Book club picks with messy choices and big opinions
15 books
A white novelist steals her dead Asian friend's manuscript and publishes it as her own. The book club fight writes itself; Kuang knows it and keeps the knife in.
A mother writes letters to her absent husband after their son murders nine people at his high school. The question Shriver refuses to answer is whether she ever loved him.
A planned community in 1990s Ohio, a mother-daughter duo who don't fit, and a custody battle over a Chinese-American baby. No one is fully right and no one stays fully wrong.
A Korean wife stops eating meat and the men around her treat it as an act of war. Three perspectives, none of them hers, on a quiet refusal that becomes everything.
Shakespeare's son dies and we sit with the wife everyone forgets. A novel about grief, and underneath, a quiet argument about whose stories get told.
A district attorney's son is accused of murdering a classmate. Landay asks how much parents really want to know about their children.
A wife disappears on her fifth anniversary; her husband is the obvious suspect. Flynn flips the perspective halfway through and the entire premise of the genre with it.
A new mother is sure something is wrong with her daughter. Her husband is sure something is wrong with her. The book refuses to choose, and that's the debate.
Twins in Kerala, a forbidden love across caste, the small things that grow into the catastrophe. Roy writes language as if breaking it open.
An artificial friend watches a sick teenage girl from inside the family that bought her. Ishiguro lets you decide whether what Klara feels counts.
A young woman in 2000 New York decides to sleep through a year on prescription drugs. Moshfegh dares you to sympathize and dares you to look away.
A teenage Renaissance duchess sits for the painting she suspects is her death sentence. The historical evidence and the novel's interpretation will fight in your living room.
A young Black babysitter is accused by a security guard of kidnapping the white toddler she's caring for. Reid puts the well-meaning white employer at the centre and lets her be wrong.
A mixed-race Mississippi family on a road trip carrying ghosts. The argument is about what we owe the dead and what they keep asking.
A girl misreads a scene between her sister and the housekeeper's son. McEwan writes the misreading and then spends a lifetime undoing it. The ending changes everything you thought you understood.
