themselves--in a rapidly evolving world, Mrs. Everything is an ambitious, richly textured journey through history--and herstory--as these two sisters navigate a changing America over the course of their lives.

The Martian
Andy Weir

Left for dead after an accident, astronaut Mark Watley is stranded on the surface of Mars.  Left with only enough food and supplies for a few months, Watley has to rely on his wits and ingenuity to survive.

The World Without Us
Alan Weisman

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.

Educated: A Memoir
Tara Westover

Born to survivalists in the mountains of Idaho, Tara Westover was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. Her family was so isolated from mainstream society that there was no one to ensure the children received an education, and no one to intervene when one of Tara's older brothers became violent. When another brother got himself into college, Tara decided to try a new kind of life. Her quest for knowledge transformed her, taking her over oceans and across continents, to Harvard and to Cambridge University.

Harlem Shuffle
Colson Whitehead

From two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author Colson Whitehead, a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in the 1960s.

The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida.

The Underground Railroad
Colson Whitehead

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. 

Bread and Butter
Michelle Wildgen

Madison author Wildgen tackles sibling rivalry and the cutthroat world of restaurants when brothers Britt, Leo and Harry open rival restaurants in a small town near Philadelphia.  

Black Cake
Charmaine Wilkerson

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. 

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents
Isabel Wilkerson

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

The Warmth of Other Suns: the Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Isabel Wilkerson

Between World War I and 1970, six million black Americans left the South for the East Coast, West Coast, or Midwest. This non-fiction book tells the story of  this “Great Migration” by focusing on the lives of three of the people who made the move.

Seven Days in June
Tia Williams

A hilarious, romantic, and sexy‑as‑hell story of two writers discovering their second chance at love over seven days during a steamy Brooklyn summer.

The Seed Keeper
Diane Wilson

This haunting novel spanning several generations follows a Dakhóta family's struggle to preserve their way of life, and their sacrifices to protect what matters most, told through the voices of women who have protected their families, their traditions, and a precious cache of seeds through generations of hardship and loss, through war and the insidious trauma of boarding schools.

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
Simon Winchester

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.

Before We Were Yours
Lisa Wingate

Based on one of America's most notorious real-life scandals in which the director of a Memphis adoption organization kidnapped and sold poor children to wealthy families all over the country, Wingate's wrenching and ultimately uplifting tale reminds us how, even though our paths can lead to many places, the heart never forgets where we belong.

The White Lady
Jacqueline Winspear

A reluctant ex-spy with demons of her own, Elinor finds herself facing down one of the most dangerous organized crime gangs in London, ultimately exposing corruption from Scotland Yard to the highest levels of government.

Red at the Bone
Jacqueline Woodson

Two families from different social classes are joined together by an unexpected pregnancy and the child that it produces. As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy.

Fourth Wing
Rebecca Yarros

Instead of joining the Scribe Quadrant at Basgiath War College that 20-year-old Violet Sorrengail has trained for, at her mother’s command, she joins the Riders Quadrant, where she faces brutal challenges in pursuit of a chance to bond with a dragon and become a rider. Other cadets - like ruthless wingleader Xaden Riorson - are out to eliminate the competition, so every day is a battle for her life. 

I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban
Malala Yousafzai

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.

For Keeps: Women Tell the Truth About Their Bodies, Growing Older, and Acceptance
Victoria Zackheim

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. 

Solito: A Memoir
Javier Zamora

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.  
 

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir
Michelle Zauner

From the indie rockstar of Japanese Breakfast fame, and author of the viral 2018 New Yorker essay that shares the title of this book, an unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin

A modern love story about two childhood friends, Sam, raised by an actress mother in LA's Koreatown, and Sadie, from the wealthy Jewish enclave of Beverly Hills, who reunite as adults to create video games, finding an intimacy in digital worlds that eludes them in their real lives.

The Book Thief
Markus Zusak

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.