Barack Obama’s Book Picks of the Season
Since his time in the White House, former President Barack Obama has been sharing his favorite reads from the previous months. Here are his most recent book recommendations, spanning everything from the most talked-about novels to insightful nonfiction and everything in between.
-
1
Add to BookshelfKin: Oprah’s Book Club
by Tayari Jones
A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage — an unforgettable novel about mothers and daughters that sparkles with wit, intelligence, and deep feeling about 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.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$32.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
2
Add to Bookshelf
The Things We Never Say
by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition — one that brims with compassion for every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$29.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
3
Add to Bookshelf
A World Appears
by Michael Pollan
In Pollan’s dazzling exploration of consciousness, he discovers a world far deeper and stranger than our everyday reality. Eye-opening and mind-expanding, A World Appears takes us into the laboratories of our own minds, ultimately showing us how we might make better use of the gift of awareness to more meaningfully connect with the world and our deepest selves.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$32.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
4
Add to Bookshelf
Cool Machine
by Colson Whitehead
From #1 New York Times bestselling author and two-time Pulitzer winner Colson Whitehead, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
5
Add to Bookshelf
Vigil
by George Saunders
With the wisdom, playfulness, and explosive imagination we’ve come to expect, George Saunders takes on the gravest issues of our time — the menace of corporate greed, the toll of capitalism, the environmental perils of progress — and, in the process, spins a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil, and the thorny question of absolution.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
6
Add to Bookshelf
One Sun Only
by Camille Bordas
A stunning collection of stories exploring love and art, luck and loss, from “one of our greatest living short story writers” (Esquire), the author of How to Behave in a Crowd and The Material.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$28.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
7
Add to Bookshelf
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
by Kiran Desai
A Barack Obama 2025 Summer Reading selection. 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.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$21.00Preorder from:
-
8
Add to Bookshelf
Dead and Alive
by Zadie Smith
A Barack Obama 2025 Summer Reading selection. Throughout this thrilling collection, Zadie Smith shows us once again her unrivalled ability to think critically and humanely about some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$30.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
9
Add to Bookshelf
The Look
by Michelle Obama
A Barack Obama 2025 Summer Reading selection. Beautifully illustrated with more than 200 photographs, including never-before-seen images, The Look is a stunning journey through Michelle Obama’s style evolution, in her own words for the first time.
Add to BookshelfHardcover
$50.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
10
Add to Bookshelf
What Napoleon Could Not Do
by DK Nnuro
A Barack Obama 2023 Summer Reading selection. America is seen through the eyes and ambitions of three characters with ties to Africa in this gripping novel.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.00Buy from Other Retailers:
-
11
Add to Bookshelf
Hello Beautiful (Oprah’s Book Club)
by Ann Napolitano
A Barack Obama 2024 Summer Reading selection. An exquisite homage to Louisa May Alcott’s timeless classic, Little Women, Hello Beautiful is a profoundly moving portrait of what is possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$18.99Buy from Other Retailers:
-
12
Add to Bookshelf
Blue Hour
by Tiffany Clarke Harrison
A Barack Obama 2023 Summer Reading selection. What is motherhood in the midst of uncertainty, buried trauma, and an unraveling America? What it’s always been — a love song.
Add to BookshelfPaperback
$15.95Buy from Other Retailers:
