15 copies or more

A Broadway actress returns home to small town Minnesota to care for her Down's syndrome nephew. This larger-than-life woman learns how far she's drifted from her core values, but with trademark Landvik humor.

The author chronicles a year spent restoring an old pickup, gardening, and falling in love. This memoir is filled with eccentric characters, keen observation, and humorous storytelling.

A ‘fantasy’ nonfiction book by a science writer that explores what would happen to the earth’s flora and fauna, as well as our built environment, if suddenly all humans disappeared.

In chapters that alternate between the history of the Hmong and a highly personal story of a young Hmong girl who is severly ill with seizures, we learn about Hmong culture and the dramatic clash between it and American medicine in the early 1990s. The full title is The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures.

Journalist Lopez befriends a schizophrenic former Juilliard student playing a battered violin beside a shopping cart of belongings in L.A. Chosen by Porchlight as their Madison Cares community read. The full title is The Soloist: a Lost Dream, an Unlikely Friendship, and the Redemptive Power of Music.

Small-town Georgia in 1964 is the setting for this novel of beekeeping, civil rights, and a girl's yearning for her deceased mother. Despite the difficult subjects, this novel is sad but warm and, ultimately, uplifting.

This is the first in a series of gentle mysteries. Precious Ramotswe operates in Botswana, running an agency where the solving of the ‘mystery’ is often secondary to the exploration of family, customs and alternate methods of justice.

Winner of the Booker Prize, this novel has two story threads: a granddaughter in the Himalayan foothills fall in love with her tutor, and an immigrant from the same place tries to make it in NYC.

The story of Henrietta Lacks, an African-American cancer patient, wife and mother, and of her cells, known as HeLa cells. HeLa cells are used daily in labs worldwide, yet Lacks' family was unaware of their use until more than 20 years after her death. Chosen as the 2010-2011 UW-Madison Go Big Read selection.

Adoption, race, class, and family are explored in this novel about three brothers and their widowed father.