Best Book Club Books for 2025

Book Summary

Maddy’s stress seems typical for a college freshman at NYU – she is overwhelmed by schoolwork, exams, navigating life in New York City, plus she is dealing with a breakup. Her recent low led to a prescription for antidepressants, and now she’s feeling good. So good, in fact, that she begins to spiral too high into a terrifying mania that culminates in bipolar disorder diagnosis.

Growing up, Maddy never felt like she fit in with her picture-perfect Connecticut family. Now this new reality has her feeling like both too much and not enough as she struggles to navigate the complex effects of her diagnosis on her identity, her relationships, and her dreams for her future.

Book Summary

Ebby Freeman was just 10 years old when her brother was shot. She found him lying on the floor, surrounded by shattered pieces of a centuries-old jar. The crime was never solved, but people still talk about it. The Freemans were one of only Black families in their well-to-do corner of New England, causing the case to have an enduring, voyeuristic pull for the public.

Now, eighteen years later, Ebby’s high-profile romance has fallen apart, leading to yet another media frenzy. Ebby flees to France to try to get away from it all, but her past follows her. She begins thinking back on the other loss her family suffered the day her brother died – a stoneware jar that had been in their family for generations. She knows the jar was brought North by an enslaved ancestor. What she doesn’t know, however, is that the pottery holds more than her family’s history – it might also hold the key to her future.

Book Summary

While much of the country was experiencing social unrest in 1919, Harlem felt different. This corner of New York was filled with Black pride, as evidenced in the music, theater, fashion, and arts. Positioned right in the heart of this renaissance is a literary editor for a preeminent Negro magazine named Jessie Redmon Fauset.

The founder and editor of the magazine, W.E.B. Du Bois, tasked Jessie with discovering promising young writers whose words could change the world. Jessie wastes no time finding 16-year-old Countee Cullen and 17-year-old Langston Hughes. She also discovers Nella Larson, who becomes one of Jessie’s best friends.

Subscriptions soar for the already notable magazine, and every Black writer in the country is vying for the opportunity to be published in The Crisis. Jessie’s career is taking off, but her relationship with her married boss, W.E.B., threatens to jeopardize it all. At a time when she faces both overwhelming sexism and racism, Jessie will have to find a way to balance her drive and her desires if she hopes to preserve her legacy and achieve her ambitious dreams.

Book Summary

Following her years volunteering with the Red Cross in Nazi-occupied Europe during WWII, Louise is still adjusting to her new postwar role as a housewife. When she comes across a necklace at a secondhand shop, she recognizes the name of the Paris department store on the box and is certain she’s seen the jewelry before. She thinks that the necklace might even hold the key to the mysterious death of her friend, Franny.

With help from her former boss, Louise follows a trail of clues to Paris, where she discovers the dark history of Lévitan, a once glamorous department store that served as a Nazi prison during the war. She uncovers the story of Helaine, a Jewish woman who was imprisoned within the store after being separated from her husband when the Germans invaded France.

As Louise works to trace the connection between Lévitan, the necklace, and Franny’s death, there are forces working against her, determined to keep the truth buried.

Book Summary

Lila’s life is complicated. Her house is falling apart and her career as a self-help writer is at a standstill because she’s developed writer’s block. She’s divorced, has two willful daughters, and her elderly stepfather seems to have quietly moved in with her. Then her real father – a man she hasn’t seen since he left for Hollywood more than three decades ago – suddenly shows up on her doorstep.

His reappearance in her life after 35 years feels like the final straw. But she’ll learn that even when you think you can’t forgive someone, they might still have something to teach you about love and what it means to be family.

Book Summary

In 1930, five of the greatest female crime writers of the era came together to form a secret society. Tired of being treated as second-class citizens by their male counterparts in the legendary Detection Club, these women call themselves the Queens of Crime, and they are determined to solve an actual murder reminiscent of the locked-room murderers they are famous for writing about.

Led by Dorothy L. Sayers (whose husband is a member of the Detection Club), the Queens of Crime also includes Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy.

