What books did your book club love talking about last year? See how they compare to the titles our subscribers say were their favorites for book group discussions in 2024.

The Most Popular Book Club Books of 2024 (with Pub Year)

The above information is based on a 2025 survey of BookBrowse email subscribers. Only subscribers were eligible to take part so as to prevent the ratings being skewed by enthusiastic fan bases. Respondents were asked to name up to three favorites that they discussed in a book group setting in 2024.

This year, we welcome four new arrivals to our top ten most popular book club books, three of which go straight to the top of the list: The Women by Kristin Hannah, The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, and James by Percival Everett. All three of these historical novels were named BookBrowse Top 20 Books of 2024, and Lawhon’s novel was our Award Winner in Fiction. The fourth new book to make the list is The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, which we recently discussed in our online book club.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, our 2022 Award Winner in the Debut category, held its place at #4, while the rest of the books on the list stayed but shifted in the rankings.

As always, the above rankings only represent the tip of the iceberg and don’t adequately reflect the variety of books named by participants. Like last year, the list displays a strong cross-section of current titles that we’ve in some way featured on BookBrowse.

Popular books that nearly made the top ten include (in order of ranking):

• North Woods by Daniel Mason.
• Lady Tan’s Circle of Women by Lisa See.
• Tom Lake by Ann Patchett.
• Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (which was #1 last year).

Scroll down for more info on the Top 10!

 

The Women: A Novel
by Kristin Hannah

Hardcover Feb 2024. 480 pages
Published by St. Martin’s Press

Based on years of research and guidance from real-life Vietnam War nurses, The Women vividly describes the horrors of war and the beauty of friendship and forgiveness while honoring the women whose service in Vietnam has been largely ignored. (Jordan Lynch) 

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The Frozen River: A Novel
by Ariel Lawhon

Paperback Nov 2024. 448 pages
Published by Vintage

Martha’s stories of attending births and delivering babies are some of the best scenes, allowing Lawhon to demonstrate her talent for capturing dramatic events while also developing full, well-rounded characters, even when they only appear for a few pages. The Frozen River is Martha Ballard’s story, developed down to the finest details in a way that A Midwife’s Tale, given its purpose as a work of academic literature and its source’s brevity, could not be. For fans of historical fiction, the novel is an excellent path to A Midwife’s Tale and other stories, historical or fictional, set in the late 18th century. (Maria Katsulos) 

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James: A Novel
by Percival Everett

Hardcover Mar 2024. 320 pages
Published by Doubleday

Jim’s voice, along with the voices of the other enslaved people he knows and meets on his journey, is one of constant code switching. The ignorance-feigning language of minstrelsy also hearkens back to Erasure‘s book-within-a-book called My Pafology, which is written with a white audience in mind, employing the stereotypical language this audience would expect to hear from a streetwise Black criminal. Slavery’s violence is unflinchingly captured in all of its horror, but also in its absurdity. Like the author supposedly standing up for Black voices in American Fiction, there are white savior types in James held up for satirical ridicule. Readers of some of Everett’s other work may find themselves yearning for the stranger qualities of books like Erasure and Dr. No. James is a straightforward novel with few frills. However, it features some excellent surprises and the build up to and execution of the final act are expertly done. (Lisa Butts) 

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Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel
by Shelby Van Pelt

Paperback Mar 2025. 368 pages
Published by Ecco

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Debut Award

Septuagenarian Tova Sullivan has lived in Sowell Bay since childhood, in the home her father built by hand after immigrating from Sweden. She began cleaning the aquarium at night following her husband’s passing, five years before the story opens, to keep busy. One night she discovers Marcellus stuck in a tangle of electrical cables and rescues him, and an unlikely friendship ensues. The book combines realism with the supernatural; certainly an octopus capable of intervening in human affairs is an unlikely beast. But while Marcellus’s actions are critical to the plot’s ultimate resolution, it’s the novel’s underlying themes of grief, loneliness and change that propel it along. (Kim Kovacs)

