Looking for your next great read? NPR's latest Books We Love list features a dozen inspiring and thought-provoking titles perfect for your book club. Explore fiction and nonfiction recommendations, from poignant memoirs to sharp satirical novels, covering themes of feminism, race, class, marriage, and more.
If your book club is looking for its next conversation-sparking title, we have a dozen for you! These fiction and nonfiction titles were all recommended by NPR staff and critics for the latest installment of Books We Love , our annual year-end books guide. Books We Love allows you to browse and filter them by genre to find the title that's perfect for you and your reading buddies.
\Here are a few to get you started: Catalina Ituralde is that elusive, cool, shrewdly intelligent, cultured friend who has somehow managed to be unapologetically herself. She is main-character energy. Her senior year at Harvard, Catalina wants to date fellow student Nathaniel Wheeler, work on the literary magazine and write a killer thesis. What happens after graduation is uncertain. As a DREAMer raised in Queens, she's navigating her undocumented status, her relationship with her grandparents and her place in a world that isn't built for her. Catalina is a melding of unflinching personal insights and insecurities with an analytical exploration into the politics of feminism, colonialism, race, class and gender. As author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio puts it – out of all the abandoned girls, Catalina could be the valedictorian. \—Eliza Griswold likens her style of immersion journalism to hitchhiking: You might think you're headed to Vermont, only to find yourself lost in Las Vegas. Something of the sort happens in her nonfiction book *Circle of Hope*. She spots the hipsters and spiritual refugees who make up Philadelphia's Circle of Hope church, and she embeds with its four pastors, expecting to tell a story about modern Christians emulating Jesus' earliest followers. But the story takes a sharp left turn as the church confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and its own racial missteps. It's not a happy ending – the Circle, in the end, is broken. But animated by Griswold's sharp eye and deep empathy for the church's idealistic but flawed leaders, the book is more than worth the journey. \—Danzy Senna has earned a stellar reputation for her discerning reflections on the experience of being Black and biracial in an aspirationally post-racial America. Her exhilarating, satirical fourth novel,, is one of the sharpest, most viscerally entertaining novels I've read in years. Jane is a literary novelist who's sick of living in genteel, precarious poverty in the cold shadow of Hollywood's dream factory. When her spectacularly esoteric, centuries-spanning saga of mixed-race history (a'mulatto') doesn't sell, she launches a perilous yet hilarious bid to become a TV writer instead. It's a wild and poignant ride. \—I spent most of the last year mourning my mother and found few books that even got close to capturing my altered mental state. My brain kept rehashing the past and finding significance in the oddest things, and I so wanted to share that experience with the very person I was missing. In a slim 191 pages, Sloane Crosley nails it precisely as she details mourning her best friend, who died suddenly by suicide. While poignant and vulnerable, her memoir is also insightful and funny, especially as she recounts adventures with Russell and her attempts to track down and reclaim jewelry that was stolen from her apartment about a month before he died: a caper he would have enjoyed in the telling. I finished it feeling grateful for her friend's life and even more appreciative of my mom's. \—Maybe it's the age I'm in – seeing friends and peers become parents while also caring for their own parents, seeing how it radically changes their lives, seeing the price of child care! – but this book hit home. Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews,clearly lays out how the U.S. forces women to fill in as society's support system through both written policy and cultural norms. Some of the interviews may ruin your day with how angry they make you. There is also a healthy dose of hope, as this book points us toward urgent institutional changes to pave a better path forward. \—It's the story of the dissolution of a marriage, told from the eyes of a woman whose husband seems uninterested in husbanding. At first, it's easy to brush off the slights as him just being a guy. But then the slights and put-downs and lies build, and it's obvious to everyone outside of the relationship that this is unsustainable. It's a story that's been told a million times, but in Manguso's hands, it's terse and funny. The marriage is sour. You can wince, but you can't look awa
BOOK CLUB RECOMMENDATIONS NONFICTION FICTION NPR BOOKS WE LOVE MEMOIR SATIRE FEMINISM RACE CLASS MARRIAGE
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