Book Club Kits

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

Spending the days searching for truths on an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp, eleven-year-old Dorothy Zook, the granddaughter of an herbalist and eccentric healer, finds her childhood upended by family secrets, passionate love, and violent men where the only bridge across the water is her wayward mother.

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

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?
 

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. 

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

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.

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. 

A portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world that asks where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil--can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written--is there still time to find a happy ending?

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. 
 

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.

After the death of her literary rival in a freak accident, author June Hayward steals her just-finished masterpiece, sending it to her agent as her own work, but as emerging evidence threatens her success, she discovers how far she'll go to keep what she thinks she deserves.

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.

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?

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.)

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.
 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.