Need help choosing a title for your next book club meeting? Our Book Club in a Bag contains everything you need to get a lively discussion started:

• six copies of the same book
• a discussion guide
• reviews of the book
• biographical information about the author

To sign out your kit simply present your valid Saskatoon Public Library card. You can pick up your kit at any branch and borrow it for a maximum of 6 weeks (no renewals). You are responsible for returning the kit intact.

To reserve your Book Club in a Bag or for help with your next book club selection, please call the Fiction Services desk at 975-7570. We're here to help!

The following are some of the titles that are available. Others may be available if we have them and we have enough notice. Please give us at least 2 weeks notice and give us several title choices if possible, just in case one of the titles isn't available on the date that you would like to have the books.

      *** New titles added

•  Accordion Crimes by Annie Proulx
  • Nine connected stories that follow an accordion and its various doomed owners from 1890 Sicily to New Orleans and then to an immigrant community in South Dakota.
    
•  The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo
  • A magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, to read the omens strewn along life's path and most of all, to follow your dreams.
    
•  Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  • When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party somewhere in South America, an unlikely assortment of people are thrown together.   People from different continents become compatriots and the terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds. (2002 Orange prize for fiction)
    
•  The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • This novel is a window into the psyche of a mentally unstable woman in the 1950s.  Esther Greenwood, a talented young writer, suffers a nervous breakdown and struggles to climb out of the dark abyss during a time in society that often did not take a woman’s aspirations seriously.
    
•  The Birth House by Ami McKay
  • During the WWI years in an isolated rural community in Nova Scotia, 17 year old Dora Rare becomes an apprentice to a gifted but aging midwife.  Their traditional practices are threatened by the arrival of a brash medical doctor who promises sterile and painless births.
    
•  The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill
  • Based on an actual record of freed Loyalist slaves, this book tells the story of Aminata Diallo who survives kidnapping by slave traders, the horrors of the Middle Passage, an exodus to Nova Scotia, then Sierra Leone and finally England. (2008 Commonwealth Writer's prize)
    
•  The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway ***
  • A cellist plays at the site of a mortar attack in Sarajevo to commemorate the 22 people who were killed there while a female sniper secretly protects him as he plays. Based on a true story, this novel weaves together four lives to tell the story of Sarajevo’s devastation and how lives under siege create impossible moral choices.
    
•  The Chrome Suite by Sandra Birdsell
  • Amy Barber, a successful screenwriter and filmmaker looks back on her life, in a narrative that moves from a small town during one extraordinarily hot summer at the close of the fifties when a death changes everything, to the sixties and seventies when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son’s well-being.
    
•  Cold Sassy Tree by Olive Ann Burns
  • On July 5, 1906, scandal breaks out in the small town of Cold Sassy, Georgia, when the proprietor of the general store, barely three weeks a widower, elopes with Miss Love Simpson who is only half his age and a Yankee to boot.  Brimming with eccentric characters, this book is a timeless and funny account of small-town Southern life in a bygone era.
    
•  A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews
  • 16-year-old Nomi Nichol rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel set in the 1980s in bleak rural Manitoba. (2004 Governor General's literary award)
    
•  Daniel Isn’t Talking by Marti Leimbach ***
  • Melanie Marsh seems to have it all until her young son Daniel is diagnosed with autism. As her marriage falls apart, Melanie seeks out alternative treatments from a behaviourist with a dubious reputation in this hopeful story about a mother’s love for and faith in her child.
    
•  Deafening by Frances Itani
  • Left profoundly deaf from scarlet fever, Grania O'Neill grows up protected from the hearing world, but her life changes when she falls in love with Jim Lloyd, a hearing man, on the eve of the Great War.
    
•  The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer
  • How much do we owe the people we love? Is it a sign of strength or weakness to walk away from someone in need? When her fiance is left paralyzed following a tragic accident, Carrie Bell is filled with grief, guilt, indecision and fear as she questions her familiar world, from her everyday life in Wisconsin to her relationships.
    
•  The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery ***
  • In a Paris apartment, intelligent widowed 54 year-old Renee Michel masks herself as the stereotypical uneducated concierge to avoid suspicion from the building’s snobby residents. Also living in the building is troubled 12 year-old Paloma. When a new Japanese tenant moves into the apartment a curious and deeply fulfilling friendship develops between the three – freeing the two females from the mental prisons confining them.
    
