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The Alchemist
Paulo Coelho

A young Spanish shepherd seeking his destiny travels to Egypt where he learns many lessons, particularly from a wise old alchemist.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (Audiobook)
Garth Stein

Nearing the end of his life, Enzo, a dog with a philosopher's soul, tries to bring together the family, pulled apart by a three year custody battle between daughter Zoe's maternal grandparents and her father Denny, a race car driver.

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Three children lost their innocence - as the sweltering summer heat bears down on the hottest day in 1935 - and their lives are changed forever.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie

During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, two boys are sent to the country for re-education, where their lives change when they meet the beautiful daughter of a local tailor and stumble upon a forbidden stash of Western literature.

Bel Canto
Ann Patchett

When terrorists seize hostages at an embassy party, an unlikely assortment of people are thrown together, including American opera star Roxanne Coss, and Mr. Hosokowa, a Japanese CEO and her biggest fan.

A Bend in the Road (Large Print)
Nicholas Sparks

Devastated by the death of his wife in a hit-and-run accident, Miles, deputy sheriff of New Bern, North Carolina, discovers new meaning in his life when he meets Sarah Andrews, a woman struggling to rebuild her own life.

Best Kept Secret
Amy Hatvany

A contemporary story about a single mother, Cadence, who has a growing addiction to alcohol.

The Birth House
Ami McKay

Practicing midwife Dora Rare works in Scots Bay, Nova Scotia during the early part of the twentieth century, but the midwifery tradition is threatened when medical doctor Gilbert Thomas arrives with promises of fast, painless childbirth.

The Book of Negroes
Lawrence Hill

Dreaming of escaping her life of slavery in South Carolina and returning to her African home, slave Aminata Diallo is thrown into the chaos of the Revolutionary War, during which she helps create a list of black people who have been honored for their service to the king.

The Cat's Table
Michael Ondaatje

In the early '50s, an 11-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England. Looking back from adulthood, the narrator relates a tale about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a sea voyage.

The Cellist of Sarajevo
Steven Galloway

While a cellist plays at the site of a mortar attack to commemorate the deaths of twenty-two friends and neighbours, a woman sniper secretly protects the life of the cellist as her army becomes increasingly threatening.

The Christmas Box
Richard Paul Evans

Richard, a busy and preoccupied father, discovers a Christmas box full of love letters from an old woman to her dead daughter and, with the help of an angel, begins to learn the true meaning of Christmas.

Clara Callan
Richard B. Wright

Set during World War II, this novel follows the adventures of two Canadian sisters who struggle against social convention--one in a small town in Ontario, the other in New York City.

A Complicated Kindness
Miriam Toews

In bleak rural Manitoba, A 16-year-old 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.

Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter

In the 70's, Silas being black and Larry white, are friends, but not publicly. When a girl goes missing after going on a date with Larry, he is permanently marked, and the two boys go their separate ways. Twenty-five years later, Silas is the local constable. When another girl disappears, Larry, an auto mechanic with few customers and fewer friends, is once again a person of interest.

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Mark Haddon

Despite his overwhelming fear of interacting with people, Christopher, a mathematically gifted, autistic 15 year-old boy, decides to investigate the murder of a neighbour's dog.

Georgia's Kitchen
Jenny Nelson

All the right ingredients--a heart-warming heroine, a romp through Tuscany--make for a delicious book that leaves you hungry for more.
 

Gift from the Sea
Anne Morrow Lindbergh

In this beloved classic, Lindbergh shares her meditations on youth and age; love and marriage; peace, solitude and contentment as she set them down during a brief vacation by the sea.

The Girls
Lori Lansens

Born in a small Ontario town in the midst of a tornado and abandoned by their unwed teenage mother, conjoined twins Rose and Ruby Darlen are cared for by Aunt Lovey, a nurse who refuses to see them as deformed or even disabled.

The Glass Castle: a memoir
Jeanette Walls

Walls and her three siblings grew up in poverty, without social norms, yet Jeannette climbed out of this life and into a successful career in New York City.

The Glassblower of Murano
Marina Fiorato

Venice, 1681. Glassblowing is the lifeblood of the Republic, and Venetian mirrors are more precious than gold. Jealously guarded by the murderous Council of Ten, the glassblowers of Murano are virutally imprisoned on their island in the lagoon. But the greatest of the artists, Corradino Manin, sells his methods and his soul to Louis XIV of France to protect his secret daughter.

The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy

Set in Kerala, India 1969, Rahel and her twin brother, Estha, forge a childhood for themselves amid the destruction of their family life, as they discover that a single moment can transform their entire world.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Mary Ann Schaffer

In 1946, writer Juliet Ashton finds inspiration for her next book in her correspondence with a native of Guernsey, who tells her about a book club born as an alibi during German occupations.

Happiness Sold Separately (AudioBook)
Lolly Winston

A love triangle, featuring Elinor, an overachieving lawyer and infertile wife; Ted, her successful yuppie husband; and Gina, his sexy and giving sports-trainer mistress.

The Help
Kathryn Stockett

Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.

Hey Nostradamus

A quartet of monologues about the aftermath of a high-school mass shooting. Set in suburban Canada between the late 1980s and now, each of the four sections is narrated by a person affected by the Columbine-like massacre.

Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins

In a future North America, where the rulers of Panem maintain control through an annual televised survival competition pitting young people from each of the twelve districts against one another, sixteen-year-old Katniss's skills are put to the test when she voluntarily takes her younger sister's place.

If Today Be Sweet
Thrity Umrigar

A middle-aged widow struggles to decide whether she will live in her native India or immigrate to America, where her son and his wife live in suburban Ohio and where the widow struggles with her identity and need to bring happiness into the family.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
Rebecca Skloot

Science writer Skloot's dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.

Inside the Kingdom
Carmen Bin Ladin

Carmen Bin Ladin, a Swiss-Iranian raised in Geneva, married a brother of Osama. Upon moving to Arabia, she was appalled by Saudi culture and later took refuge in Switzerland, where her marriage eventually broke up.

Into Thin Air
Jon Krakauer

The bestelling and somewhat controversial account of the 1996 ascent of Mount Everest which turned catastrophic, killing eight climbers and leaving several others stranded.

The Keep
Jennifer Egan

Two cousins are reunited to work on the renovation of a medieval castle in Eastern Europe, where they are cut off from the outside world and are doomed to reenact the a horrific event from their past.

Keeping Faith
Jodi Picoult

Faith, a seven-year-old girl whose family is torn apart by divorce, begins talking to God and performing miracles, and her family enters a media circus of believers, critics, medical professionals and lawyers.

Kill Me
Stephen White

White takes an endlessly debatable question - at what point would a decline in your quality of life cause you to choose to end your life? - and leverages it into a clever and absorbing thriller.

The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini

Amir and Hassan are childhood friends in the sunny days of Kabul before the invasion of the Soviet army. Both motherless, they grow up as close as brothers, but their fates, they know, are to be different.

Ladies Coupe
Anita Nair

Akhila awakes one day with a "fight-or-flight" notion, so she boards a ladies coupe (a segregated, second-class compartment found on most overnight Indian trains until 1998) and journeys from Bangalore to Kanyakumari.

Latitudes of Melt
Joan Clark

Found by a fisherman on an ice flow as an infant, Aurora is believed to be a changeling by the superstitious residents of Newfoundland, and it it not until she is an old woman that her true origins are revealed.

Little Bee
Chris Cleave

Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women.

The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches
Gaetan Soucy

Two children grow up alone with their authoritarian father on an isolated estate, speaking a language and inhabiting a surreal universe of their own creation, until the death of their father brings them into contact with the outside world.

Lost in Translation
Eva Hoffman

Hoffman has written a perceptive and moving memoir detailing her family's immigration from Poland to Canada in 1959.

Medicine River
Thomas King

A young Canadian Indian returns to his hometown outside the Blackfoot Reservation and recovers his lost heritage among a varied cast of characters, including an all-Indian basketball team, a marriage doctor, and a world traveler.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter
Kim Edwards

In a tale spanning twenty-five years, a doctor delivers his newborn twins during a snowstorm and, in a rash decision to protect his wife from one of the baby's affliction with Down Syndrome, turns it over to a nurse, who secretly raises the child.

Midwife of Venice
Roberta Rich

Hannah Levi, a Jewish midwife, must decide if she will accept payment for delivering a countess' baby, as she is torn between breaking a Papal edict forbidding Jews from providing medical care to Christians and her desperate need to ransom her husband from pirates.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Agatha Christie

A murder in a small English village leads Hercule Poirot into a strange mystery involving a determined, curious spinster, the local doctor, and a wide range of suspects with possible motives and mysterious relationships.

The Namesake
Jhumpa Lahiri

A portrait of the immigrant experience follows the Ganguli family from their traditional life in India through their arrival in Massachusetts in the late 1960s and their difficult melding into an American way of life.

Netherland
Joseph O'Neill

Abandoned amid the offbeat inhabitants of the  Chelsea Hotel when his English wife and son return to London following September 11th, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands, struggles to find himself in his adopted country.

