Best Book Club Books for 2025

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.

Book Summary

This suspenseful family drama explores the moral responsibility and ethical consequences of AI through a compelling story. Lorelei is a mother and a workaholic world leader in the field of artificial intelligence. She’s in the backseat with her tweens, Alice and Izzy, while husband, Noah, rides shotgun, and 17-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat of the family’s autonomous minivan.

When their van collides with an oncoming car, resulting in deadly consequences, the family is forced to confront more than one moral dilemma. Charlie’s future is at stake as the police investigate the crash, and Noah becomes suspicious of Lorelei’s behavior. Tensions escalate when Danieal, a tech mogul connected to Lorelei, suddenly intrudes on his family.

Book Summary

Suchi was only 7 years old when she first met Haiwen in Shanghai. She was drawn to the sounds of his violin, and over time their friendship developed into a deep love. But when Haiwen secretly enlisted in the Nationalist army in 1947 in order to save his brother from the draft, Suchi was left behind with nothing more than his violin and a note begging her forgiveness.

Sixty years later, they finally see each other again thanks to a chance encounter at an Asian supermarket in Los Angeles. Recently widowed Haiwen hopes it might be a second chance for them, but Suchi has survived the intervening decades by refusing to look back.

This novel follows Suchi and Haiwen through the six decades they were separated. Through alternating viewpoints, Suchi’s story is told from her childhood to the present. Haiwen’s story is traced in reverse from Chinese war and famine to the song halls of Hong Kong, from military encampments in Taiwan to the busy streets of NYC, and to sunny California, where they are finally reunited.

This epic, character-driven novel illustrates the different ways that people learn to survive through a lifetime of difficult decisions. Haiwen holds his memories close, while Suchi forces herself to only ever look forward.

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

When 16-year-old Adela Wood becomes pregnant, her parents send her away from her comfortable home in Indiana to her grandmother’s home in the small town of Padua Beach, Florida. In Florida, she meets several other teens who have faced pregnancy and motherhood at a young age.

This group, called the “Girls,” includes Emory, who brings her newborn to school because she’s determined to graduate, and Simon, who has four-year-old twins and is pregnant again. The small town considers this group the students who have lost their way, but instead, the Girls are finding their way together.

Book Summary

Joan is content with her quiet life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University in Houston. Then, she sees an ad that changes her life. NASA is looking for the first women scientists to join the Space Shuttle program. After being selected from a pool of thousands of worthy applicants, Joan begins training in the summer of 1980.

As she trains with her new team, they become unlikely friends, and Joan finds a new passion for life. She also begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

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

Some would consider 63-year-old PJ Halliday a lucky man, considering he won the million-dollar lottery. Unfortunately, tragedies have plagued him, including the sudden death of his eldest daughter and the subsequent end of his marriage. He’s already had three heart attacks and assumes he won’t be around long, especially since he spends all his time and money at the bar.

Then, he sees an obituary that means his high school crush is finally single again. Filled with renewed zest for life, he decides to drive across the country to the Tender Hearts Retirement Community in Arizona to win Michelle back.

Before he can leave town, another tragedy hits and he becomes the guardian for his estranged brother’s grandchildren. But he figures those kids could use an escape and join him on the trip. This, in turn, leads to his 20-something daughter joining to help babysit. Could this be PJ’s second chance at not only love, but parenting?

Book Summary

Freya had been working as a bartender in Maine, but after an emergency left her short on cash, she headed back to her hometown of Somers, New York. In Somers, she could at least stay in the house she inherited from her estranged parents without worrying about rent.

She’s shocked to find that her 15-year-old niece, Aubrey, has been secretly living in the derelict home. While she intended to lay low in Somers, Freya is not only reconnecting with Aubrey, but also encounters childhood friends, familial enemies, and old flames around town.

Throughout the story, Aubrey and Freya begin to repair both the home and their relationship, and readers slowly learn the difficult reasons Freya initially fled from Somers.