•  Enduring Love by Ian McEwan
  • Joe and Clarissa Rose's picnic in the park is cut short when Joe attempts to rescue a child swept away in a hot-air balloon. The rescue fails and unstable, delusional Jed Parry - another rescuer- becomes eerily obsessed with Joe and begins to stalk and threaten him in this examination of psychological disintegration and obsessive love.
    
•  The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe
  • A renegade Canadian cowboy, involved in an 1873 Indian massacre as a teenager, 50 years later becomes known as Shorty McAdoo, a grizzled bit player in pioneer Hollywood.  Shorty catches the imagination of a movie mogul who wants to film an inspiring Western about him--a movie that will deliberately ignore McAdoo's dark secret, which has filled his life with guilt. (1996 Governor General's literary award)
    
•  Exit Lines by Joan Barfoot
  • You might think life in a retirement home could be a trifle boring but at the Idyll Inn not everyone feels ready for the quiet life.  In a light humourous tone, this novel deals with the serious issues of old age, including diseases, loneliness, family responsibilities and death.
    
•  The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom ***
  • At an oceanside amusement park, 83 year-old maintenance mechanic Eddie is killed while trying to save a little girl. He wakes up in heaven where he meets five people who make him realize that his life on earth had been worthwhile. This contemporary fable affirms that what we do does affect others and that we all have our own special kind of significance.
    
•  Follow the River by James Alexander Thom
  • In 1755, Mary Ingles was twenty-three, married, and pregnant, when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement and took her captive. For months she lived with them until she escaped, and followed a thousand mile trail through untamed wilderness along the rushing Ohio River to freedom. Based on true events, this is an extraordinary story of a pioneer woman who risked her life to return home.
    
•  The Gathering by Anne Enright
  • As the nine surviving children of the Hegarty clan gather in Dublin for the wake of their wayward brother, Liam, who drowned in the sea, his sister, Veronica, remembers the secret he shared with her about what happened in their grandmother's house thirty years ago, a betrayal that spans three generations. (2007 Man Booker award winner)
    
•  The Girls by Lori Lansens
  • 29 year-old twins, Rose and Ruby, are joined at the side of the head but have separate brains and bodies and very distinct personalities.   They take turns telling their story of sisterhood, of the people who guided them along the way and how they adapted to the world and how the world viewed them.
    
•  Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott
  • Absorbed in thought, Clara Purdy crashes her car into the vehicle of the homeless Gage family.  In a moment of guilt she offers to house the family, transforming her quiet tidy life into messy noisy chaos. What follows is a moving love story and an examination of what it means to be good.
    
•  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer
  • In 1946, London writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book as she begins to correspond with an eccentric group of Guernsey islanders, who tell her about their war experiences and the bookclub they formed as a way for people to get together without raising the suspicions of Guernsey's Nazi occupiers.
    
•  The Hatbox Letters by Beth Powning
  • Facing a second winter after her husband's untimely death, fifty-two-year-old Kate Harding reads letters that were collected from her grandparents' house and finds strength to let go of the past and start living in the present as she learns about her grandparents'seemingly idyllic marriage.
    
•  Heartburn by Nora Ephron
  • Seven months into her pregnancy, Rachel, a writer of cookbooks, must decide what to do when she discovers that her husband is in love with another woman.  In this story of adultery, revenge, group therapy, and pot roast the author reminds us that comedy depends on anguish as surely as proper gravy depends on flour and butter.
    
•  The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent ***
  • Based on fact and the author's family history, this story is told from the point of view of 9 year-old Sarah, the daughter of one of the first women to be accused, tried and hanged as a witch in Salem. It brings to life a time and place in history when any negative event was thought to be the work of the devil in human form.
    
•  The Hero's Walk by Anita Rau Badami
  • The scion of a down-at-the heels Brahmin family living in a crumbling mansion on the Bay of Bengal, suddenly finds himself caring for his estranged daughter’s seven-year-old child.  Told with warmth and humour, this is a story of one family’s adjustment to their unexpected circumstances.
    
•  The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
  • When a motherless American girl living in Europe finds a medieval book and a package of letters, all addressed ominously to "My dear and unfortunate successor . . ." she unwittingly assumes a search about the myth of Dracula.
    
•  The House at Riverton by Kate Morton ***
  • Told in flashbacks by 98 year-old Grace – a former servant with a secret - this suspenseful novel recounts the elegance of the Edwardian era, the pain and trauma of war, the disintegration of a prominent British family and the mysterious death of a famous poet visiting Riverton House in 1924.
    