Read more

 

Demon Copperhead: A Novel
by Barbara Kingsolver

Paperback Aug 2024. 560 pages
Published by Harper Perennial

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in rural Virginia. The novel is a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, spanning the late 1990s to the present day. Kingsolver achieves the impossible, creating a narrative that stands up to its source material and, by some measures, may even surpass it. Although Kingsolver incorporates many clever nods to the original, readers need not be familiar with David Copperfield to fully appreciate Demon Copperhead. Those who do know the Dickens novel, though, will likely get a kick out of how Kingsolver adapts the plot to a new time, place and set of social circumstances. (Kim Kovacs) 

Read more

 

Horse: A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks

Paperback Jan 2024. 464 pages
Published by Penguin Books

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing. (Jane McCormack)

Read more

 

The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese

Paperback May 6, 2025. 768 pages
Published by Hachette Books

Winner: 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters like Big Ammachi, Digby, a Swedish physician named Rune who runs a colony for lepers, Philipose and his love Elsie, who is born to be an artist of staggering genius if only the world will let her. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets “that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed.” (Peggy Kurkowski) 

Read more

 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
by James McBride

Paperback Jul 29, 2025. 432 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, primarily within the confines of a real-life settlement called Chicken Hill, during the racially contentious 1930s. Chicken Hill’s population was largely Jewish and Black, and included Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants. It was a place where all types of people, united by impoverished circumstances, “pretty much got along,” as McBride explains in an interview with NPR, which inspired him to recreate the congenial relationships between his characters. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store shows readers that it is possible to connect with people who are radically different from you without relinquishing the things unique to your own experience. Love bursts from the pages of McBride’s novel, shining its golden light on the miracles we can accomplish as a community. (Abby Edgecumbe) 

Read more

 

West with Giraffes: A Novel
by Lynda Rutledge

Feb 2021. 372 pages
Published by Lake Union Publishing

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. 

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.

Read more

 

The Berry Pickers: A Novel
by Amanda Peters

Oct 2023. 320 pages
Published by Catapult

July 1962. A Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family’s youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister’s disappearance for years to come.

In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren’t telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.

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Jon Savage’s mammoth new book skilfully navigates, across more than 700 pages, key moments in music and entertainment history and maps their significance for the advancement and acceptance of queer culture. The Secret Public takes its name from that duality of the public and private self and early chapters describe the brutal dangers and difficulties, before the legalisation of homosexuality, encountered by singers and artists in the UK and US who were not able to fully be themselves. Often, he points out, they had public personas and identities at odds with their private selves, operating as some of them were “in the claustrophobic sexual and gendered atmosphere of America in the early 1950s” where “any perceived deviancy was automatically suspect”. The book tells the story of how we have arrived at our modern moment, with LGBTQ+ artists more fully, if not entirely, accepted, while also serving as a prescient warning about not slipping back.

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As you would expect, Savage can really write about music, its poetry and cadences. Early on, he examines the opening refrain of Little Richard’s Tutti Frutti, digging deep into each syllable of that opening “first eruption”, describing how the final two syllables of “Awopbopaloobop alopbamboom” have the “force of a fist, a blow, an explosion – a caption in a superhero comic”. And by choosing a condensed period of time, just 24 years, he is able to revel in details, both the seismic and the sidelined. He brings new life to Bowie, Dusty Springfield and… Rock Hudson who, when it was thought his “natural speaking voice was too high-pitched for his macho image”, was forced to scream when he had a cold in order to permanently alter the tone, making it deeper and supposedly “more seductive”. With Bowie, Savage gives us not just the better-known story of the evolution of the stage persona, but the backstage and managerial minutiae of his rise as well.

