We know how difficult it is to choose a book for your next book group meeting, and to find enough copies for all the members of your group. We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag. We've included discussion questions and information about each author in a folder for each collection.
There are at least 8 copies of the book in each kit. At this time we have over 320 kits for you to choose from.
Printable lists of titles are also available, without cover art, sorted by title and by author.
How can we get a kit?
Call us at 266-6300 or visit the Central Library and we will help you check out a kit. The kit will be checked out on the library card of the person picking them up. The person checking out the kit may choose a due date for the kit, up to 3 months from the day they pick it up. Due to high demand, please take only one or two kits at a time. Kits can be shipped to any library in Madison as well as any public library in the South Central Library System.
What if a book is lost?
If your group happens to lose a book, we ask that you replace it with another copy of the book, new or second hand, that is clean and readable.
Search our collection of kits
The Postmistress
Interwoven stories of three American women at the start of World War II: a single 40-year old postmistress in a small town on Cape Cod, a newlywed new to the town, and a reporter in London working under Edward R. Morrow.
The Power
A rich Nigerian boy; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. When a vital new force takes root and flourishes, their lives converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls and women now have immense physical power-- they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And everything changes ...
The President is Missing
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.
Pride and Prejudice
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.
Prodigal Summer
Summer in a corner of southern Appalachia serves as the setting for the adventures and struggles of three free-spirited women, who have intimate ties to the natural world.
The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
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.
Purple Hibiscus
When she visits her liberated and loving aunt, life dramatically changes for a 15-year old Nigerian girl who has grown up in sheltered privilege with a wealthy father who is politically courageous but religiously fanatic.
Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: a Tale of Love and Fallout
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.
The Reckoning
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.
Regeneration
Patients and the doctors that treat them for shell-shock are the focus of this World War I novel based on actual people and events.
A Reliable Wife
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.
Rise and Shine
While her mic is accidentally on, morning talk show host Meghan calls a guest a vulgar name on national television. Her entire world changes, including her career and relationships with her husband, grown son and social worker sister.
ROAR: An Urban Shapeshifter Story
Sy’noba, a young female lioness with roots from the savanna in Africa finds herself battling with her true identity living in civilization amongst humans. The pride’s king, Koja, who already has two wives has his eyes set on Sy’noba, his first wife little sister. With jealousy brewing in the pride, will Asha turn on her sister, Sy’noba? Will Sy’noba find herself when her back is against the wall or will she become Koja’s third wife?
Room
5-year old Jack narrates the story of his life from the 11 by 11 foot room where he and his mother are confined by Old Nick.
The Rope
Anna Pigeon's first job as a National Park employee in Glen Canyon National Recreation Area basis for this book-- Barr's 17th in the series. The setting of the desert surrounding Lake Powell and the houseboat renting tourists that populate the park are central features of this story, which reveals a broken-hearted and widowed Anna just getting started on what we know to be a long career in solving crimes.
The Rosie Project
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.
Run
Adoption, race, class, and family are explored in this novel about three brothers and their widowed father.
The Secret Life of Bees
Small-town Georgia in 1964 is the setting for this novel of beekeeping, civil rights, and a girl's yearning for her deceased mother. Despite the difficult subjects, this novel is sad but warm and, ultimately, uplifting.
The Sellout
A biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court.
The Sense of an Ending
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.
Settlin': Stories of Madison's Early African American Families
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.
Shanghai Girls
Threatened by bankruptcy, May and Pearl, two beautiful girls living in Shanghai in the 1930s, are placed in arranged marriages to Chinese men living in Los Angeles where the girls struggle to form a new life.