The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Alexander McCall Smith

Working in Gaborone, Botswana, Precious Ramotswe investigates several local mysteries, including a search for a missing boy and the case of the clinic doctor with different personalities for different days of the week.

Norwegian Wood
Murakami Haruki

The tragic death of their best friend has a profound influence on the passionate relationship between Toro, a serious young college student in Tokyo, and Naoko, an introspective beauty.

Olive Kitteridge
Elizabeth Strout

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.

One  Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

In the noble, ridiculous, beautiful, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, of the mythical town of Macondo, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of the town, one sees all of Latin America.

The Orchardist
by Amanda Coplin

When two feral girls, one of them very pregnant, appear on his homestead, solitary orchardist Talmadge, who carefully tends the grove of fruit trees he has cultivated for nearly half a century, vows to save and protect them.

Oryx and Crake
Margaret Atwood

Jimmy, now known as Snowman, has survived an ecological disaster that has destroyed the world as we know it. As he struggles to function without everything he once knew, including time, Snowman reflects on the past. 

Our Lady of the Forest
David Guterson

Sixteen-year-old runaway and unlikely spiritual candidate Ann Holmes, who lives in a tent and works as a mushroom picker, experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary.

The Penelopiad
Margaret Atwood

Drawing on a range of sources, in addition to The Odyssey, Atwood scripts the narrative of Penelope, the faithful and devoted wife of Odysseus and her 12 maids, who were killed upon the master's return.

The Pillars of the Earth
Ken Follett

A prior, a master builder, and their community try to build a cathedral to protect themselves while Stephen and the Empress Maud fight for the crown of England.

The Pilot's Wife

When her husband, a pilot, dies in an airplane crash off the Irish Coast, Kathryn Lyons finds herself in the media spotlight as rumours abound about her husband's shocking secret past.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith

As a mysterious plague falls upon the village of Meryton and zombies start rising from the dead, Elizabeth Bennett is determined to destroy the evil menace, but becomes distracted by the arrival of the dashing and arrogant Mr. Darcy.

The Reader
Bernhard Schlink

Not until he becomes a law student after World War II does Michael Berg realize that the woman who found him ill and nursed him through hepatitis was illiterate and possibly a Nazi war criminal.

The Red Tent
Anita Diamant

Her name is Dinah. In the bible, her life is only hinted at in a brief and violent detour. Told in Dinah's voice, Diamant imagines the traditions and turmoil of ancient womanhood - the world of the red tent.

Room

A 5-year-old narrates a story about his life growing up in a single room where his mother aims to protect him from the man who has held her prisoner for seven years since she was a teenager.

Titles: S to T | See How to Book a Kit and Borrowing Policies

Same Kind of Different as Me

Describes how the co-author, a man held under plantation-style slavery until he fled in the 1960s, suffered homelessness for an additional eighteen years before the wife of the other co-author, an art dealer accustomed to privilege, intervened to save the former's life.

Sixty years after the roundup of Jews by the police in Paris, journalist Julia Jarmond, while writing an article on this dark episode of WWII, embarks on an investigation that leads to long-hidden family secrets and to the ordeal of Sarah, a young girl caught up in the raid.

Secret Daughter

Interweaves the stories of a baby girl in India, the American doctor who adopted her, and the Indian mother who gave her up in favour of a son, as two families--one in India, the other in the United States--are changed by the child that connects them.

The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd

After her "stand-in-mother," a bold black woman named Rosaleen, insults the three biggest racists in town, Lily Owens joins Rosaleen on a journey to Tiburon, South Carolina, where they are taken in by three black, bee-keeping sisters.

The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A boy named Daniel selects a novel from a library of rare books, enjoying it so much that he searches for the rest of the author's works, only to discover that someone is destroying every book the author has ever written.

Siddhartha
Herman Hesse

Siddhartha is an allegorical novel which deals with a young Indian man's search for enlightenment during the time of the Buddha.

Slaughterhouse-five
Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history - the WWII bombing of Dresden - with mock serious humor and clear antiwar sentiment.

The Sparrow
Maria Doria Russell

The sole survivor of a crew sent to explore a new planet, Jesuit priest Emilio Sandoz discovers an alien civilization that raises questions about the very essence of humanity, an encounter that leads Sandoz to a public inquisition and the destruction of his faith.

State of Wonder
by Ann Patchett

A researcher at a pharmaceutical company, Marina Singh journeys into the heart of the Amazonian delta to check on a field team that has been silent for two years--a dangerous assignment that forces Marina to confront the ghosts of her past.
 

