To start the year off we have added popular new titles and and some beloved classics to our Book Club Kits collection!
Whether you need some reading ideas for your existing book club, or want to start a book club but don’t know what to read, we’ve got you covered! NCW Libraries offers more than 300 book club kits available for checkout to reading groups.
Each kit has 12 copies of the same book that are checked out to one person and shared with members of their group. The kits can be check out for up to six weeks and also include discussion questions.
Learn more about book club kits here.
Here are the latest additions to our collection:
Adult Fiction
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson
In present-day California, Eleanor Bennett’s death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. The heartbreaking journey Eleanor unfolds, the secrets she still holds back, and the mystery of a long-lost child challenge everything the siblings thought they knew about their family and themselves.
Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boyland
Olivia McAfee knows what it feels like to start over. Her picture-perfect life, married to a brilliant cardiothoracic surgeon, raising a beautiful son, Asher, was upended when her husband revealed a darker side. She never imagined she would end up back in her sleepy New Hampshire hometown. Lily Campanello is familiar with do-overs, too. When she and her mom relocate to New Hampshire for her final year of high school, they both hope it will be a fresh start. Then one day, Olivia receives a phone call: Lily is dead, and Asher is being questioned by the police. As the case against him unfolds, Olivia realizes he’s hidden more than he’s shared with her.
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. Nora Seed finds herself faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng
A deeply suspenseful and heartrending novel about the unbreakable love between a mother and child in a society consumed by fear. Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in Harvard University’s library. When Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is drawn into a quest to find his mother. Our Missing Hearts is a story of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and the power of art to create change.
Adult Nonfiction
Pushed: Miners, a Merchant, and (Maybe) a Massacre by Ana Maria Spagna
One day in 1875, according to lore, on a high bluff over the Columbia River, a group of local Indigenous people murdered a large number of Chinese miners – perhaps as many as 300 – and pushed their bodies over a cliff into the river. The little-known incident was dubbed the Chelan Falls Massacre. Consulting historians, archaeologists, Indigenous elders, and even a grave dowser, Ana Maria Spagna uncovers three possible versions of the event: Native people as perpetrators. White people as perpetrators. It didn’t happen at all. Her book replaces convenient narratives of the American West with nuance and complexity, revealing the danger in forgetting or remembering atrocities when history is murky, and asking what allegiance to a place requires.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Indie rockstar and author of a viral New Yorker essay sharesan unflinching, powerful memoir about growing up Korean-American, losing her mother, and forging her own identity. In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.
Young Adult Fiction
The Firekeeper’s Daughterby Angeline Boulley
Daunis Fontaine has never quite fit in, either in her hometown or on the nearby Ojibwe reservation. She dreams of college, but when her family is struck by tragedy she puts her future on hold to care for her fragile mother. The only bright spot is meeting Jamie, a new recruit on her brother Levi’s hockey team. When Daunis witnesses a shocking murder, she reluctantly agrees to go undercover, drawing on her knowledge of chemistry and Ojibwe traditional medicine to track down the source of a new drug. How far will she go to protect her community, if it threatens to tear apart the only world she’s ever known?
Monsters Born and Made by Tanvi Berway
Sixteen-year-old Koral and her brother, Emrik, risk their lives to capture the monstrous maristags that live in the black seas around their island. They have to, or else their family will starve. In an oceanic world swarming with vicious beasts, the ruling elite have indentured her family to provide the maristags for the Glory Race, a deadly chariot tournament reserved for the upper class. When Koral fails to capture a maristag for this year’s race, her family can’t afford medicine for her chronically ill little sister. Koral’s only choice is to do what no one has ever dared: cheat her way into the Glory Race. But Koral must race against contenders who have trained their whole lives and have no intention of letting a low-caste girl steal their glory.
All the Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Salahudin and Noor are more than best friends; they are family. Growing up as outcasts in the small desert town of Juniper, California, they understand each other the way no one else does. Until a fight destroys their bond with the swift fury of a star exploding. Now, Sal scrambles to run the family motel as his mother’s health fails and his grieving father loses himself to alcoholism. Noor, meanwhile, walks a harrowing tightrope: working at her wrathful uncle’s liquor store while hiding the fact that she’s applying to college. When Sal’s attempts to save the motel spiral out of control, he and Noor must ask themselves what friendship is worth –and what it takes to defeat the monsters in their pasts and the ones in their midst.
The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
Sixteen-year-old Mexican American Yami Flores starts Catholic school, determined to keep her brother out of trouble and keep herself closeted. But her priorities shift when Yami discovers that her openly gay classmate Bo is also annoyingly cute.
Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas
If there’s one thing seventeen-year-old Maverick Carter knows, it’s that a real man takes care of his family. As the son of a former gang legend, Mav does that the only way he knows how: dealing for the King Lords. With this money he can help his mom, who works two jobs while his dad’s in prison. Life’s not perfect, but with a fly girlfriend and a cousin who always has his back, Mav’s got everything under control. Until Maverick finds out he’s a father. Now he’ll have to figure out for himself what it really means to be a man.
Gold Mountain by Betty Yee
Growing up in 1860s China, 15-year-old Tam Ling Fan disguises herself as her twin brother, journeys from her village in China to California, and works as a laborer on the Transcontinental Railroad — where she faces danger on multiple fronts– to earn the money her family desperately needs. When someone threatens to expose Ling Fan’s secret, she must take an even greater risk to save what’s left of her family — and to escape the Gold Mountain alive.
Classics
English