This is a meticulously researched tome, as evidenced by more than 50 pages of notes and references, but Savage’s central achievement is to wear all his knowledge lightly, to tell us these stories as easily and engagingly as if we were stood in line with him, waiting to go into a gig. This is a tricky book to pull off, in that it is both academic and has a broad appeal. Savage is knowledgable and has a wide range of reference, bringing his experience of previous books on the Sex Pistols (England’s Dreaming) and screenplays for film documentaries such as 2007’s Joy Division to the page, so that you alway feels he is in command of his subject.

The Secret Public is constantly in motion, spinning outwards from its glimpses of individual stars and managers into the collective story of entire nations, not just of LGBTQ+ people. Readers who come for the insights into certain schools of music, or particular singers, will also find a book that is brilliant on shifting ideas of postwar masculinity in the UK and US, and the wider cultural consumption of the era (mainly driven by women, “who were at the forefront of consumerism in the postwar years”, and whose participation in “massed fandom” brought “public attention to the power of teenage girls…” ).

Savage writes of the shifting tides of history with the pinpoint distillation of the line of a song; he notes that “the relationship between gay pop and politics” was “complex and vexed”, and it’s this book’s achievement that it gives us that entanglement in intimate snapshots.

A first cousin, though different in style and focused on the decades directly after The Secret Public, is David France’s classic How to Survive a Plague and it’s impossible to read the final sentence of Savage’s book without shuddering. He leaves us with a glimpse of the cover of Sylvester’s 1979 album Living Proof and its fold-out sleeve, describing the singer at the centre, “pouring champagne into a glass”, as “the perfect party host”. “Around him, on the steps up to a nightclub, framed by the marquee roof, are upwards of 35 celebrants: a mixture of ages, genders and races… Packed tight together, they are all smiling with pleasure and anticipation.”

The author ends with a plea to “leave them there”, while they are “frozen in their fabulousness, with no thought of what is to come”. Less than 10 years later, Sylvester would die of an Aids-related illness. We can only hope this book might herald a sequel in which Savage can turn his rigorous depth and tenderness to what did happen next.

Historical fiction is often a well-loved genre for book clubs. It allows members to learn more about a particular time and place at their leisure while enjoying the twists and turns of a good story and sharing it with others.

We’ve already published the results of our most recent annual survey showing the Top 10 book club books of 2023, but how did historical novels fare? Below are the works of fiction set in past eras that book club members took the most pleasure in discussing.

The Most Popular Historical Fiction for Book Clubs in 2023 (with Pub Year)

The above information is based on a February 2024 survey of BookBrowse email subscribers. Only subscribers were eligible to take part so as to prevent the ratings being skewed by enthusiastic fan bases. Respondents were asked to name up to three favorites that they discussed in a book group setting in 2023; 3268 votes were cast.

The popularity of historical fiction is already evident by its presence in our general Top 10. Six of the ten, led by Lessons in Chemistry from Bonnie Garmus and Horse from Geraldine Brooks, are historical novels, leaving room for four more favorites. Filling the 7th and 8th place spots in a tie are Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray’s The Personal Librarian, the story of Belle da Costa Greene, who hid her identity as a Black woman while working as J.P. Morgan’s librarian in the early 20th century, and Amor Towles’ The Lincoln Highway, which follows a spontaneous series of road trip adventures undertaken by a pair of brothers in the 1950s. These two titles also made our overall Top 10 of 2022, taking the #4 and #2 spots respectively.

Trust by Hernan Diaz, coming in at #9, is a metafictional feast of a novel featuring four accounts of a wealthy couple living in 1920s New York. Along with The Personal Librarian and Towles’ novel, this work gives readers a unique glimpse into American history, and provides food for thought on the nature of truth and perspective.

Maggie O’Farrell’s The Marriage Portrait, sliding in at #10, sweeps us away in another direction entirely. Set in 16th-century Italy, it relates a high-tension, alternate version of the story of the real Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of a Grand Duke of Tuscany, in which she attempts to foil her husband’s plans to murder her.

As with our general Top 10 list, it’s important to remember that there are book groups for every possible reading interest, and there are so many exceptional books to choose from that this Top 10 list represents only the very tip of the iceberg.

