Oprah's Book Club is the original cultural tastemaker. Since the 1990s, her selections have shaped reading habits across generations, turning literary novels into shared national conversations. Oprah's picks tend to be big-hearted, ambitious, and deeply human — stories that are meant to be felt, not just read.
By Ocean Vuong
In a fading Connecticut mill town, nineteen-year-old Hai, a Vietnamese American drifting in grief and addiction, prepares to end his life when he's interrupted by Grazina, an elderly widow slipping into dementia. Their chance meeting leads to an unlikely arrangement: Hai becomes her live-in caretaker in exchange for food and shelter. As he navigates low-wage work, family expectations, and buried secrets, Hai slowly forges a makeshift family with Grazina and his coworkers. The novel traces how fragile acts of care, humor, and shared struggle can tether people to the world without offering easy resolutions.
By Eckhart Tolle
A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose is a spiritual guide rather than a story-driven book, following Eckhart Tolle's exploration of how the human ego creates suffering, conflict, and dissatisfaction. Through examples, reflections, and practical insights, he invites readers to observe their thoughts, release their attachment to possessions and roles, and discover a deeper identity rooted in present-moment awareness. As he contrasts ego-driven living with a more awakened state of consciousness, the book gently outlines a path toward inner peace, authentic purpose, and a collective shift in how humanity relates to itself and the planet.
By Tina Knowles
Matriarch is Tina Knowles's candid memoir about her journey from a spirited girl growing up in 1950s Galveston, Texas, to a creative force and devoted mother at the center of a famous musical family. Tracing her life in three acts—daughter, mother, woman—she reflects on early encounters with racism, the tight-knit community that shaped her, the joys and pressures of raising Beyoncé and Solange, and the complicated evolution of a long marriage. Without dwelling on gossip, the book focuses on resilience, self-worth, and what it truly means to become the matriarch of both a family and a legacy.
By Eric Puchner
Eric Puchner's Dream State follows Cece, her charismatic fiancé Charlie, and his damaged best friend Garrett, who gather at Charlie's family lake house in rural Montana for a destination wedding that does not go as planned. Over the ensuing decades, their split-second choices at the lake reverberate through marriages, friendships, and their children's lives, all against the backdrop of a West increasingly shaped by drought, wildfire, and climate anxiety. Both intimate and sweeping, the novel traces how love, regret, and memory evolve over fifty years, asking what it means to build a life amid uncertainty.
By Ann Packer
Ann Packer's Some Bright Nowhere follows Eliot and Claire, a couple married for nearly forty years, as they face the final stage of Claire's long illness. Once partners in work, parenting, and everyday life, they have gradually shifted into a caregiver–patient dynamic that both binds and strains them. When Claire makes an unexpected request about how she wants to spend her last days, Eliot is forced to reconsider what he thought he knew about their marriage, their past compromises, and her private inner life. The novel traces love, resentment, and acceptance in the charged space between life and death.
By Richard Russo
Bridge of Sighs follows Louis 'Lucy' Lynch, a good-natured man who has spent his whole life in the fading upstate New York town of Thomaston, where he runs several small convenience stores and remains devoted to his wife, Sarah. As the couple prepare for a long-delayed trip to Italy to see Lucy's estranged childhood friend, now a famous painter living abroad, Lucy begins to reflect on their intertwined pasts. Moving between memories of youth and the uncertainties of later life, the novel explores small-town loyalties, buried secrets, and the question of whether people can truly escape where they came from.
By Elizabeth Gilbert
All the Way to the River: Love, Loss, and Liberation is Elizabeth Gilbert's intimate memoir of her transformative relationship with musician and hairdresser Rayya Elias. Beginning with an unlikely friendship that slowly deepens into profound, life-altering love, Gilbert traces how this bond forces her to confront long-hidden patterns of emotional dependency and addiction. As illness and crisis enter their lives, she is pushed to question her ideas about devotion, spirituality, and self-preservation. Written with candor and tenderness, the book reflects on how one extraordinary relationship can break a life apart and, ultimately, help rebuild a more honest self.
By Amy Griffin
In The Tell, Amy Griffin appears to have it all—a successful career, a loving family, and a life built far from her Texas childhood—but an unsettling emotional distance from her young daughter exposes cracks beneath the surface. Spurred by that confrontation, Amy begins a quest to understand the source of her lifelong anxiety and perfectionism. Her search leads her into MDMA-assisted therapy, where she must face mysteries buried deep in her memory, and into the legal and cultural systems that shaped her silence. The memoir traces her struggle to reclaim her voice, her past, and a more authentic self.
By Wally Lamb
In The River Is Waiting, Wally Lamb follows Corby Ledbetter, a once-optimistic stay-at-home dad in small-town Connecticut whose life implodes after a single tragic mistake involving his young son. As his family fractures under the weight of grief and blame, Corby spirals into addiction and faces criminal charges that send him into the brutal world of a state prison. There, he must navigate danger, guilt, and shame while clinging to fragile connections with his wife and daughter. The novel traces his painful struggle toward accountability, self-understanding, and the hope of emotional redemption.
By Bruce Holsinger
Bruce Holsinger's Culpability follows the Cassidy-Shaw family after their autonomous minivan is involved in a devastating crash on the way to a lacrosse tournament. In the aftermath, high-achieving parents Noah and Lorelei and their three children retreat to the Chesapeake Bay, where a police investigation, mounting media pressure, and their own buried secrets begin to pull them apart. As they grapple with guilt, grief, and questions about responsibility—human and technological—the arrival of a powerful tech mogul linked to Lorelei's AI work further complicates their search for truth, testing the limits of family loyalty and moral certainty.
Oprah's Book Club is the original cultural tastemaker. Since the 1990s, her selections have shaped reading habits across generations, turning literary novels into shared national conversations. Oprah's picks tend to be big-hearted, ambitious, and deeply human — stories that are meant to be felt, not just read.