The Best Celebrity Book Club Picks of the Year

Oprah’s Book Club

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that. It’s one brilliant woman’s intimate and revealing story, and a multigenerational family saga that carries within it the story of America — and the wisdom that women pass on to one another, mothers to daughters, across generations.

Good Morning America Book Club

Stegner Fellow Jemimah Wei explores the formation and dissolution of family bonds in a story of ambition and sisterhood in turn-of-the-millennium Singapore. In the story of a family and its contention with the roiling changes of our rapidly modernizing, winner-take-all world, The Original Daughter is a major literary debut, rife with emotional clarity and searing social insight.

Reese’s Book Club

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library — its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind. Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess. Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.

Oprah’s Book Club

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. Hallmarks of Vuong’s writing — formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness — are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: A second chance.

Read With Jenna

This extraordinary novel asks: Can a name change the course of a life? Spanning 35 years, it follows three alternate versions of Cora’s and her young son’s lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

Oprah’s Book Club

Cece is in love. She has arrived early at her future in-laws’ lake house in Salish, Montana, to finish planning her wedding to Charlie, a young doctor with a brilliant life ahead of him. Charlie has asked Garrett, his best friend from college, to officiate the ceremony. As Cece spends time with Garrett, his gruff mask slips, and she grows increasingly uncertain about her future. Written with humor, precision, and enormous heart, both a love letter and an elegy to the American West, Dream State is a thrillingly ambitious ode to the power of friendship, the weird weather of marriage, and the beauty of impermanence.

Read With Jenna

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for 21 days. From Laila Lalami — the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist — comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Oprah’s Book Club

For decades, Amy ran. Through the dirt roads of Amarillo, Texas, where she grew up; to the campus of the University of Virginia, as a student athlete; on the streets of New York, where she built her adult life; through marriage, motherhood, and a thriving career. To outsiders, it all looked, in many ways, perfect. But Amy was running from something — a secret she was keeping not only from her family and friends, but unconsciously from herself. Discover an astonishing memoir that explores how far we will go to protect ourselves, and the healing made possible when we face our secrets and begin to share our stories.

Read With Jenna

For 50 years, Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now. An homage to New York City, to romance, and even to loss, This Is a Love Story tenderly and suspensefully captures deep truths about life and marriage in radiant prose.

Reese’s Book Club

Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian — an enigmatic and volatile man — spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. That journey takes an unexpected turn when Marguerite, accused of betrayal, is brutally punished and abandoned on a small island. Inspired by the real life of a 16th-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.

Good Morning America Book Club

Sixteen years old and enslaved since she was born, Junie has spent her life on Bellereine Plantation in Alabama, cooking and cleaning alongside her family, and tending to the white master’s daughter, Violet. Her daydreams are filled with poetry and faraway worlds, while she spends her nights secretly roaming through the forest, consumed with grief over the sudden death of her older sister, Minnie. When wealthy guests arrive from New Orleans, hinting at marriage for Violet and upending Junie’s life, she commits a desperate act. As long-held truths begin to crumble, she realizes Bellereine is harboring dark and horrifying secrets that can no longer be ignored.

Read With Jenna

A witty, atmospheric, and brilliantly told novel that offers compelling portraits of womanhood, motherhood and female friendship, along with the irresistible intrigue surrounding an extraordinary British family.

Good Morning America Book Club

Homeseeking follows the separated lovers through six decades of tumultuous Chinese history as war, famine, and opportunity take them separately to the song halls of Hong Kong, the military encampments of Taiwan, the bustling streets of New York, and sunny California. At once epic and intimate, Homeseeking is a story of family, sacrifice, and loyalty, and of the power of love to endure beyond distance, beyond time.

Oprah’s Book Club

Eckhart Tolle shares how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness, but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world. Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, A New Earth is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life — and for building a better world.

Read With Jenna

Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Carefully curated, these 200-plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best.

Oprah’s Book Club

Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough.

Read With Jenna

Discover the soaring thriller and epic love story that “hits like a sledgehammer … an absolutely must-read novel” (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl). A missing person mystery, a serial killer thriller, a love story, a unique twist on each, Chris Whitaker has written a novel about what lurks in the shadows of obsession and the blinding light of hope.

Jimmy Fallon’s Summer Reads Winner

When a teenager vanishes from her Adirondack summer camp, two worlds collide. Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. The God of the Woods is Jimmy Fallon’s Summer Reads winner, one of Barack Obama’s favorite reads of summer 2024, and Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.

Good Morning America Book Club

From the celebrated New York Times bestselling author of Such a Fun Age comes a fresh and provocative story about a residential assistant and her messy entanglement with a professor and three unruly students.

Oprah’s Book Club

From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Strout comes a “stunner” (People) of a novel about new friendships, old loves, and the very human desire to leave a mark on the world.

Read With Jenna

“A bottomless champagne flute of a novel” (Washington Post), The Husbands delights in asking: How do we navigate life, love, and choice in a world of never-ending options?

Read With Jenna

Three estranged siblings return to their family home in New York after their beloved sister’s death in this “deeply nuanced and compelling” (Vogue) novel, from the acclaimed author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein.

Good Morning America Book Club

Prepare for a ruthless and romantic new fantasy from #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Award-winning author Sabaa Tahir! Beloved storyteller Tahir interweaves the lives of three young people as they grapple with power, treachery, love, and the devastating consequences of unchecked greed, on a journey that may cost them their lives — and their hearts. Literally.

Good Morning America Book Club

A brilliant take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex from the bestselling author of Caucasia. Funny, piercing, and page-turning, Colored Television is Senna’s most on-the-pulse, ambitious, and rewarding novel yet.

Reese’s Book Club

Discover this novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine. Enthralling, richly imagined, filled with psychic mediums and charlatans, spirits and past lives, mothers, marriage, and the legacy of alcoholism, this is a deeply moving novel about the land we inhabit, the women who came before us, and the ways in which none of us will ever truly leave this earth.

Good Morning America Book Club

Malas is a story full of passion and revenge, following one family living on the Texas Mexico border and a curse that reverberates across generations. Rich with cinematic details — from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings — this memorable debut is a love letter to the Tejano culture and community that sustain two women as they discover what family means.

Belletrist Book Club

From the award-winning author of The Leavers and chosen as one of Barack Obama’s favorite reads of summer 2024, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

Read With Jenna

From the award-winning author of Goodbye, Vitamin: How far would you go to shape your own destiny? An exhilarating novel of American identity that spans three generations in one family and asks: What makes us who we are? And how inevitable are our futures?

Good Morning America Book Club

A young woman wins the role of a lifetime in a film about a legendary heroine — but the real drama is behind the scenes. A sumptuous historical epic from the New York Times bestselling author of Mexican Gothic.

Reese’s Book Club

“[A] richly textured and deeply moving debut” (The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice) about one unforgettable Southern Black family and its youngest daughter’s coming of age in the 1990s. With visceral clarity and powerful prose, Dameron reveals the devastation of being made to feel invisible and the transformative power of being seen. Redwood Court celebrates extraordinary, ordinary people striving to achieve their American dreams.