Best Fall Book Club Books for 2025

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. As the years pass, Geogette comes of age, watching the highs and lows of her parents’ marriage and becoming best friends with the boy next door.

Later, after a shocking blow tears the family apart, teenager Georgette tries to distance herself from reminders of her parents. But an unexpected email changes what she thought she new about her mom’s past. Ultimately, she’ll have to decide what she wants to do with this information and how she should move forward in her life.

As you follow the Bright family history from the 1970s-2019, there are a few flashbacks in the early chapters, but the majority of the book is a linear timeline. The years are clearly denoted for each chapter. Instead of one character narrating the whole book or alternating narrators, you’ll find that the first half of the book is told from Lillian’s perspective before her daughter takes over for the next 40%. One final narrator then tells the last 10% of the story.

Book Summary

Two years ago, Barbara’s husband passed away and she was suddenly a single mom. Her own mother moved in to help with the children, but now Barbara is ready to start fully living again without her mom in the house.

Then, her mother-in-law, Ruth, arrives without warning, carrying suitcases in tow. While she means well, she’s abrasive and inflexible. Barbara would love to turn her away so she could start the new life she was finally looking forward to, but Ruth is a widow herself and still grieving the loss of her son.

However, Barbara starts to lose patience as the days turn into weeks. She needs a plan to get Ruth out of her house. Luckily, inspiration strikes! She just needs to find Ruth a suitor and marry her off…

Book Summary

Three women in different timelines are unexpectedly linked in this historical mystery, described as an ode to book lovers.

In 1900, Eva, a teacher from Cuba, travels to Boston to participate in a cultural exchange program at Harvard. It’s the perfect opportunity to represent Cuba as they prepare their bid for democracy while also working on the book she is writing. However, it’s a chance encounter with a stranger that changes the course of her life and legacy.

In 1966, Pilar works as a librarian in Cuba by day, but by night she fights Fidel’s regime in her own way and hopes for her husband’s release from unjust imprisonment. When she is entrusted with a book published sixty years earlier, she must decide how much she is willing to risk to protect it.

In 2024 London, American expat Margo is hired to source a book that’s more than one hundred and twenty years old. She has no idea she’s on a quest with deadly consequences. Along with her unlikely ally, she’ll have to confront the ghost of her own past to move forward.

Book Summary

Now in her 30s, Layla has always dreamed of a career in dance. When an unlikely opportunity to be the choreographer-in-residence at Briar House in rural Vermont comes along, she has to take it, even if this means leaving behind her friends, family, husband, and home in Brooklyn.

For nine months, she’ll lead a group of Black dancers in a very small, very white town. Layla just wants to create a magical dance, but the community wants to see the Black experience represented on stage. Teaching a career-defining performance is a difficult feat even before you add the layers of her crumbling marriage, the discovery of Blair House’s problematic past, and her positive pregnancy test.

Book Summary

The Ryan sisters haven’t been together at the family home in Long Island for years. Two decades ago, a tragedy upended everything. Their brother Topher’s friend was killed in an accident, which resulted in a lawsuit that sent their parents into bankruptcy. Topher spiraled into a deep depression that resulted in him taking his own life.

Now, the sisters are back for Thanksgiving for the first time. While they are eager to connect, each has a secret. Cait has been holding onto the fact that no one knows her role in the accident. Alice is facing career decisions and their potential impact on her marriage. Maggie is finally ready to risk bringing home the woman she loves to her devoutly Catholic mother. And they’re all still grieving the loss of Topher.

Old tensions and new truths emerge when Cait invites a guest to Thanksgiving dinner.

Book Summary

Sybil Van Antwerp is a 72-year-old grandmother, wife, and distinguished lawyer. Almost every day at 10:30, she sits down to write letters. And she sends most of them – whether to her brother, her best friend, or authors like Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. But for one common recipient, the letters are never sent.

She expects the rest of her life to continue as normal before receiving letters from someone who was part of one of the most painful periods of her life. Is it time to finally share the unsent letters she has been writing over all these years?

Book Summary

Dolores, aka Dorrie, has become a 35-year-old orphan after the funeral of the last member of her family. She’d feel completely alone if it weren’t for the chorus of dead relatives constantly interrupting her life with unsolicited advice and opinions.

While she made a deathbed promise to return to Colombina, the voices are amplifying her own doubts. How could she leave the country while trying to deal with her new inherited home, her mother’s aging Minneapolis Victorian, which also comes with two cats. She’s also recently broken up with her long-time boyfriend and been laid off from her job as a cartographer.

However, the hand-drawn map of her hometown is intriguing, so when an old flame offers to housesit, she takes the chance and flies south to discover her roots.

Book Summary

Margaret and her husband Thomas arrived to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1646, eager to build a life in the New World with a child on the way. However, Margaret’s fiery personality is not well-regarded in the Puritan community. Soon, she is considered cunning and dangerous.

The unjust accusations even begin to affect the previously passionate and unbreakable love she shared with Thomas. Can their marriage survive Margaret’s trial for witchcraft?

Book Summary

This novel transports you to 1940s rural Colorado and the home of teenager Victoria Nash. Despite her young age, she runs the household as the sole female in a family of troubled men. One day, she meets Wilson Moon, a mysterious young drifter who has been displaced from his tribal land. Their sudden and passionate connection is full of danger and secrets.

Victoria ends up fleeing to the harsh mountain wilderness in a small hut, where she struggles against impossible conditions. As the Gunnison River rises and threatens her homeland, she begins a quest to fight for all she has lost.