Still Alice
Lisa Genova

In this compelling debut novel, a 50-year-old woman and her family deal with her sudden descent into early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

Stitches
David Small

The author recounts in graphic novel format his troubled childhood with a radiologist father who subjected him to repeated x-rays and a withholding and tormented mother, an environment he fled at the age of sixteen in the hopes of becoming an artist.

Stone Diaries
Carol Shields

From her birth in rural Manitoba, to her journey with her father to southern Indiana, to her years as a wife, mother, and widow, to her old age, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to find a place for herself in her own life.

Straight Man
Richard Russo

Hank Devereaux Jr. is the kind of guy who turns anything serious into a joke. Pushing 50, he's the interim chair of a squabbling English department at a small rural college, where rumours of budget cuts have everyone on edge.

Set in fictional Mariposa, an Ontario town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti, these sketches present a remarkable range of characters: some irritating, some exasperating, some foolhardy, but all endearing. Painted with the skillful brushstrokes of a great comic artist, the delightful inhabitants of Mariposa represent the people of small towns everywhere.

Tales of the City
Armistead Maupin

From a groundbreaking newspaper serial in 1976 to a bestselling novel to a critically acclaimed PBS series, Tales contains the universe -- if not in a grain of sand, then in one San Francisco apartment house.

Talk Before Sleep
Elizabeth Berg

Cautious, conventional Anne shares a deep bond of friendship with the outspoken and eccentric Ruth, building an honest, open relationship that evolves into something deeper when Ruth is diagnosed with cancer.

These Is My Words: the diary of Sarah Agnes Prine, 1881 - 1901
Nancy E. Turner

In 1881, Sarah Agnes Prine, 17, goes from New Mexico to Texas and back, protecting her family with her rifle, and then becoming ranch manager while her second husband serves as a Texas Ranger.

The Thirteenth Tale
Diane Setterfield

When her health begins failing, the mysterious author Vida Winter decides to let Margaret Lea, a biographer, write the truth about her life, but Margaret needs to verify the facts since Vida has a history of telling outlandish tales.

Three Cups of Tea
Greg Mortenson

One man's campaign to build schools in the most dangerous, remote, and anti-American reaches of Asia: Mortenson counteracts extremism by building schools, especially for girls, throughout the breeding ground of the Taliban.

Three Day Road
Joseph Boyden

The nephew of a Canadian Oji-Cree who is the last of a line of healers and diviners, Cree reserve student Xavier enlists in the military during WWI, a conflict throughout which he and his friend, Elijah, are marginalized for their appearances, their culturally enhanced marksmanship, and their disparate views of the war.

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

The explosion of racial hate in an Alabama town in the 1930's is seen through the eyes of a young girl named Scout whose father is defending a black man accused of rape.

Under This Unbroken Sky
Shandi Mitchell

Out of prison, Theo Mykolayenkos tirelessly clears his untamed land on the 1938 Canadian prairie and begins to heal himself and his family, but when his sister's rogue husband returns, he stirs up rancor that will end in tragedy.
 

Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen

Ninety-something Jacob Jankowski remembers his time in the circus during the Great Depression, and his friendship with Marlena, the star of the equestrian act, and Rosie, the elephant who gave them hope.

The White Tiger

Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher. Entrepreneur. Murderer. Over the course of seven nights, Balram tells the terrible and transfixing story of how he came to be a success in life-- having nothing but his own wits to help him along.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Large Print)
Joan Didion

An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief.

Ysabel
Guy Gavriel Kay

Ned joins his famous photographer father for an extended stay in Provence, where a visit to Saint-Sauveur Cathedral brings Ned together with Kate an American exchange student, and a man who appears to be much, much older than one would think.

How to Book a Kit

Any Strathcona County Library card holder can borrow a Book Club Kit. Requests for specific titles must be made through the Information Desk by...

visiting in person
calling 410-8600 OR
emailing info[at]sclibrary.ab.ca

Borrowing Policies

You may sign out two kits at a time
You may keep kits for 8 weeks, with no renewals
Extended use fees are $1/day up to a maximum fine of $10
Kits should be returned in person to the Check Out Desk during library hours
Please check all contents before returning kits, as you will be charged for lost items
When you sign out a kit, you take financial responsibility for the bag and all of its contents!

Title Requests & Donations

Book Club Kits are created on an ongoing basis. We welcome suggestions for new titles, and we will gladly accept donations! If your Book Club wishes to donate money for a new kit, or has copies of a previously discussed book, please talk to staff at our Information Desk.