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 We've made it easier for you by collecting donated and withdrawn copies of discussible books and putting all the copies in a canvas bag.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
A Man Called Ove
Ove has always lived his life according to strict principles, earning him the status of lead curmudgeon in his neighborhood. But when life threatens to overwhelm even the firmly stoic Ove, a comedic cast of characters comes to the rescue—and proves that help can come from the most surprising of sources.
Euphoria
Inspired by events in the life of anthropologist, Margaret Mead, this is the fictional story of a love triangle among three anthropologists working in New Guinea, who display three completely different approaches to studying other cultures.
Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
Bryan Stevenson was a young lawyer when he founded the Equal Justice Initiative, a legal practice dedicated to defending those most desperate and in need. One of his first clients was Walter McMillian, a man on death row for a murder he didn’t commit. Here Stevenson details the legal journey to McMillian’s release as well as those of others he’s helped in his now thirty year career.
H Is for Hawk
British naturalist Macdonald undertakes the training of a goshawk as a means of working through the grief at the sudden loss her father, himself a falconer.
The Invention of Wings
Sarah Grimke, a well-to-do daughter of antebellum Charleston receives a ten-year old slave girl, Hetty ‘Handful’ Grimke, on her eleventh birthday. Both women know they are meant to do more in the wider world, and yearn to escape the respective paths of life they were born to. Over the course of their thirty-five year relationship, their destinies overlap and intertwine through slavery, freedom and the complexities of love, against the backdrop of the abolition and early women’s movements.
Station Eleven
In this National Book Award-nominated novel, a rag-tag group of traveling Shakespearean actors struggle to survive in a landscape that has been decimated by a global pandemic that wipes out 99% of the population. In flashbacks, members of the group recall their lives during the pandemic and what it took for them to survive, with some surprising connections.
And the Mountains Echoed
In 1952, a poor Afghan father travels across the desert with his young son and daughter, about to make a decision that will have complex repercussions for years to come in this saga of family love, honor and sacrifice.
Crazy Rich Asians
Envisioning a summer vacation in the humble Singapore home of a boy she hopes to marry, Chinese American Rachel Chu is unexpectedly introduced to a rich and scheming clan that strongly opposes their son's relationship with an American girl.
The Burgess Boys
Two brothers left their hometown in Maine to become New York City lawyers. One is now a hotshot corporate attorney, the other works for Legal Aid. When their sister in Maine needs help, both go back to assist—and secrets large and small are revealed.
Americanah
A young woman experiences racism for the first time after she leaves her native Nigeria, which is under oppressive military dictatorship, to attend college in the United States. Meanwhile, her boyfriend lives a miserable life in London as an illegal immigrant.
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.
The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Olympics
The nine boys who made up the Olympic rowing team, sons of western loggers and hardworking laborers, may not have had the pedigree of the elite teams of the east, but they set out to prove themselves to the world at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Author Brown captures the struggles, including the Great Depression, poverty, and the loss of family, of a team that showed the nation what pulling together meant.
A Tale for the Time Being
In Japan, a teenage girl is struggling-- and writing to a future anonymous reader about it in a diary. Ten years later the diary, along with letters in Japanese and French, wash ashore in a metal lunchbox on the coast of British Columbia. The woman who finds it sets out to identify the girl to see how she's fared in the intervening years.
Ordinary Grace
In the summer of 1961, life in New Bremen, Minnesota moves slowly for thirteen-year-old Frank Drum. The tragic death of a child in a train accident prompts old memories to resurface between the Drum and Brandt families, revealing the pain and dark shadows that lurked just under the surface of an idyllic life, and introducing Frank to the harsh realities of adulthood.
Bread and Butter
Madison author Wildgen tackles sibling rivalry and the cutthroat world of restaurants when brothers Britt, Leo and Harry open rival restaurants in a small town near Philadelphia.
Learning to Stay
When her husband Brad returns from Iraq, Elise is thrilled to have him home. But the traumatic brain injury he suffered on duty has turned the patient, thoughtful man she married into someone quite different. Faced with potentially losing the man she loves, Elise receives help from an unlikely source.
We Need New Names
In Bulawayo’s semiautobiographical novel, young Darling describes her chaotic but still happy childhood during Zimbabwe’s strife-filled Lost Decade. In the second half of the novel, the teenage Darling reflects on the promises and failures of America after she emigrates to Destroyedmichigan (Detroit). A work that considers what one embraces in a new culture and what can’t be left behind, We Need New Names was shortlisted for the 2013 Man Booker Award.