Book Summary

This historical novel is based on the real life and memoir of a 15th-century female physician in China. Tan Yunxian was raised in the Ming Dynasty era by her grandmother, also a physician, who taught her the art of Chinese medicine. Additionally, she learned about female conditions from her best friend, Meiling, who was training to be a midwife. While Yunxian was on the path to success in her own right, she was still forced into an arranged marriage.

Her new mother-in-law was a traditionalist who forbade her from seeing Meiling and stopped her from helping the girls and women in their household. Instead, she is supposed to be a “proper wife,” learning poetry, embroidering foot-binding slippers, and staying within the walls of their compound.

How did Yunxian break free and go on to treat women from all classes of society and create remedies that are still used over 500 years later? Lisa See tells her compelling life story in this novel.

Book Summary

In 1950s Tehran, Ellie lives a privileged life. However, her whole world changes when her father unexpectedly passes away, and she and her mother must move to a tiny home downtown.

On her first day at her new school, Ellie meets Homa, a kind, brave, and passionate girl who becomes her best friend. They spend all their time together learning to cook, playing games, and wandering the Grand Bazaar.

But then Ellie’s life flips again when she’s given a chance to return to her privileged life and attend the best girls’ high school in Iran. Over time, her thoughts of Homa fade, and she embraces her bourgeois life. When Homa suddenly reappears, the course of both of their lives is changed forever. The rising political turmoil in the country complicates things even further.

Book Summary

Looking to escape his circumstances, Jacob Jankowski jumps onto a passing train and suddenly finds himself thrust into the world of a circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression.

Because Jacob is just shy of his veterinary degree, he’s put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. He becomes enamored with Marlena, the star of the equestrian show. But Marlena is married to the circus’s cruel animal trainer. Jacob also meets Rosie, an elephant that everyone had hoped would help save the circus, but who appears to be untrainable.

Book Summary

Ashlyn Greer is a rare-book dealer who loves the smell of old paper, ink, and leather. Old volumes appeal to all of her senses, including a sense the rest of us don’t have. She is gifted with the unique ability to feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners.

When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound, unpublished volumes with no evidence of how they came to be, she gets wrapped up in a decades-old literary mystery. Each volume bears a curious inscription, as well as the emotional fingerprints of the authors, Hemi and Belle. The books tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance. The more Ashlyn learns about Hemi and Belle, the closer she comes to bringing closure to their love story, and to the unfinished chapters of her own life.

Book Summary

Charlie greets the women in his family, including his wife and four daughters, by saying “Hello, Beautiful” and truly sees something special in each of them. Unfortunately, Charlie is resented by his wife, Rose, because he’s an alcoholic, which also impacts his ability to provide for the family.

Their oldest daughter, Julie, is smart and ambitious. When she meets William, whose family couldn’t be more different than her own, he’s at college on a basketball scholarship. For William, the sport has been his saving grace and a substitute for the love of family. At least until he meets Julie and her family embraces him in their family unit when they become a couple. Once that happens, the family refuses to give up on him.

While you’ll get some fall vibes when Julie heads to college, Hello Beautiful also follows the characters for nearly four decades. The book begins in the main character’s childhood, in the 1960s, and spans into their middle-aged years.

Book Summary

Fourteen-year-old June had a very close relationship with her uncle, Finn, and was devastated when he died in 1987 from AIDS, which was then still a mysterious and seldom talked about illness.

June meets a stranger at Finn’s funeral – someone who is also struggling with the loss. As the two get to know each other, their unexpected friendship may be what they each need to heal.

Book Summary

This is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. Like Copperfield, Copperhead examines institutional poverty, but in contemporary Appalachia.

Born to a teenage single mother, Damon (soon to be known as Demon) braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, opioid addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

Book Summary

Civil is fresh out of nursing school and has dreams of making a big difference in her post-segregation African American community. She works for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, and she’s sent to a rural cabin during her first week on the job. When she arrives, Civil is shocked to find that her patients are children, only 11 and 13 years old.

The girls, Erica and India, are innocent and not even thinking of boys. However, because they are poor and Black, those handling their benefits have requested that the children be on birth control. Civil struggles with this unexpected aspect of her new career. Despite the shocking reason for meeting the sisters, Civil is endeared to them and their family. However, one day when she arrives for her visit, something unthinkable has happened, and Civil soon finds herself involved in a legal case.

You’ll also see Civil years later, at the end of her career, with a daughter of her own, as she tries to find peace without forgetting those she encountered along the way.

Book Summary

West With Giraffes is a charming tale of adventure that takes you on the ride of a lifetime from the East Coast of the US to the West, alongside a rowdy 17-year-old, a grumpy older man, and two giraffes. The year is 1938, and no American zoo has successfully housed giraffes before. The female zoo director of the San Diego Zoo believes she can do it. The giraffes have just survived a hurricane en route to the East Coast, and Riley Jones, the curmudgeonly head zookeeper, is responsible for safely transporting the giraffes from New York City to San Diego.

America is still in the throes of the Great Depression, and the Dust Bowl conditions continue to ravage the drought-stricken Southern Plains states. A coast-to-coast trek with giant animals is no easy feat. Jones begrudgingly teams up with a starving teenager named Woody to help him make the journey. The adventures along the way include run-ins with circus con artists, being tailed by a female photographer looking for a big scoop, an emotional visit to Woody’s hometown, and so much more.

At its heart, this is a coming-of-age story. Now, at the age of 105, Woody recounts his 12-day cross-country trip with Jones and the giraffes and how it shaped his life.