May Daniels, an English nurse, was visiting France with her friend when she seemingly vanished from a train station. Her body was discovered in the nearby woods months later. The police believe she was strangled, but how did the killer manage to sneak her body out of the crowded station without anyone noticing, and why was there so much blood at the crime scene?

The Queens of Crime take it upon themselves to solve this highly publicized murder, but it seems that the killer is targeting Sayers and threatening to expose a dark secret from her past.

Book Summary

In 1962, at the dawn of the jet-set era, two Pan Am stewardesses are navigating an adventurous new life in this historical fiction novel.

Judy Goodman and Beverly Caldwell had different reasons for seeking the coveted position of a Pan Am stewardesses, but both were looking to put continents and oceans between them and their pasts. Judy is running away from an oppressive marriage in small-town Pennsylvania while Beverly is leaving behind the gilded cage of her NYC society life.

By joining the elite team at Pan American Airlines, they embrace the culture, etiquette, and strict rules of the world above the clouds. The job takes them to faraway destinations and presents them with opportunities they could have only dared dream about.

As the two women build a deep friendship, they see each other through both love and danger while discovering what is truly important. They will also be forced to confront secrets that could change their lives all over again.

Book Summary

Carrie Buck came from a poor family in Virginia and was only 6 years old when she became a ward of the state. With no formal education and no family to support her, she spends her youth dreaming of a future different from the one she knows in her exploitative foster family. As a young woman in 1927, she finds herself at the center of an extraordinary legal battle at the forefront of the American eugenics conversation.

Nearly a century later, Jessa Gidney is trying to balance her high-powered legal career with her desire for a meaningful marriage and her dreams of having children. At a career turning point, Jessa leans in to her family’s history of activism by taking on pro bono work at a nearby ICE detention center. There, she meets a young mother named Isobel fighting to stay with her daughter. An unsettling revelation about Isobel’s health leads Jessa to discover a disturbing pattern of medical malpractice within the detention facility that has shocking ties to her own family’s history.

Book Summary

In 1991, twenty-something Frida arrives in Paris eager to begin a career as a war journalist covering the war in Bosnia. She sends an inquiry to a bookstore in Seattle, but what she receives back is more than just the book she requested.

What begins as correspondence between Frida and a young Seattle bookseller named Kate soon blossoms into an important friendship for both women throughout a very transformative period in each of their lives.

Book Summary

Growing up in the 1920s, Clara Harrington has a magical childhood as the daugther of renowned author Bronwyn Newcastle Fordham. Bronwyn became a national sensation when, at the age of just twelve, she wrote a book in an invented language.

But in 1927, when Clara was just 8 years old, her mother went missing off the coast of South Carolina. Not only does this leave her daughter and husband brokenhearted, it also dashes the hopes of ever translating the sequel to her book.

Years later, in 1952, Clara is an illustrator raising a daughter of her own. Out of the blue, she is contacted by a stranger in London named Charlie Jameson who claims to have discovered a handwritten dictionary of her mother’s lost language. Clara is skeptical but intrigued.

Together with her daughter, Wynnie, Clara crosses the Atlantic. When they arrive, London is experiencing a deadly natural disaster – the Great Smog. It’s too much for young Wynnie’s asthma, so Charlie invites them to seek refuge at his family’s retreat in the Lake District. There Clara must find the courage to uncover the truth about her mother and the story she left behind.

Book Summary

Deep in the Appalachian hills of North Carolina, there was once a community of formerly enslaved men and women ruled by a king and queen.

In the present day, after years of silence, Nikki’s estranged grandmother asks her to come to North Carolina. Nikki is hoping for answers about her family’s recent past, but instead, she learns a shocking story about her great-great-great-grandmother, Queen Luella.

Standing on the very land that was once the Kingdom of Happy Land, Nikki’s grandmother insists this place must be protected at all costs. She needs Nikki’s help to ensure that the land is not taken from their family.

