We at Booklist are proud to once again partner with the Women’s National Book Association for National Reading Group Month. Every October, the WNBA supplies a list of Great Group Reads. The 20 titles on this year’s list have been chosen for their appeal to reading groups by a selection committee of writers, reviewers, librarians, booksellers, publicists, and committed readers. The following titles cover timely and provocative topics and include under-represented gems from independent presses and lesser-known mid-list releases from larger houses. The 2017 list is below, with links to their Booklist reviews.
In Erich Segal’s indelible novel Love Story, cancer tragically ends a great romance. Maynard could have used the same title for her latest memoir. This haunting story, penned by a master wordsmith, is a reminder to savor every loved one and every day.
The Clay Girl, by Heather Tucker
When her father shoots himself, eight-year-old Harriet is sent to Toronto live with her Aunt Mary. And thus Ari, as Harriet is known, is launched into the tumultuous 60s, where the smart, spirited girl grapples with darkness, loss, and family drama—with the help of an imaginary seahorse she calls Jasper.
Boyne, author of the internationally best-selling children’s book
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, delivers the epic story of Cyril Avery, who—after being born out of wedlock in Dublin in 1945—is adopted as a baby by a dissolute banker and a chain-smoking author of literary novels.
Butler’s best-selling debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, garnered widespread praise for its poignant depiction of small-town life in a Wisconsin farming community. Using the backdrop of his home state once again, he follows the erratic fortunes of an aspiring Eagle Scout and virtually friendless outcast.
Jeremy Beaujolais, a student of botany at the University of Massachusetts, is so committed to botanical preservation that just listing the names of all the flora species going extinct on a campus radio program gives him a panic attack so serious that the school authorities insist that he take an academic break.
Moss, famous for the children’s series Amelia’s Notebook, here turns to decidedly adult matters. Readers are invited into her home during one of the most intimate and turbulent times in her family’s history, her husband’s quick decline and untimely death from ALS.
Lilly Blackwood has spent all of her nine years locked in an attic room at Blackwood Manor Horse Farm because, as her mother tells her, she is an abomination. When the traveling Barlow Brothers’ Circus pitches its tents nearby, Momma marches her over and sells her.
Contrary to what the title suggests, this remarkably empathetic story is about two women, mothers separated by ethnicity and class, whose orbits of longing intersect around one “lucky boy,” Ignacio.
Sorell’s debut novel may at first appear to be literary suspense, but it’s much more the tale of a fractured mother-daughter relationship and its fallout. Elsie’s mother, Rachel, has succumbed to cancer Elsie was unaware of. Elsie inherits her mother’s apartment and discovers more secrets.
In the winter of 1870, Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels from town to town reading current news of ratified amendments and polar expeditions to (mostly) attentive audiences. When he’s asked to deliver a 10-year-old German girl back to her relatives in San Antonio in exchange for $50 in gold, he agrees.
As a child, Sarah Creamer was told by her mother that “you ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, child.” As a widow, Sarah is still haunted by those words as she struggles to make ends meet for herself and seven-year-old Emerson Bridge, the illegitimate son of her husband and her best friend.
A decade after
her international best-selling debut, Lee delivers an exquisite, haunting epic that crosses almost a century, four generations, and three countries while depicting an ethnic Korean family that cannot even claim a single shared name because, as the opening line attests: “History has failed us.”
The Redemption of Galen Pike: Short Stories, by Carys Davies
In her second short story collection, Davies (Some New Ambush, 2007) takes readers on a globe-spanning journey from the American Southwest to Siberia. Deep, layered, and darkly funny, her prose won Davies the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award.
The war may have only lasted six days, but its impact echoes through generations of a Palestinian family in this ambitious debut novel. Each chapter offers a crystalline glimpse into a different character’s life, their stories jarringly redirected by the conflicts in the Middle East.
Historical-novelist Vyleta imagines an alternative turn-of-the-century England where the proletariat and aristocratic classes are further divided by the relationship to Smoke, the manifestation of sin that flows from the body as blackened breath or ashen sweat whenever someone thinks or acts immorally.
Kevin Pace, an artist living in New England, is working obsessively on a painting in his barn. It is a massive canvas, the object of daily struggles and inner turmoil. No one is allowed to see it, to the vexation of his family and closest friend, Richard, who all worry that he’s drinking again.
See, herself partly of Chinese ancestry, creates a complex narrative that ambitiously includes China’s political and economic transformation, little-known cultural history, the intricate challenges of transracial adoption, and an insightful overview of the global implications of specialized teas.
Debut novelist Huber brings psychological acuity and tender empathy to her portraits of Margery Williams, the English American author of the children’s literature classic The Velveteen Rabbit, and her artist daughter, Pamela Bianco—lives so intertwined that it would be difficult to tell their stories separately.
Hunter’s novel about what happens to the family after the Germans invade in 1939 is based on her own family’s experiences. Amid the many accounts of Jews who did not survive the Holocaust, this novel stands out in its depiction of one lucky family who, miraculously, did.
Omotoso’s U.S. debut is an intimate, frequently hilarious look at the lives of two extraordinary women set in postapartheid South Africa. Hortensia James and Marion Agostino have been neighbors and enemies for more than 20 years.As the chapters unfold, readers learn the origins of their deliberate antagonism.