Check out all of these historical gems in more detail below!

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel
by Bonnie Garmus

Hardcover Apr 2022. 400 pages
Published by Doubleday

Bonnie Garmus’s debut, Lessons in Chemistry, introduces readers to an exceptional woman struggling to succeed in a male-dominated field. Garmus sets her novel in the days before the Equal Rights Amendment and the #MeToo movement, when most men — and many women as well — believed that any woman who dared to enter a traditional men’s profession was either “a lightweight or a gold digger,” in the author’s words. One might assume the novel is a dark, weighty exploration of the sexual discrimination rampant during the 1950s and early 1960s. Amazingly, it’s really not; although the book’s substance depends largely on this theme, its overall tone is positive and affirming. (Kim Kovacs) 

Read more

 

Horse: A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks

Paperback Jan 2024. 464 pages
Published by Penguin Books

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing. (Jane McCormack) 

Read more

 

The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese

Hardcover May 2023. 736 pages
Published by Grove Press

Winner of the 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Along the Malabar Coast of South India in 1900, a 12-year-old girl grieving her father’s death sets off to a rambling estate called Parambil to marry a man almost 30 years her senior. As the years go by and she bears a child, her stepson JoJo calls her Big Ammachi (“Big Little Mother”), and the name sticks. She becomes the matriarch and mainstay of a family with a peculiar affliction, one she refers to as the “Condition.” Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets “that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed.” (Peggy Kurkowski) 

Read more

 

West With Giraffes: A Novel
by Lynda Rutledge

Feb 2021. 372 pages
Published by Lake Union Publishing

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. 

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.

Read more

 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
by James McBride

Hardcover Aug 2023. 400 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, primarily within the confines of a real-life settlement called Chicken Hill, during the racially contentious 1930s. Chicken Hill’s population was largely Jewish and Black, and included Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants. It was a place where all types of people, united by impoverished circumstances, “pretty much got along,” as McBride explains in an interview with NPR, which inspired him to recreate the congenial relationships between his characters. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store shows readers that it is possible to connect with people who are radically different from you without relinquishing the things unique to your own experience. Love bursts from the pages of McBride’s novel, shining its golden light on the miracles we can accomplish as a community. (Abby Edgecumbe) 

Read more

 

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women: A Novel
by Lisa See

Paperback Jun 11, 2024. 368 pages
Published by Scribner

According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

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The Personal Librarian
by Marie Benedict, Victoria Christopher Murray

Paperback Jun 2022. 352 pages
Published by Berkley Books

I came to love the heroine’s balance of professional chutzpah and vulnerable heart (Jessamyn R). Belle da Costa Greene was, historically, a very powerful woman and yet has never crossed my radar. The authors describe a woman of great intelligence, style and depth one can never know enough about (Carole A). This portrayal of the diminutive (in stature only) Greene and her ability to navigate a purely (white) man’s world with her wit, tenacity and intelligence is unforgettable (Patricia L).  

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The Lincoln Highway: A Novel
by Amor Towles

Paperback Mar 2023. 592 pages
Published by Penguin Books

Winner of the 2021 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Things look bleak for Emmett Watson in June of 1954. He and his eight-year-old brother, Billy, will soon be homeless, with the bank giving them three weeks to clear out. Luckily, Emmett still has his pride and joy, his 1948 Studebaker, as well as a cash inheritance from his father. Grateful for the excuse to get away from Nebraska, he intends to light out for Texas to flip houses. Billy has another idea: taking the continent-spanning Lincoln Highway to find their mother in San Francisco — the last place she mailed a postcard from after she disappeared eight years ago. The Lincoln Highway features some fantastic characters. Precocious Billy steals every scene he appears in. There is something appealing about the conjunction of bravery and mischief, and it’s reassuring how the novel comes full circle and promises further adventures ahead. (Rebecca Foster) 