•  The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
  • In 1985 in a small Himalayan community a melancholy retired judge lives in a decaying home with his valiant cook, his beloved dog, and a teenaged granddaughter when a surge of political unrest disturbs the region and challenges the old way of life.  The author depicts the wonders and tragedies of Himalayan life, the fragility of peace and the elusiveness of justice. (2006 Man Booker award winner)
    
•  The Island of the Day Before by Umberto Eco
  • An Italian nobleman is shipwrecked in the South Pacific in 1643 and saves himself by climbing aboard an abandoned ship.  While recovering his strength, he begins to record the events of his past life and also starts cautiously exploring the ship, sensing the presence of an evil twin brother about whom he has always fantasized.
    
•  Kiss the Joy as It Flies by Sheree Fitch
  • Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental to do list and sets about putting her messy life in order.  However tidying up her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to do’s.
    
•  The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  • Amir, who escaped to the United States with his family in the 1980s, returns to Afghanistan years later to find and help the son of a murdered childhood friend whom Amir had betrayed.  A deeply personal story about how childhood choices can affect our adult lives.
    
•  The Ladies' Lending Library by Janice Kulyk Keefer
  • In August 1963, the women of Kalyna Beach, who are first-generation Ukrainian Canadians, prepare for their annual end-of-season party in this novel of mothers, daughters, friends and lovers caught between countries, cultures and aspirations.
    
•  The Last Crossing by Guy Vanderhaeghe
  • In 1871, Englishmen Charles and Addington Gaunt are ordered by their tyrannical father to find their brother who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. They hire half-Blackfoot guide Jerry Potts to lead a growing number of mismatched traveling companions, each of whom must confront their personal demons on the rugged journey by wagon train. (2002 Saskatchewan book award)
    
•  Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay
  • Against the backdrop of a judicial inquiry into the proposed construction of a gas pipeline across the Arctic that would threaten the northern environment and the native way of life, this novel follows an engaging assortment of characters working in a small Yellowknife radio station in the mid-1970s. (2007 Giller Prize winner)
    
•  Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  • After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship carrying zoo animals, one solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild Pacific. The only survivors are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, an injured zebra, a female orangutan and a huge Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. This is a wonderful story of faith and survival that makes us ponder what it means to be alive, and to believe. (2002 Man Booker award winner)
    
•  Little Bee by Chris Cleave 
  • Two women's lives collide one fateful day on a Nigerian beach when one of them has to make a terrible choice. They meet again two years later in London and begin a precarious friendship filled with moral dilemmas.
    
•  The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly
  • Teza, a nonviolent activist endures brutality and betrayal in solitary confinement because of his participation in the 1988 demonstrations against the Burmese government. He develops an unexpected friendship with a twelve-year-old orphan who serves food to the prisoners, and becomes determined to help the boy escape the inhumane environment. (2007 Orange prize for new writers)
    
•  Lottery by Patricia Wood
  • The life of Perry L. (for Lucky) Crandall, a mentally challenged thirty-one-year-old man, is radically changed - first, by the death of his wise caretaker grandmother and then when he wins twelve million dollars in the Washington State Lottery. How he deals with his sudden fame, false friends and conniving family is the focus of this charming story.
    
•  The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
  • Fourteen-year-old Suzy Salmon, murdered on her way home from school, views the devastating effects of the murder on her family from heaven and struggles to accept what has happened to her while clinging to the edge of the living.
    
•  The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards
  • In 1964, after his wife gives birth to twins, a doctor secretly decides to send his newborn daughter, who has Down’s syndrome, to an institution and tells his wife that only their son survived.  Instead, the attending nurse who was told to take the child away vanishes with her to start a new life. The parallel stories of these two families unfold over the next 25 years bound by a secret that eats away at relationships and eventually helps create new ones.
    
•  Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • A rogue gene in the Stephanides family creates a hermaphroditic child in this story of how Calliope is transformed into Cal.  It raises questions about what it is that makes us who we are and what it means to be male or female. (2003 Pulitzer prize for fiction)
    
•  Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones
  • When violence erupts on a tropical island near New Guinea in the early 1990's, the only white man remaining takes over as teacher and begins to read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens to his students. The children soon become engrossed in the story and discover that the power of imagination and the balm of storytelling help them survive amid the chaos of civil war. (2007 Commonwealth Writer's prize)
    
•  Moo by Jane Smiley
  • Moo U is a large midwestern agricultural college whose faculty and students are depicted with sophisticated humour, in this satire of the hypocrisy, egomania, prejudice and self-delusion that flourish on campus and also reflect society at large.
    
