We love to support our local schools and preschools. See below for an overview of our resources and programs that can supplement the educational experience for students and teachers. Please reach out if you have any questions/additional needs.
View and complete the form here. Use this form to let us know about upcoming class projects. Please give us at least one week's notice. The earlier you alert us, the more we can do to help.
Out-of-town students receive a 1-year library card which gives them access to the collection and eBooks. Come to the Library or sign up online here. Already have a library card from another CT library? Register your out-of-town library card at New Canaan Library.
Contact us to arrange librarian visits to your school and/or class visits to the Library. We love working with students of any age, from preschool through high school, and we can tailor visits to meet your curricular needs.
Our librarians can pull books on any topic your class is studying. Contact us at [email protected] or (203) 594-5002. Running short on time? Books can be checked out to you for fast and easy pickup. Have a little more time? We can pull books for you to browse at your own pace.
Our Family Services librarians can provide an in-depth overview of our services at the Library. Demo MakerLab tools like our Cricut machine, listen to themed book talks to supplement your lesson plans, or sign up for an educator library card. Email Rebecca Fox or Dajana Martinez to schedule your visit.
- Our SEL storytimes incorporate skills such as compassion, kindness, empathy, cooperation, diversity, and respect in exciting and engaging ways. We can present these storytimes at your school or you can request to borrow a box for classroom use.
- Our Kindness Storytime provides concrete examples of what kindness can look like, what it means to be kind, and respect for friends.
- Our Feelings Storytime provides an opportunity for children to identify their emotions, find constructive and respectful ways to interact with one another, and practice mindfulness to regulate emotions.
- The SEL Storytime Boxes include songs, QR codes to tunes, rhymes, felts, and books.
- Reach out to Dajana Martinez to schedule our visit to your preschool or to borrow a box.
Recommended Reads
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Kin
OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.
“Tayari Jones’s storytelling washed over me like a trip back home. . . . Kin is a masterpiece of a novel that will live with you long after you turn the last page.” —Oprah Winfrey
Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Honeysuckle at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and discovers a world of affluence, manners, aspiration, and inequality. Annie, abandoned by her mother as a child and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, culminating in a battle for her life.
A novel about mothers and daughters, friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction. -
Lost Lambs
National bestseller. A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Vulture, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, Playboy, The Times (UK), Our Culture, Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Harper's Bazaar. A Book Club Pick from Belletrist, Bustle, and Good Housekeeping.
"If the Royal Tenenbaums were middle-class and likable, they'd be this madcap family." —The New York Times Book Review
"With her energetic prose and restless imagination, Cash does one better than survey the world; she reinvents it." ―Hannah Gold, The New Yorker
“Madeline Cash is a voice like no other.” —Lena Dunham
Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.
The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone—or something—is monitoring the town’s citizens.
Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy—one that may just bring them closer together.
Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue. -
More Than Enough
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Quindlen is as observant and as wonderfully readable as ever, attuned to women’s lives and the nuances of their voices.”—Jennifer Weiner, The New York Times Book Review
A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life—from the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author of After Annie
No one knows you like your book club.
High school English teacher Polly Goodman can talk about everything and anything with the women in her book club, which is why they’ve become her closest friends and, along with her veterinarian husband, the bedrock of her life. Her students, her fraught relationship with her mother, her struggles with IVF—Polly’s book club friends have heard about it all.
But when they give Polly an ancestry test kit as a joke, the results match her with a stranger. It is clear to Polly that this match is a mistake, but still she cannot help but comb through her family history for answers. Then, when it seems that the book club circle of four will become three, Polly learns how friendships can change your life in the most profound ways.
Written with Anna Quindlen’s trademark warmth, humor, and insight into the power of love and hope, More Than Enough explores how we find ourselves again and again through the relationships that define us. -
This Is Not About Us
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family—steadfast, complicated, begrudging, and loving—from the bestselling author of Isola
“Wise, witty . . . a deliciously readable book [about] the delicate minutiae of family life, played beautifully, boldly, brightly in a major key.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Goodman’s mature and deftly written book suggests that, in family as in art, there is no such thing as uncomplicated happiness.”—The Wall Street Journal
Was this just a brief skirmish, or the beginning of a thirty-year feud? In the Rubinstein family, it could go either way.
When their beloved sister passes away, Sylvia and Helen Rubinstein are unmoored. A misunderstanding about apple cake turns into a decade of stubborn silence. Busy with their own lives—divorces, dating, career setbacks, college applications, bat mitzvahs and ballet recitals—their children do not want to get involved. As for their grandchildren? Impossible.
With This Is Not About Us, master storyteller Allegra Goodman—whose prior collection was heralded as “one of the most astute and engaging books about American family life” (The Boston Globe)—returns to the form and subject that endeared her to legions of readers. Sharply observed and laced with humor, This Is Not About Us is a story of growing up and growing old, the weight of parental expectations, and the complex connection between sisters—a big-hearted book about the love that binds a family across generations.
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Prophet Song
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023 * INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize
Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize
Shortlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary AwardOne of The Irish Times's 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
"A prophetic masterpiece." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland's newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.
Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what--or who--is she willing to leave behind?
The winner of the Booker Prize 2023 and a critically acclaimed national bestseller, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother's fight to hold her family together.
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I Who Have Never Known Men
A work of fantasy, I Who Have Never Known Men is the haunting and unforgettable account of a near future on a barren earth where women are kept in underground cages guarded by uniformed groups of men. It is narrated by the youngest of the women, the only one with no memory of what the world was like before the cages, who must teach herself, without books or sexual contact, the essential human emotions of longing, loving, learning, companionship, and dying. Part thriller, part mystery, I Who Have Never Known Men shows us the power of one person without memories to reinvent herself piece by piece, emotion by emotion, in the process teaching us much about what it means to be human.
