Book Club Kits

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 
 

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.