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Best Book Club Books for 2023

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We love participating in our reading challenges with you as an online book club! But, we know that many of our readers participate in local book clubs as well. Some readers use the year-long challenges to guide their book club, but many make their own selections monthly and are looking for the top book club books for 2023.

How to Pick a Book for Your Book Club

One of the trickiest parts of a successful meeting comes down to making thought-provoking book club book selections. You’ll want titles that will be enjoyable but have enough depth to provide great discussion. It’s ideal when a book can elicit emotions and be relatable to members in different ways.

For this list, we focused on good book club books published in 2022 or 2023. We think these will be some of the most popular new books among book clubs. We hope the list makes it easier for your club to make book selections for the upcoming year! 

Literary Fiction vs. Contemporary Fiction

We’ve noted the genre of each book on the list below. Most genres are self-explanatory, but others can get easily confused. We wanted to clear up a couple of definitions to help you pick the best books for your club’s preferences:

  • What is Contemporary Fiction? Stories that could happen to real people in real settings, and that take place in the same time period the reader is living in.
  • What is Literary Fiction? Whereas contemporary fiction novels tend to be plot-driven, literary fiction is more character-driven; the overall tone is introspective.

Discussion Worthy Book Club Recommendations for 2023

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Book Club Books Published in 2023

Book Club Books Published in 2022

More Book Club Book Recommendations

While some book clubs love to keep up with the freshest titles and newest releases, we know that other book clubs prefer to choose backlist books that are easier to obtain from local libraries without long wait times. As a resource for groups that rely on libraries, we’ve also included links below to some of the best book club books from 2020 and 2021.

Reading Challenge Ideas for Book Clubs

Our annual reading challenges are great for book clubs! We’ve had many groups successfully use our yearly challenges to guide their groups throughout the year. Each of our challenge prompts has a corresponding list of book recommendations. Our book lists cover a wide range of topics and genres, ensuring that your club will be able to find something to fit your preferences.

Our challenges include:

Click on any challenge above to read all of the details, or find a quick summary of each here. the 2023 Challenge details here.

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Uplifting Books for Book Clubs - Book Girls' Guide

Thursday 9th of February 2023

[…] Looking for newer release book club suggestions? Try our list of the best book club books for 2023! […]

Marie Sharp

Friday 6th of January 2023

Is there any way you could do postings so we could print a list of individual grouping for future referral or so we can carry it with us to a local bookstore. Not everyone carries technology with them everywhere they go! Would love to be able to print off Winter’s mystery list or perhaps I can and just don’t know how! Love this website♥️.

Melissa George

Friday 6th of January 2023

Hi Marie, We don't currently have the best book club books or winter books in printable form, but we are starting to offer some of our lists as printables to our Buy Me a Coffee members. Because it's a manual process to make the printables, it made the most sense to offer them as a perk to those who help support the site monthly or annually. Members can currently print the monthly challenge lists or the Best of 2022 list. We may expand this in the future, but that's what we've been able to find time for so far. You can read more about the Buy Me a Coffee membership here: https://buymeacoffee.com/bookgirlsguide

Linda Lane

Saturday 19th of November 2022

Love this !!! Thank you!!!

Susan

Friday 11th of November 2022

Thank you, great list. As usual, I’ve added more to my TBR. Loved reading your October book log results, always fun to see the monthly results!

Deb

Tuesday 15th of November 2022

@Susan, Where do I find the October book log results? Thanks!