Book Summary

The Griffin sisters – Cassie and Zoe – are just a year apart in age, but growing up, they were as different as could be. Charming and beautiful Zoe was always eager for the spotlight, whereas musical prodigy Cassie preferred the shadows.

In the early 2000s, when both girls were on the cusp of adulthood, destiny intervened. They were catapulted to stardom as the pop sensation The Griffin Sisters. Over the course of one whirlwind year, their fame saw them featured on MTV, SNL, and Rolling Stone magazine. But then the band abruptly broke up.

Two decades later, Zoe spends her days caring for her family, and Cassie is off the grid. The sisters don’t speak, and after all the years, no one knows why the band broke up.

Despite all her mother’s warnings, Zoe’s teenage daughter Cherry craves fame. She’s also determined to find out what happened to her mother’s band all those years ago. As secrets begin to emerge, Zoe, Cassie, and Cherry will have to face the consequences of their choices – the ones they’ve made, as well as the ones the music industry made for them.

Book Summary

Margaret, Viv, and Bitsy appear to have it all by the standards of the early 1960s, but “all” doesn’t feel like enough to them. They live in a brand-new “planned community” in Northern Virginia and feel guilty and confused that they aren’t satisfied with their supposedly idyllic housewife lives.

Things begin to change when the three women form a book club with their artsy new neighbor from Manhattan, Charlotte. Together, they read Betty Friedan’s controversial new book, The Feminine Mystique. For the first time, each of these women realizes that they are not alone in their dissatisfaction or their longings.

Their lives are forever altered. The book may be the start of it all, but it’s their bond of sisterhood that really helps them find the courage they each need to navigate the rapidly changing world and see themselves in a new light.

Book Summary

Ryan and Lillian Bright were deeply in love when they married and became parents to baby Georgette. But they were also keeping secrets from one another. Lillian had a son she didn’t tell Ryan about. And Ryan had an alcohol addiction that he didn’t tell Lillian about. As the years pass, Georgette comes of age, watching the highs and lows of their marriage.

Later, when a shocking blow tears the family apart, Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. But when Lillian’s son begins searching for his birth family, Georgette will be forced to return to her roots to learn more about her family’s history. Ultimately, she’ll have to decide whether she can let them back into her life while there’s still time.

Book Summary

Cora has a nine-year-old daughter and a brand-new baby son. Her husband is a respected doctor in the community, but to Cora, he is a terrifying and controlling presence. After a huge storm, Cora sets out to register her son’s birth. Her husband expects the infant to be named after him, but when the registrar asks Cora for the name, she hesitates.

Can a name change the course of your life? This novel spans 35 years, following three alternate versions of life for Cora and her young son, each shaped by her choice of name.

Book Summary

Corby loves his wife Emily dearly, but new fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction all put a strain on their relationship. And that’s before he causes a tragedy that tears his family apart.

Corby is sentenced to prison, and life on the inside is brutal. But he also witnesses small acts of kindness and finds kinship with a prison librarian who is able to see the best in him and some of his fellow inmates, including his big-hearted cellmate and a troubled teen in need of a role model.

Are mercy and reconciliation possible, and can his crimes ever be forgiven by those he loves?

Book Summary

When looking at one of the most famous paintings in the world, it’s easy to miss the three tiny figures in the corner at the far end of the pier. You might even think they’re just part of the sea. But 18-year-old Louisa, an artist herself, noticed them. The painting has unexpectedly been bequeathed to her, and she’s determined to find out the story behind the enigmatic figures.

Twenty-five years ago, a group of teenagers spent their days hanging out and laughing out on the pier to escape their difficult lives at home. Joar never backs down from a fight. Bookish Ted is mourning his father. Ali’s dad never stays in place for long. And then there is the boy who hoards sleeping pills and doesn’t want too much attention, but who has an extraordinary talent for art.

Louisa sets out on a cross-country journey to learn more about the work of art. The closer she gets to the painting’s birthplace, the more she feels compelled to unleash her own artistic spirit.