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Book Club Picks That Are Actually Worth Discussing
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items The literary fiction picks that give a book club something to actually argue about - multigenerational family sagas, unreliable narrators, and a few modern classics.
Kingsolver retells David Copperfield through the opioid crisis in Appalachia, following a kid born into poverty and addiction who somehow still narrates his own life with dark humor and defiance. It won both the Pulitzer and the Women's Prize, which ...
Demon Copperhead
O'Farrell imagines the life of Shakespeare's wife and the death of their son Hamnet, the loss that supposedly inspired Hamlet, and somehow makes a 400-year-old grief feel completely immediate. The prose is gorgeous without being showy, which is a har...
Hamnet
Verghese follows three generations of a family in South India where someone always seems to drown, and turns that into a sprawling, generous novel about medicine, faith, and the weight families hand down. It's long, but it reads fast once the family'...
The Covenant of Water
Diaz tells the same story of a 1920s Wall Street fortune four different ways - a novel, a memoir, a biography, a diary - and lets you watch the truth get rewritten each time. It won the Pulitzer and it's the kind of structural trick that actually pay...
Trust
Everett retells Huckleberry Finn from Jim's perspective, and the shift in narrator changes everything about a story you probably read in school. It's funny, furious, and completely reorients a ‘classic’ you thought you already understood. One of the ...
James
Bennett follows twin sisters who grow up in the same Black community and end up living completely different lives after one starts passing as white. It's as much a family saga as it is a book about identity and the lies people build their lives aroun...
The Vanishing Half
Gyasi traces two half-sisters' descendants across 300 years, one line staying in Ghana and the other sold into slavery in America, with each chapter jumping to the next generation. It's an ambitious structure that somehow never feels rushed, even cov...
Homegoing
Orange follows a dozen interconnected characters heading to the same powwow in Oakland, weaving together a portrait of urban Native American life you don't see much in fiction. The multiple perspectives build toward something tense and inevitable by ...
There There
This one follows four friends in New York over decades, but it's really about one of them, Jude, and the trauma he's spent his whole life trying to outrun. It's a genuinely difficult read - long and unflinching - so it's not for everyone, but almost ...
A Little Life
Whitehead fictionalizes a real reform school in Florida where boys were abused and killed, following two friends trying to survive it. It's short compared to some of these picks, but it hits hard and won the Pulitzer for a reason. Pairs well with a b...
The Nickel Boys
Lee follows four generations of a Korean family living in Japan, tracking how they navigate discrimination, war, and shifting fortunes across the 20th century. It's the kind of sweeping family saga that makes you forget how much time has passed while...
Pachinko
Makkai splits the story between the AIDS crisis in 1980s Chicago and a woman searching for her estranged daughter decades later, and the two timelines end up talking to each other in ways you don't expect. It's an emotional gut-punch that's also genu...
The Great Believers
The first in Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet follows two girls growing up poor in postwar Naples, and their friendship becomes as complicated and intense as any romance in fiction. It's the kind of book that makes people immediately want to read the ne...
My Brilliant Friend
Tartt follows a boy who steals a famous painting during a museum bombing that kills his mother, and spends the rest of the book carrying both the painting and the grief. It won the Pulitzer and split readers pretty evenly between ‘masterpiece’ and ‘t...
The Goldfinch
Morrison's novel about a formerly enslaved woman haunted, literally, by the daughter she lost is one of the most essential works of American fiction, full stop. It's not an easy read, but it's the kind of book that changes how you think about memory ...
Beloved
Ng sets a custody battle over a Chinese-American baby against a buttoned-up Ohio suburb, and uses it to pick apart everything the town would rather not talk about - class, motherhood, and what ‘doing the right thing’ actually costs. It's propulsive e...
Little Fires Everywhere