•  My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
  • Conceived to provide a bone marrow match for her older leukemia-stricken sister, teenage Anna begins to question her moral obligations after countless medical procedures and decides to fight for the right to make decisions about her own body.
    
•  Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
  • Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth were once classmates at Hailsham, a private school in the English countryside with a most unusual student body: human clones created solely to serve as organ donors in order to eradicate disease from the normal population.   Told from the point of view of 31 year old Kathy this is a cautionary tale of science outpacing ethics.
    
•  The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff
  • A haunting fictional narrative by Ann Eliza Young, the real-life "rebel" wife of Mormon leader Brigham Young, blends with the equally compelling contemporary story of fictional Jordan Scott, a 20- year-old gay man whose mother, another 19th wife, is accused of murdering his polygamist father in this examination of plural marriage and its impact on women and children.
    
•  Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • Set in colonial times, this is the story of a doomed love affair between a twelve-year-old girl and a bookish priest, three times her age, who’s been sent to oversee her exorcism but who soon realizes that she is neither sick nor possessed but simply being punished for being different.
    
•  The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
  • A fierce evangelical preacher takes his family and his mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959 as the country is fighting for its independence.  What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa narrated in turn by the four daughters and their mother.
    
•  Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates ***
  • Frank and April Wheeler, move to suburbia in the 1950s and yearn to live the American dream. Once there they find they dislike the suburbs. Frank is unhappy with his job. April is bored with little to do. A plan to move to Paris is thwarted when their third child is conceived - the consequences of which are devastating.
    
•  The Riders by Tim Winton
  • Fred Scully, with his seven-year-old daughter in tow, begins an obsessive chase across Europe searching for his wife who has disappeared without explanation – a study of the price paid by someone who loves deeply but not necessarily wisely.
    
•  The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  • Set in a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, a father and his young son struggle to survive and preserve the last remnants of their own humanity as they make their way through the ruins of a devastated American landscape where food is extremely scarce and everyone has become a scavenger. (2007 Pulitzer prize for fiction)
    
•  Run by Ann Patchett
  • A woman purposely throws herself under a car to protect a stranger after an accident during a blinding snowstorm and it soon becomes clear that there is a connection between the two families involved.   What makes a family and the depths of parents’ love for their children -whether biological or adopted - are some of the issues in this novel.
    
•  A Scientific Romance by Ronald Wright
  • David Lambert, a museum curator and specialist in Victorian machinery has been given access to a letter left by H. G. Wells claiming that his supposedly fictitious time machine had actually been built by someone else and was scheduled to return soon. Skeptical but curious he goes to the location where the machine is supposed to materialize and when it actually does, he decides to try out the machine for himself landing in the year 2500 AD in an almost unrecognizable world.
    
•  The Sea by John Banville
  • Following the death of his wife, Max Morden retreats to the seaside town of his childhood summers. He stays at an inn that was once the home of the magnificent, careless Grace family with whom he had been involved and looks back on those days trying to seek an understanding of not only that summer but also his subsequent adult life. (2005 Man Booker award winner)
    
•  The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  • It’s 1964 and fourteen-year-old Lily is on the lam with her black nanny Rosaleen, fleeing both Lily's abusive father and the police who battered Rosaleen for defending her new right to vote.  They end up in Tiburon, South Carolina and are taken in by three black sisters who keep bees and discover strength and serenity among that close knit community of women.
    
•  The Shack by William Young 
  • Four years after his daughter is abducted and evidence of her murder is found in an abandoned shack, Mackenzie Allen Philips returns to the shack in response to a note claiming to be from God. He walks back into his darkest nightmare and has a life-changing experience. "Where is God in a world filled with unspeakable pain?" is the question that is at the heart of this novel.
    
•  Shanghai Girls by Lisa See ***
  • In this extensively researched historical novel spanning three decades and two continents, sisters May and Pearl are forced to leave Shanghai when their father sells them to California suitors. Married to strangers, they struggle to adapt to life in Los Angeles where they face discrimination and the challenges of living in a foreign country.
    
