Little Fires Everywhere
Celeste Ng
A mother, an artist and a custody fight in a tidy suburb. Questions of class, motherhood and who gets to decide.
All moods
Book club picks
The best book club books split the room. These novels have a moral knot, a character you'll argue about or an ending people read differently. They're all widely available in paperback and from libraries, which helps when a whole group needs a copy.
Books to start with
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
A betrayal in childhood Kabul and a lifetime of guilt. Heavy, readable and full of talking points on loyalty and redemption.
Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
Three friends grow up at an English boarding school. A gentle, quietly unsettling story best discovered without spoilers, and it lingers.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan. Sweeping, character-led and rich in themes of identity and belonging.
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel
A traveling theater troupe in the world after a pandemic. Art, memory and what we'd save.
Circe
Madeline Miller
The witch of Greek myth tells her own story. Lyrical, with a lot to say about power and being overlooked.
How to choose
Choose by how your group likes to argue. Little Fires Everywhere opens with a house fire and then goes back to show how it came about, and it invites debate about class, privilege and motherhood in 1990s Ohio. The Kite Runner is the most emotionally demanding pick. It centers on guilt and betrayal, and it includes sexual violence and war, so check that your group is ready for it. Never Let Me Go is quiet and slow, and it talks best once everyone has finished.
Pachinko follows four generations across most of the 20th century, so there are plenty of characters to take sides on. Station Eleven jumps between timelines, which makes a good opening question: how did each person follow it? Circe suits a group that likes myth and questions of power, and it includes a scene of sexual violence.
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