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Registration and MPL library card required.

 

**REGISTRATION IS FOR SEPTEMBER – DECEMBER**

BOOK CLUBS
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MAIN

Sundays @ 3:00PM

  • September 29
  • October 27
  • November 24
  • December
  • January TBD
  • February TBD
  • March TBD
  • April TBD
  • May TBD
  • June TBD
  • September – James: A Novel
  • October – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
  • November – A Great Country
  • December – Behind You is the Sea

    2025

  • January – Meet Me at the Lake
  • February – The Many Lives of Mama Love
  • March – Wandering Stars
  • April – Let Us Descend
  • May – Loot: a Novel
  • June – Denison Avenue

MAIN

Tuesdays @ 2:00PM

  • September 10
  • October 8
  • November 5
  • November 27* (Wednesday)
  • January TBD
  • February TBD
  • March TBD
  • April TBD
  • May TBD
  • June TBD
  • September – A Great Country
  • October – Behind You is the Sea
  • November – Meet Me at the Lake
  • December – The Many Lives of Mama Love

    2025

  • January – Wandering Stars
  • February – Let Us Descend
  • March – Loot: A Novel
  • April – Denison Avenue
  • May – James: A Novel
  • June – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

MAIN

Tuesdays @ 7:00PM

  • September 10
  • October 15
  • November 5
  • November 27* (Wednesday)
  • January TBD
  • February TBD
  • March TBD
  • April TBD
  • May TBD
  • June TBD
  • September – Meet Me at the Lake
  • October – The Many Lives of Mama Love
  • November – Wandering Stars
  • December – Let Us Descend

    2025

  • January – Loot: a Novel
  • February – Denison Avenue
  • March -James: a Novel
  • April – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
  • May – A Great Country
  • June – Behind You is the Sea


2024
September – Loot: A Novel

  • October – Denison Avenue
  • November – James: A Novel
  • December – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone

    2025

  • January – A Great Country
  • February – Behind You is the Sea
  • March – Meet Me at the Lake
  • April – The Many Lives of Mama Love
  • May – Wandering Stars
  • June – Let Us Descend
  • September 25
  • October 23
  • November 20
  • December 12* (Thursday)
  • January 15
  • February  12
  • March  12
  • April 9
  • May 7
  • June 4
  • September – Wandering Stars
  • October – Let Us Descend
  • November – Loot: a Novel
  • December – Denison Avenue

    2025

  • January – James: a Novel
  • February – Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone
  • March – A Great Country
  • April – Behind You is the Sea
  • May – Meet Me at the Lake
  • June – The Many Lives of Mama Love



2024-2025 TITLES
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Pacific Hills, California: Gated communities, ocean views, well-tended lawns, serene pools, and now the new home of the Shah family. For the Shah parents, who came to America twenty years earlier with little more than an education and their new marriage, this move represents the culmination of years of hard work and dreaming. For their children, born and raised in America, success is not so simple.

One Saturday night, the twelve-year-old son is arrested. The fallout from that event will shake each family member’s perception of themselves as individuals, as community members, as Americans, and will lead each to consider: how do we define success? At what cost comes ambition? And what is our role and responsibility in the cultural mosaic of modern America?

Behind You Is the Sea brings us into the homes and lives of three main families—the Baladis, the Salamehs, and the Ammars—Palestinian immigrants who’ve all found a different welcome in America. Their various fates and struggles cause their community dynamic to sizzle and sometimes explode. Only a trip to Palestine can bridge this seemingly unbridgeable divide between the two generations.

Behind You Is the Sea
 faces stereotypes about Palestinian culture head-on and, shifting perspectives to weave a complex social fabric replete with weddings, funerals, broken hearts, and devastating secrets.

Bringing together ink artwork and fiction, Denison Avenue by Daniel Innes (illustrations) and Christina Wong (text) follows the elderly Wong Cho Sum, who, living in Toronto’s gentrifying Chinatown–Kensington Market, begins to collect bottles and cans after the sudden loss of her husband as a way to fill her days and keep grief and loneliness at bay. In her long walks around the city, Cho Sum meets new friends, confronts classism and racism, and learns how to build a life as a widow in a neighborhood that is being destroyed and rebuilt, leaving elders like her behind.

A poignant meditation on loss, aging, gentrification, and the barriers that Chinese Canadian seniors experience in big cities, Denison Avenue combines visual art, fiction, and the endangered Toisan dialect to create a book that is truly unforgettable.

Everyone in my family has killed someone. Some of us, the high achievers, have killed more than once. I’m not trying to be dramatic, but it is the truth. Some of us are good, others are bad, and some just unfortunate.