•  Small Island by Andrea Levy
  • At the end of World War II. the Joseph family arrives in London from Jamaica and is befriended by their white landlady until her racist husband arrives home from the front.  This novel examines class, race and prejudice as we see events from each of the four character's point of view, demonstrating both the subjectivity of truth and the rationalizing lies that people tell themselves when they are doing wrong. (2004 Orange prize for fiction)
    
•  A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon
  • Recent retiree George Hall, convinced that his eczema is cancer, goes into a tailspin but no one in George's family notices his mental decline because they’ve all got trouble of their own.  Mortality, fallibility and forgiveness are issues that Haddon raises with a light hand in this funny articulate novel.
    
•  Still Alice by Lisa Genova
  • Fifty–year-old Alice Howland exchanges the role of high-achieving teacher, wife and mother of three for that of a disoriented, inarticulate, forgetful shell of her former self when she is suddenly diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease irrevocably changing her life as well as the life of her family.
    
•  The Stone Angel by Margaret Laurence
  • A study of old age and uncompromising pride and a portrait of a fierce old woman and the lives she dominated and diminished.  Hagar Shipley is almost 90 and lives with her elderly son and his wife both of whom she despises. In a series of flashbacks she takes us back through her early childhood, her stormy marriage and the loss of her favourite son.
    
•  Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
  • Trudy, a professor of German history, is obsessed with finding out more about her German heritage and the SS officer, who she suspects fathered her.  Her mother however, adamantly refuses to discuss the past.  This novel raises questions of shame, survivor guilt, and personal responsibility and examines what people will do to protect the ones they love.
    
•  A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
  • Three decades of anti-Soviet jihad, civil war and Taliban tyranny are seen through the lives of two very different women who are brought together by dire circumstances in this powerful harrowing story of Afghanistan.
    
•  Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden
  • When Xavier, a Cree boy raised on a reserve, enlists in the army during WWI with his friend Elijah, the boys abruptly enter a world in which their ethnic appearance is a signal to others that they are to be treated differently.  They become superb marksmen but at a terrible cost to both.
    
•  Through Black Spruce by Joseph Boyden ***
  • This powerful 2008 Giller Prize winner tells of the struggles encountered by contemporary aboriginals. Narrated in turn by Will - a Cree bush pilot lying comatose in a hospital and Annie -his niece who has just returned from New York City in search of her missing sister, this novel is full of the dangers and harsh beauty found in both the forest and the city.
    
•  The Time In Between by David Bergen
  • Charles Boatman returns to Vietnam 30 years after the war tormented by the atrocities he both witnessed and committed. When he goes missing, two of his adult children, travel to Vietnam to find him in this novel of the aftereffects of violence and failed human connection. (2005 Giller Prize winner)
    
•  The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett ***
  • While searching for her corgis, the Queen inadvertantly finds a bookmobile parked outside the back door of the palace and feels obliged to borrow a book.  She develops an unexpected passion for reading and quickly begins to lose interest in her official duties setting the palace into an uproar.   A delightful satire!
    
•  Unless by Carol Shields
  • When her lovely oldest daughter drops out of college to beg on a Toronto street corner wearing a sign that reads GOODNESS, Reta Winters’ grief causes her to revise her feminist outlook and pushes her work as a writer in a new direction.
    
•  Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
  • Drifting in and out of his memories, ninety-something Jacob Jankowski reminisces about his time in the circus as a young man during the Great Depression where he cares for a menagerie of exotic creatures. He relives his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant who gave them hope.
    
•  The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie MacDonald
  • The story of a once-happy family changed forever by one year in the 1960s when the father's participation in Cold War intrigue goes tragically awry and his eight-year-old daughter is keeping a secret of a different kind.
    
•  We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver
  • In a series of brutally introspective letters to her husband from whom she is separated, Eva tries to come to terms with the fact that their 17-year-old son, Kevin, has killed seven students and two adults with his crossbow. Dealing with issues of nature vs. nurture, motherhood, career and family, this psychologically astute novel offers much to discuss. (2005 Orange prize for fiction)
    
•  White Tiger by Aravind Adiga ***
  • Low caste Balram Halwai is initially delighted to be the driver for a wealthy man but becomes increasingly angry at the way he is excluded from society and looked down upon by the rich. So angry that he murders his employer in this fascinating story narrated by the clever resourceful Balram as he describes how he went from being a likable village boy to a cold-blooded killer.  (2008 Man Booker award winner)
    
•  The Wreckage by Michael Crummey
  • Tells the story of young Newfoundland soldier Wish Fury and his beloved Sadie Parsons and the wreckage of lives half-lived.
    

Last updated December 2009.