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Trust
by Hernan Diaz

Paperback May 2023. 416 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

Hernan Diaz’s Trust is a work of fiction that is itself comprised of four very different works existing in the world of its story. Bonds is a novel published in the 1930s about Benjamin Rask, who increased his fortune playing the 1920s stock market before his wife Helen’s madness and death. Next is an unfinished autobiography by Andrew Bevel, on whom Benjamin Rask was unashamedly based—he wants to correct the story about him and his late wife, Mildred. The third section is a memoir by Bevel’s secretary, Ida Partenza, a Brooklynite whose father is a bombastic, anarchic Italian immigrant. The last section is Mildred’s, and the best. The novel is like a feminist retelling of a classic, male-oriented story, except that the original story is also one that Diaz wrote. Look at what is missing from these accounts, he implores us. Who do you believe? (Chloe Pfeiffer) 

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The Marriage Portrait: A Novel
by Maggie O’Farrell

Paperback Jul 2023. 352 pages
Published by Vintage

The book begins with Lucrezia’s realization that her husband means to murder her while they’re at a remote castle. The story then loops back through her childhood and adolescence, with chapters periodically jumping to her in the castle trying to avoid her husband’s violent intentions. The structure gives the book the feel of a murder mystery — Will he or won’t he do it? What is he capable of? — and the simmering undercurrents of danger draw the reader in, enveloping us in Lucrezia’s fear and confusion, but also her intelligence and bravery. By shortening the distance between Lucrezia’s lifetime and our own, O’Farrell also makes the risks of succession and reproduction patently clear for modern readers. She provides a glimpse of the terror, pride, hope, danger and sometimes affection that marriage entailed for early modern women, all within an exciting and fast-paced tale. (Rose Rankin) 

Read more

What were the most popular book club books in 2023? The results are in! Read on to see the titles our subscribers enjoyed discussing most with their book groups over the past year.

The Most Popular Book Club Books of 2023

Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus not only retains its #1 spot on the list from the previous year but claims an even larger percentage of the votes (up to 18.6% from 13.9%). That’s not especially surprising, as this debut novel, a humorous and charming but substantial story exploring aspects of 1960s misogyny, was voted a BookBrowse Best Book of the Year in 2022 and is well established as a book club and reader favorite.

Interestingly, the two other books in our Top 10 of 2022 that have kept a place in the rankings are both historical novels featuring animals. Horse by Geraldine Brooks, centered on 19th-century thoroughbred racing, climbs up a spot (from #3 to #2), while West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge, based on the true story of two famous giraffes during the Depression era, holds steady at #6. Horse was our 2022 Award Winner in the Fiction category, and West With Giraffes was the subject of a 2023 BookBrowse Book Club discussion.

Also of note, 9 out of the Top 10 books were not available in paperback last year, (the other was a dual release of paperback and hardcover), proving that book clubs aren’t waiting to discuss books in paperback.

Although Top 10 lists make for interesting reading, it’s important to remember that there are book groups for every possible reading interest, and even among what might be considered typical groups, reading mostly literary fiction with forays into genre fiction and nonfiction, there are so many exceptional books to choose from that this Top 10 list represent only the very tip of the iceberg. In fact, the list of favorite titles is so wide and varied that only 14 books were named by at least 2% of respondents—and more than 1,300 different titles were named overall!

The remaining titles that got at least 2% of votes are (in order of ratings):

• Mad Honey by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult.
• The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, reviewed by readers in our First Impressions program in 2021.
• The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles, the 2021 BookBrowse Fiction Award winner.
• The Measure by Nikki Erlick.
• Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.
• Trust by Hernan Diaz, the 2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Fiction.

Scroll down to explore the Top 10 in more detail!

