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 We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag.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 Book of Longings
An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny in Nazareth, where she marries Jesus.
Untamed
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.
Leave the World Behind
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
Fifty Words for Rain
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.
A Burning
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.
The Thursday Murder Club
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.
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
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.
Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age
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.
Girl, Woman, Other
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 . . .
Little Faith
A Wisconsin family grapples with the power and limitations of faith when one of their own falls under the influence of a radical church.
Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
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.
City of Girls
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.
How to Be an Antiracist
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.
This Tender Land
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.
Ask Again, Yes
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.
Dominicana
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.
Three Women
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 Dutch House
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.
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
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.
Parkland: Birth of a Movement
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.
