Enjoy Colorado’s 2024 National Book Festival Selections with Your Book Club!

We recently partnered with Colorado Humanities to help spotlight Colorado’s two selections for the 24th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival: The Immortal King Rao, by Vauhini Vara (adult fiction) and Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves, by Meg Long (young adult fiction).

Thanks to our partnership, we now have two sets of each title available for reading groups across Colorado (with more to be added if needed). Each set contains eight copies and is loaned out for eight weeks at a time, plus renewals if no other holds are waiting. Each set comes with tailored discussion questions (linked below) and other discussion materials.

How can I request a set?

As with all the 1,200+ sets in the Colorado Book Club Resource, you can request a title for your book club via your local public library. We partner with libraries and use the statewide library courier system to transport our materials. We have already established patron accounts with many of the branches around the state, but if your local library is not familiar with our service, enrolling is easy!

Book Descriptions

Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves

A lone girl determined to survive. The feral wolf she must learn to trust.

Only one chance to escape their icy planet: a race across the deadly tundra.

Seventeen-year-old Sena Korhosen hates the sled race, especially after it claimed both her mothers’ lives five years ago. Alone on her frozen planet, she makes money any other way she can–until she double-crosses a local gangster.

Desperate to escape, Sena flees with his prized fighting wolf, Iska, and takes an offer from a team of scientists. They’ll pay her way off-world, on one condition–that she uses the survival skills her mothers taught her to get them to the end of the race. But the tundra is a treacherous place. When the race threatens their lives at every turn, Sena must discover whether her abilities are enough to help them survive the wild, and whether she and Iska together are strong enough to get them all out alive.

As the girl and the wolf forge a tenuous bond and fight to escape ice goblins, giant bears, and the ruthless gang leader intent on trapping them both, one question drives them relentlessly forward: Where do you turn when there is nowhere to hide?

Cold the Night, Fast the Wolves is a captivating, breathless debut about survival and found family that delivers a fresh twist on classic survival stories.

The Immortal King Rao

In an Indian village in the 1950s, a precocious child is born into a family of Dalit coconut farmers. King Rao will grow up to be the most accomplished tech CEO in the world and, eventually, the leader of a global, corporate-led government.

In a future in which the world is run by the Board of Corporations, King’s daughter, Athena, reckons with his legacy—literally, for he has given her access to his memories, among other questionable gifts.

With climate change raging, Athena has come to believe that saving the planet and its Shareholders will require a radical act of communion—and so she sets out to tell the truth to the world’s Shareholders, in entrancing sensory detail, about King’s childhood on a South Indian coconut plantation; his migration to the U.S. to study engineering in a world transformed by globalization; his marriage to the ambitious artist with whom he changed the world; and, ultimately, his invention, under self-exile, of the most ambitious creation of his life—Athena herself.

The Immortal King Rao, written by a former Wall Street Journal technology reporter, is a resonant debut novel obliterating the boundaries between literary and speculative fiction, the historic and the dystopian, confronting how we arrived at the age of technological capitalism and where our actions might take us next.

(Both descriptions are from the publishers.)