 

Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel
by Bonnie Garmus

Hardcover Apr 2022. 400 pages
Published by Doubleday

Bonnie Garmus’s debut, Lessons in Chemistry, introduces readers to an exceptional woman struggling to succeed in a male-dominated field. Garmus sets her novel in the days before the Equal Rights Amendment and the #MeToo movement, when most men — and many women as well — believed that any woman who dared to enter a traditional men’s profession was either “a lightweight or a gold digger,” in the author’s words. One might assume the novel is a dark, weighty exploration of the sexual discrimination rampant during the 1950s and early 1960s. Amazingly, it’s really not; although the book’s substance depends largely on this theme, its overall tone is positive and affirming. (Kim Kovacs) 

Read more

 

Horse: A Novel
by Geraldine Brooks

Paperback Jan 2024. 464 pages
Published by Penguin Books

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing. (Jane McCormack) 

Read more

 

Demon Copperhead: A Novel
by Barbara Kingsolver

Paperback May 7, 2024. 560 pages
Published by Harper Perennial

Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in rural Virginia. The novel is a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, spanning the late 1990s to the present day. Kingsolver achieves the impossible, creating a narrative that stands up to its source material and, by some measures, may even surpass it. Although Kingsolver incorporates many clever nods to the original, readers need not be familiar with David Copperfield to fully appreciate Demon Copperhead. Those who do know the Dickens novel, though, will likely get a kick out of how Kingsolver adapts the plot to a new time, place and set of social circumstances. (Kim Kovacs) 

Read more

 

Remarkably Bright Creatures: A Novel
by Shelby Van Pelt

Hardcover May 2022. 368 pages
Published by Ecco

Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Debut Award

Septuagenarian Tova Sullivan has lived in Sowell Bay since childhood, in the home her father built by hand after immigrating from Sweden. She began cleaning the aquarium at night following her husband’s passing, five years before the story opens, to keep busy. One night she discovers Marcellus stuck in a tangle of electrical cables and rescues him, and an unlikely friendship ensues. The book combines realism with the supernatural; certainly an octopus capable of intervening in human affairs is an unlikely beast. But while Marcellus’s actions are critical to the plot’s ultimate resolution, it’s the novel’s underlying themes of grief, loneliness and change that propel it along. (Kim Kovacs) 

Read more

 

The Covenant of Water
by Abraham Verghese

Hardcover May 2023. 736 pages
Published by Grove Press

Winner of the 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award

Along the Malabar Coast of South India in 1900, a 12-year-old girl grieving her father’s death sets off to a rambling estate called Parambil to marry a man almost 30 years her senior. As the years go by and she bears a child, her stepson JoJo calls her Big Ammachi (“Big Little Mother”), and the name sticks. She becomes the matriarch and mainstay of a family with a peculiar affliction, one she refers to as the “Condition.” Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi’s granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets “that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed.” (Peggy Kurkowski) 

Read more

 

West with Giraffes: A Novel
by Lynda Rutledge

Feb 2021. 372 pages
Published by Lake Union Publishing

Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.

It’s 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California’s first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow. 

Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it’s too late.

Read more

 

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store: A Novel
by James McBride

Hardcover Aug 2023. 400 pages
Published by Riverhead Books

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, primarily within the confines of a real-life settlement called Chicken Hill, during the racially contentious 1930s. Chicken Hill’s population was largely Jewish and Black, and included Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants. It was a place where all types of people, united by impoverished circumstances, “pretty much got along,” as McBride explains in an interview with NPR, which inspired him to recreate the congenial relationships between his characters. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store shows readers that it is possible to connect with people who are radically different from you without relinquishing the things unique to your own experience. Love bursts from the pages of McBride’s novel, shining its golden light on the miracles we can accomplish as a community. (Abby Edgecumbe) 

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Hello Beautiful: A Novel
by Ann Napolitano

Hardcover Mar 2023. 400 pages
Published by The Dial Press

Ann Napolitano’s much-anticipated Hello Beautiful pulls the reader into a warm, loving familial atmosphere in what has been described as an homage to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Sweeping and vast, it follows the Padavano family from the 1980s up until 2008, cataloging their attempts to grow, change, forgive and find love within the bounds of their very tight-knit group. Each character has virtues: Sylvie, the bookworm romantic with her head screwed on straight; Julia, the planner obsessed with finding and fixing all flaws; Cecelia, the sentimental artist; and Emeline, the nurturing caregiver. Yet, most importantly, they have major flaws. They run from challenges. They hurt easily and hold grudges. They are emotional, they are thrown into irrational decisions seemingly at a whim. They have egos and tempers. But at the forefront of all the conflict is the desire for forgiveness: to receive it, and to dole it out. That, and the desire for love. (Abby Edgecumbe) 