I’m Ernest Cunningham. Call me Ern or Ernie. I wish I’d killed whoever decided our family reunion should be at a ski resort, but it’s a little more complicated than that. Have I killed someone? Yes. I have. Who was it? Let’s get started.

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, he 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 literature 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 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light.

Let Us Descend is a is a journey from the rice fields of the Carolinas to the slave markets of New Orleans and into the fearsome heart of a Louisiana sugar plantation.

Annis, sold south by the white enslaver who fathered her, is the reader’s guide through this hellscape. As she struggles through the miles-long march, Annis turns inward, seeking comfort from memories of her mother and stories of her African warrior grandmother. Throughout, she opens herself to a world beyond this world, one teeming with of earth and water, of myth and history; spirits who nurture and give, and those who manipulate and take. While Ward leads readers through the descent, this, her fourth novel, is ultimately a story of rebirth and reclamation.
es.

A spellbinding historical novel set in the eighteenth century – a hero’s quest, a love story, the story of a young artist coming of age, and an exuberant heist adventure that traces the bloody legacy of colonialism across two continents and fifty years. A wildly inventive, irresistible feat of storytelling from a writer at the height of her powers.

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace. His fate will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.

Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice.

No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: She is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards.

Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns jail is a class system with a power structure somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies.

When she’s released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. She must learn to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.

Fern Brookbanks has wasted far too much of her adult life thinking about Will Baxter. She spent just twenty-four hours in her early twenties with the aggravatingly attractive, idealistic artist, a chance encounter that spiraled into a daylong adventure in Toronto. The timing was wrong, but their connection was undeniable: they shared every secret, every dream, and made a pact to meet one year later. Fern showed up. Will didn’t.

At thirty-two, Fern’s life doesn’t look at all how she once imagined it would. She needs a plan—a lifeline. To her surprise, it comes in the form of Will, who arrives nine years too late, with a suitcase in tow and an offer to help on his lips. Will may be the only person who understands what Fern’s going through. But how could she possibly trust this expensive-suit wearing mirage who seems nothing like the young man she met all those years ago. Will is hiding something, and Fern’s not sure she wants to know what it is.

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity.  A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalized by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Oakland, 2018. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is barely holding her family together. From the moment he awakens in his hospital bed, Orvil begins compulsively googling school shootings on YouTube. He also becomes emotionally reliant on the prescription medications meant to ease his physical trauma. His younger brother, suffering from PTSD, is struggling to make sense of the carnage he witnessed at the shooting. Opal is equally adrift, searching for a way to heal her wounded family.

Extending his constellation of narratives into the past and future, Tommy Orange once again delivers a story that is by turns shattering and wondrous, a book piercing in its poetry, sorrow, and rage—a masterful follow-up to his already-classic first novel, and a devastating indictment of America’s war on its own people.



FAQ
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Book club kits are to be borrowed as a set, checked out on one card, and can be picked up and returned to Main library only. You will receive an email when your book club kit is ready to be picked up. They are not renewable. 

Please note that the book club kit system is currently down. Please check back again. We thank you for your patience.

Book Club Kits for your book club can be borrowed all year long! Get 10 copies of a title and a leader’s guide for a loan period of up to six weeks.

Reservations may be made in advance (up to one year), and MPL Book Club Kits can be borrowed for six weeks, so please ensure you schedule a pickup date a few days before your book club meeting. This allows time for book distribution, reading, discussion, and returning the entire kit to the library.

If MPL’s Book Club Kit reservation system is not allowing you to place a kit on hold, it may be because that kit is already on reserve for someone else during all or part of your requested reservation period. Please note that you must reserve a kit at least three days in advance to allow time for processing of kits. Same day or next day reservations are not allowed.

To see what Book Club Kits you have reserved, click on the “My Kits” link on the main page. You will be prompted to enter your library card barcode and PIN. Click the “Submit” button.  At the Milton Public Library card verification screen, click the “Continue” button. You will see a list of your reservations. From this list, you can click on the “Show” button to see the details of each reservation.

Any Milton Public Library patron with an account in good standing can place a reservation on any available Book Club Kit(s). The entire kit must go out with the patron who has placed the reservation. MPL encourages book clubs to contact the library and create a book club card specifically for this purpose.

In support of book clubs, Milton Public Library offers our patrons access to Book Club Kits, available to borrow from Main branch. We use the reservation software “Kit Keeper” for book club kit reservations. Each kit contains 10 copies of the book, and leader discussion questions.  All of our kits come in a MPL canvas bag for ease of transport.

Need more information?
Email: bookclubs@beinspired.ca
Phone: 905-875-2665 x3263

Looking for a list of all MPL Book Club Kits? 
Click here for a printable PDF.