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Hum
From critically acclaimed, prize-winning author Helen Phillips comes an urgent, compelling and deeply human novel that asks: how do we raise our children for a future that is unknown, that we can't see ourselves?
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The Heir Apparent
An irresistible modern fairy tale about a British princess who must decide between her duty to her family--or to her own heart.
A Reese's Book Club Pick!
It's New Year's Day in Australia and the life Lexi Villiers has carefully built is working out nicely: she's in the second year of her medical residency, she lives on a beautiful farm with her two best friends Finn and Jack, and she's about to finally become more-than-friendly with Jack--when a helicopter abruptly lands.
Out steps her grandmother's right-hand-man, with the tragic news that her father and older brother have been killed in a skiing accident. Lexi's grandmother happens to be the Queen of England, and in addition to the shock and grief, Lexi must now accept the reality that she is suddenly next in line for the throne--a role she has publicly disavowed.
Returning to London as the heir apparent Princess Alexandrina, Lexi is greeted by a skeptical public not ready to forgive her defection, a grieving sister-in-law harboring an explosive secret, and a scheming uncle determined to claim the throne himself.
Her recent life--and Jack--grow ever more distant as she feels the tug of tradition, of love for her grandmother, and of obligation. When her grandmother grants her one year to decide, Lexi must choose her own destiny: will it be determined by an accident of birth--or by love?
"There's nothing better than snuggling up with a great story this time of year. The December Reese's Book Club pick, The Heir Apparent by Rebecca Armitage, has everything I love in a holiday read--royals, romance, family twists, and a woman finding her own path. Can't wait for you to dive in." --Reese Witherspoon
"One of the best books I've read all year." --Natasha Lester, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress -
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF PEOPLE’S TOP 5 BOOKS OF THE YEAR
BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLIST
KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, The Washington Post, NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Economist, Harper’s Bazaar, The Globe and Mail, BBC, New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, Elle, Library Journal, Libby, Chicago Public Library, Lit Hub
ONE OF BOOKPAGE’S 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
A spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years—an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity, by the Booker Prize–winning author of The Inheritance of Loss
“A transcendent triumph . . . not so much a novel as a marvel.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“A magnificent saga.”—Washington Post
“Lavish, funny, smart, and wise, this is a novel that will last.”—The Boston Globe
“A spectacular literary achievement. I wanted to pack a little suitcase and stay inside this book forever.”—Ann Patchett
“A novel so wonderful, when I got to the last page, I turned to the first and began again.”—Sandra Cisneros
“Devastating, lyrical, and deeply romantic . . . an unmitigated joy to read.”—Khaled Hosseini
“A masterpiece.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“A sweeping page-turner, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a kind of Romeo and Juliet story for a modern, globalized age.”—Publishers Weekly (Top 10 New Fall Books)
When Sonia and Sunny first glimpse each other on an overnight train, they are immediately captivated yet also embarrassed by the fact that their grandparents had once tried to matchmake them, a clumsy meddling that served only to drive Sonia and Sunny apart.
Sonia, an aspiring novelist who recently completed her studies in the snowy mountains of Vermont, has returned to her family in India. She fears that she is haunted by a dark spell cast by an artist to whom she had once turned for intimacy and inspiration. Sunny, a struggling journalist resettled in New York City, is attempting to flee his imperious mother and the violence of his warring clan. Uncertain of their future, Sonia and Sunny embark on a search for happiness together as they confront the many alienations of our modern world.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is the sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their lives: country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. A love story, a family saga, and a rich novel of ideas, it is the most ambitious and accomplished work yet by one of our greatest novelists. -
The Correspondent
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Discover the word-of-mouth hit hailed by Ann Patchett as “A cause for celebration”—an intimate novel about the transformative power of the written word and the beauty of slowing down to reconnect with the people we love.
“The Correspondent is this year’s breakout novel no one saw coming.”—The Wall Street Journal
“I cried more than once as I witnessed this brilliant woman come to understand herself more deeply.”—Florence Knapp, author of The Names
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, Elle, Christian Science Monitor, She Reads
“Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle. . . . Isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that a story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone?”
Filled with knowledge that only comes from a life fully lived, The Correspondent is a gem of a novel about the power of finding solace in literature and connection with people we might never meet in person. It is about the hubris of youth and the wisdom of old age, and the mistakes and acts of kindness that occur during a lifetime.
Sybil Van Antwerp has throughout her life used letters to make sense of the world and her place in it. Most mornings, around half past ten, Sybil sits down to write letters—to her brother, to her best friend, to the president of the university who will not allow her to audit a class she desperately wants to take, to Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry to tell them what she thinks of their latest books, and to one person to whom she writes often yet never sends the letter.
Sybil expects her world to go on as it always has—a mother, grandmother, wife, divorcee, distinguished lawyer, she has lived a very full life. But when letters from someone in her past force her to examine one of the most painful periods of her life, she realizes that the letter she has been writing over the years needs to be read and that she cannot move forward until she finds it in her heart to offer forgiveness.
Sybil Van Antwerp’s life of letters might be “a very small thing,” but she also might be one of the most memorable characters you will ever read.
Digital Resources
Academic Search Premier
Biography Reference Bank
Biography Reference Center
CT State Library Resources for Elementary School
CT State Library Resources for Middle School