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Tom Lake: A Novel
by Ann Patchett

Hardcover Aug 2023. 320 pages
Published by Harper

Lara and her husband own a cherry orchard in Michigan, and the book takes place during the harvest of the summer month, for which her three grown daughters are onsite to help. It’s the middle of the pandemic, so there isn’t much else to do, and they beg Lara to tell them the story of how she came to date heartthrob actor Peter Duke when she was younger. Rather than crafting shimmering passages that call attention to her skill, Patchett’s gift is to make herself disappear so we can better connect with the characters. The events of Lara’s life flow perfectly together, which makes it exciting when we learn how she goes from swimming with a movie star to owning a cherry orchard with a husband and kids. Also, that’s really how life is: we never know if a single moment will turn out to be important or not, or when we’ll see someone for the last time, or how what we will come to learn about them in future will change how we see the past. (Erin Lyndal Martin) 

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Lady Tan’s Circle of Women: A Novel
by Lisa See

Hardcover Jun 2023. 368 pages
Published by Scribner

According to Confucius, “an educated woman is a worthless woman,” but Tan Yunxian—born into an elite family, yet haunted by death, separations, and loneliness—is being raised by her grandparents to be of use. Her grandmother is one of only a handful of female doctors in China, and she teaches Yunxian the pillars of Chinese medicine, the Four Examinations—looking, listening, touching, and asking—something a man can never do with a female patient.

Lady Tan’s Circle of Women is a captivating story of women helping other women. It is also a triumphant reimagining of the life of a woman who was remarkable in the Ming dynasty and would be considered remarkable today.

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As polyamory found greater acceptance in the nineteen-nineties, the movement shed its remaining countercultural trappings, Gleason argues, noting the shift away from New Age spirituality in favor of “ethics” and “rule-based” approaches to polyamory. These precepts were codified in “The Ethical Slut,” by Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy (1997), a sex-positive guide colloquially known as “the poly bible.” It contains Keristan terminology (like “compersion”—the feeling of joy that comes from seeing your partner sexually happy with another person) and a list of do’s and don’ts, including “DO refrain from fucking the guests until your lover is finished cooking and serving dinner,” and “DON’T wander off with your lover, leaving your partner to make conversation with your lover’s spouse.”

So many rules! “American Poly” reveals Americans to be very American. Good Puritans, we made marriage into work and non-monogamy into even more work—something that requires scheduling software, self-help manuals, even networking events. Presumably, participants could at least skip the icebreakers.

Halfway through “More,” Molly Roden Winter’s memoir about her open marriage, the author picks up a copy of “The Ethical Slut” from the Strand, “a bookstore large enough to contain the embarrassment I feel,” she writes. By now, Roden Winter is writing in unstinting detail about the mechanics of her marriage’s transition from monogamous to open (some sex on the side) to fully polyamorous (in which couples are allowed to have full-fledged concurrent relationships). She holds nothing back, even when she should. At one point, she signs up for AshleyMadison.com (tagline: “Life is short, have an affair”) using the alias Mercedes Invierno, her surname in Spanish. “The twin sins of cultural appropriation and misrepresenting myself to men with Latina fetishes hardly seem important in the world of Ashley Madison,” she tells herself, eating up the attention she receives on the site “like a warm plate of churros.”