Book Summary

Jane grew up in an isolated cabin in Montana in the mid-1990s. Her father was her whole world. She only knew him, the vegetable garden they used to sustain themselves, and the nineteenth-century philosophy books he gave her instead of school books. All she knows about her mysterious life before moving off-grid is that they once lived in the Bay Area and that her mother died in a car accident.

When Jane hits her teen years, she becomes more curious about the small boundaries of her world. She desperately wants to join her father on his rare trips away from the cabin. One day, she discovers that her devotion to her father has made her an accomplice to a horrific crime. In a search for the truth, she leaves Montana and heads to San Francisco, desperate to learn more about her mother.

Book Summary

Set in the real-life neighborhood of Sugar Hill in Los Angeles during the 1940s, this modern retelling of The Great Gatsby follows the mysterious and glamorous James Mann, whose parties illuminate the night—but whose past is shrouded in secrets.

Charlie, a young veteran, comes to town at the invitation of his cousin, Marguerite, and is shocked to discover the world of L.A.’s Black elite. Marguerite’s cousin helps him land a promising career as an insurance agent.

Soon, Charlie is drawn into Mann’s glittering orbit. He discovers that behind the glamor, Mann is haunted by love and ambition, and is determined to reclaim something, or someone, that he lost.

Real historical events and figures are woven throughout the novel, including a court battle over racial covenants and real stars like Hattie McDaniel and Lena Horn.

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

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

After a teenage heartbreak, Beth marries a kind, gentle farmer named Frank, and they build a beautiful life together. Years later, Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog that is attacking sheep on the farm, and then they learn that the dog belonged to Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager, who has just returned to town. From that moment forward, nothing will ever be the same again.

Gabriel, now a famous author, has returned to his hometown with his young son. A son who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s orbit, the past is no longer in the past. Secrets and jealousies resurface and tensions rise throughout the village. Beth will have to decide between the life she has and the life she once wanted.

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

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

Back in college, Abe Winter and Ruth Warneke went on a terrible blind date. Against all odds, that date led to a seven decade marriage. Together, the two built a life on a farm on Bainbridge Island, where they raised children, fell in and out of lockstep, and endured losses. Through it all, they forged a dependable partnership.

Now in their 80s, the life they’ve created together is beginning to fall apart when Ruth’s health begins to fail. As she struggles with the loss of her independence, Abe wants nothing more than to take care of her. But their adult children are unconvinced of his ability to do so and encourage their parents to sell the farm.

Book Summary

In 1936, anthropology student Charlotte Cross was offered a coveted spot on an archaeological dig in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, but when tragedy strikes, Charlotte’s future is forever changed.

Forty-two years later, 18-year-old Annie Jenkins lands an amazing opportunity working for Diana Vreeland, the iconic former fashion editor at Vogue. It’s 1978, and Diana is organizing the famous Met Gala. Annie will have her work cut out for her in order to keep up with Diana’s demands and exacting standards.

Charlotte now leads a quiet life as the associate curator of the Egyptian Art at the Met. She wants little to do with the city’s “party of the year” because she’s too consumed with her research on Hathorkare – a rare female pharaoh who most other Egyptologists deem unimportant.

When one of the Egyptian art collection’s most valuable artifacts goes missing on the night of the gala, Annie and Charlotte team up to search for the missing antiquity. With signs that Hathorkare’s legendary curse might have been reawakened, the two women will travel to the one place Charlotte swore never to return – Egypt.

Book Summary

Junie has spent all of her 16 years on the Bellereine Plantation in Alabama as a slave. She cooks, cleans, and tends to the white master’s daughter, Violet. While she works, she dreams of poetry and a world outside her own, but at night, she’s overcome by grief due to the loss of her older sister, Minnie.

When the family has wealthy guests in town who hint at a marriage for Violet, which would upend Junie’s life, she does something to rouse Minnie’s spirit from the grave. When she needs help, she enlists the guest’s coachman, Caleb, who becomes a friend…then more. As the Civil War approaches, she realizes the dark truths and horrifying secrets about the Bellereine Plantation, and she begins to push back against her old life.

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

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

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

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

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.