New Book Club in a Bag Kits for Spring 2025!

In her first memoir, the bestselling cookbook author and host of the beloved Food Network show “Barefoot Contessa” offers a personal, engaging, and motivating narrative of her extraordinary journey from a difficult childhood to becoming a cultural icon. (From NoveList Plus)

Across centuries two women, Melina Green and Emilia Bassano, one a modern playwright and the other her Elizabethan ancestor, each fight societal expectations to have their voices heard on the stage in a world that silences female playwrights. (From NoveList Plus)

In a Virginia courtroom in 1968, a reluctant white lawyer and a dedicated black attorney must bridge their differences to fight for a black man’s life against racial prejudice and powerful forces seeking to undo civil rights progress. (From NoveList Plus)

Early morning, August 1975: a camp counsellor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. (From NoveList Plus)

A novel of love and loyalty across four generations, at once sweeping and intimate, of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. John returns to Canada after becoming badly injured during World War II. He ties to move forward in his life, but his trauma continues to affect generations. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. (From NoveList Plus)

The quirky members of the Senior Citizen’s Social Club join forces with the tiny members of the daycare next door to thwart the city council’s planned sale of the building that houses both centres. (From NoveList Plus)

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, Jim decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American fiction know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of Twain’s original novel remain in place, Jim’s agency, intelligence, and compassion are shown in a radically new light. (From NoveList Plus)

A heartfelt, epic novel of friendship, betrayal, and redemption is set against three transformative decades in Tehran, Iran. Childhood friends Homa and Ellie meet in Tehran a form an unbreakable bond, despite their differences. As the friends come of age over three decades, they must reconcile their country’s turmoil, class divide, and the loss of women’s rights. (From NoveList Plus)

Years after a mysterious cataclysm caused a permanent blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy, Evan Whitesky’s community is running out of resources in remote northern Ontario. Evan and his fifteen-year-old daughter, Nangohns, lead a small scouting party to their traditional home on the north shore of Lake Huron, to discover what kind of life – and what dangers – still exist in the lands to the south. (From NoveList Plus)

The tragic story of two itinerant ranch hands on the run – one is the lifelong companion to the other, a developmentally disabled man. As the two men move from place to place searching for work during the Great Depression, they find themselves on a ranch where they finally feel they have found their chance to achieve their dream of a better future. (From NoveList Plus)

Lila Kennedy juggles a broken marriage, rebellious daughters, a crumbling house, and an elderly stepfather when her estranged father unexpectedly shows up after thirty-five years, forcing her to confront unresolved feelings and discover unexpected lessons about love and family amidst her chaotic life. (From NoveList Plus)

In 1965, nursing student Frankie McGrath, after hearing the words "women can be heroes, too," impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam where she is overwhelmed by the destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America. (From NoveList Plus)