When the book opens, Roden Winter is the (monogamously) married stay-at-home mother of two small children, or, as she puts it, “the Wiper of Noses, the Doer of Dishes, the Nag in Residence.” She wants, well—more. One night, after her husband, Stewart, gets home late from work, yet again, she loses it. Out on a rage walk through the mean streets of Park Slope, she bumps into an old colleague from her teaching days who invites her out to a nearby bar, appropriately named the Gate, where she will first trespass the boundaries of monogamy.

Inside, she meets Matt, a younger man who buys her a few rounds of I.P.A.s. The description of him is generic: tall, jeans, hair. Their conversation is devoid of even the slimmest fragment of witty banter. This is a lust born of deprivation and desperation. She gives Matt her number, and by the time she’s home he’s sent her a text message, which Stewart spies. It turns out that he’s turned on. Matt becomes the couple’s marital lubricant. In bed, Stewart imagines that Matt is probably somewhere “thinking about what he wishes he’d done to you,” he tells his wife, before brushing his fingers across her panties. Roden Winter is riveted: “ ‘Fuck me’ I say, for perhaps the first time in our married life.”

At every turn, Roden Winter emphasizes that this experiment sustains and deepens her bond with her husband. “Sometimes, when Stewart does something new—moves his tongue differently, I freeze,” she writes. “Where did he learn to do that? I wonder,” she continues, before she has a powerful orgasm that recalls the early days of their courtship. Later, she goes to see “Get Out” with a man she met on OKCupid, and is breathlessly excited about decoding the film’s symbolism. “And the cotton in his ears was so cool!” she recalls telling her OKCupid date. “It’s like he’s using this symbol of slavery to escape the enslavers.” He compliments her on her insight, then grows quiet, not as eager as she imagines Stewart will be to go back and forth with “Mercedes Invierno” on race relations.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of “More” is how closed-minded it feels about many things besides open marriage. Divorce, for instance. When the wife of one of Roden Winter’s lovers leaves him for another man, she derides the woman to her therapist: “I feel bad for him. Diana is being so impulsive. I mean, she’s planning on marrying this guy she met only a year ago.” It’s a startlingly judgmental pronouncement coming from someone who clearly thinks of herself as transgressive. But that kind of marital rupture is impossible in Roden Winter’s world. While I appreciated her lack of shame about desire (including the desire for validation), I couldn’t help wishing that she possessed the same candor around the economics of her marriage. Although she never directly addresses the matter in “More,” it is clear from her life style that Roden Winter and her husband are better off than most of their partners, who tend to be younger, single, and less financially secure than they are. One of their rules is that they cannot have sex in their home, and so, in the course of the book they spend untold amounts on New York City hotels, taxis, and co-working spaces. When Roden Winter first hooks up with Matt, she immediately notices his cramped living space: “There’s no foyer in his small studio apartment, no mudroom with four identical cubbies like I have in my house.” Who thinks about a mudroom during sex? Someone who writes a book called “More” is who.

The memoir takes a long time to finish, not unlike a bad Ashley Madison hookup, but not before Roden Winter offers closing remarks in defense of open marriage. She echoes the common refrain expressed by proponents of polyamory that the life style represents an abundance-oriented mind-set, whereas monogamy is a symptom of scarcity culture. “Because love is vast,” she tells us. “Abundant. Infinite, in fact. And the secret is this: love begets love. The more you love, the more love you have to give.” But there is no articulation of what that abundance might look like beyond her private life and the private spaces in which it unfolds. Ultimately, Roden Winter’s memoir represents a very specific, arguably very American version of polyamory—the extension of abundance culture to all corners of the bedroom, but nowhere beyond.

I want more for polyamory than “More.” As ethical non-monogamy becomes the stuff of Park Slope marriages and luxury perfume ads, it’s worth remembering that revolutions don’t fail; they get co-opted—often by people who can afford co-ops. You can understand why Roden Winter might believe that she is ushering in a bright, abundant future by opening up her marriage. A good love affair, when you’re inside it, feels like it could change the world. But changing the world takes more than spreading the love; you have to spread the wealth, too. Maybe that’s just utopian, hippie nonsense. But what can I say? I’m a romantic. ♦