![bookclub kit bags](https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/sites/www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/files/styles/half_width/public/media/paragraphs/images/bookclub-kit-bags.jpg?itok=X_I6RB5F)
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 We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag.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 400 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 608-266-6300 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 Great Divide
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.
The Cemetery of Untold Stories
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.
Northwoods
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.
Wandering Stars
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.
James
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.
Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World--and How You Can, Too
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.
What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez
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.
I Know What You Did
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.
Happy Place
A couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends.
Pineapple Street
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.
The Berry Pickers
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.
Spare
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.
The White Lady
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.
Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
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.
Maame
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.
Let Us Descend
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.
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
An entertaining, enlightening, and utterly original investigation into one of the most quietly influential forces in modern American life--the humble parking spot.
I Could Live Here Forever
A gripping portrait of the tumultuous, consuming relationship between Leah, a graduate student at UW-Madison, and Charlie, a recovering heroin addict.
Chain-Gang All-Stars
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.
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
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.