14 Book Club Picks That Actually Live Up To The Hype

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“It was as if we could no longer be ourselves because the world was not itself.”

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Choosing the right book club picks can be tricky. With so many hyped titles online, it’s tough to know which ones are really worth reading and which ones will spark lively discussions. That’s why we here at What We Reading have curated our list of the best books for book clubs – titles that truly live up to the hype. Whether you’re searching for popular book club books, page-turners everyone will enjoy, or highly recommended books for discussion, this guide has you covered. These selections are perfect for both seasoned readers and casual book club members, offering rich themes, compelling characters, and stories that keep conversations flowing long after the last page. If you’ve ever felt disappointed by overhyped picks or struggled to find books that book clubs actually love, this list promises to give you confidence that your next meeting will be engaging, thought-provoking, and, most importantly, fun. 

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Circe – Madeline Miller

Kicking off our list is one of our all-time favourite book club picks, Madeline Miller’s iconic retelling of The Odyssey, Circe. Circe is a strange child – neither powerful like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does indeed have power: the power of witchcraft. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts, and crosses paths with the famous figures in mythology, including the Minotaur, Medea, and Odysseus. 

But there is danger too. Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of all the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or with the mortals she has come to love. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like Circe 

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Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. 

In her compelling nature book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer brings these lenses of knowledge together to show that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings are we capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learning to give our own gifts in return. 

Dream Count – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chiamaka is a Nigerian travel writer living in America. Alone in the midst of a pandemic, she recalls her past lovers and grapples with her choices and regrets. Zikora, her best friend, is a lawyer who has been successful in everything, until she finds herself forced to turn to the person she thought she needed the least. Omelogor, Chiamaka’s outspoken cousin, is a financial powerhouse in Nigeria who begins questioning how well she knows herself. And Kaiatou, Chiamaka’s housekeeper, is proudly raising her daughter in America, but faces an unthinkable hardship that threatens all she has worked to achieve. 

One of the best book club picks from 2025, Dream Count is a tale of these women in a novel that takes up the very nature of love itself. A trenchant reflection on the choices we make and those made for us, Adichie’s tale pulses with emotional urgency and poignant observations of the human heart. 

The Vanishing Half – Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. However, after growing up together in a small southern Black community and running away at sixteen, it’s not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by many miles, the fates of these twins remain intertwined. 

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a book club favourite that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant depiction of the American history of passing. The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person’s decisions, desires, and expectations. 

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Crying In H Mart – Michelle Zauner

In this delicious story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humour and heart, she tells of growing up as the only Asian-American kid at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother’s high expectations of her; of treasured months in Seoul with her grandmother, where she and her mother would bond over heaping piles of food. 

As she grew up, her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother’s diagnosis of terminal pancreatic cancer that forced a reckoning with her identity. Vivacious, honest, and lyrical, Crying in H Mart is one of the best memoirs for book clubs for anyone looking for a read that will be cherished, shared, and reread. 

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The Remains Of The Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

In the summer of 1956, Sevens, a long-serving butler at Darlington Hall, decides to take a motoring trip through the West Country. The six-day excursion becomes a journey into the past of Stevens and England, a past that takes in fascism, two world wars, and an unrealised love between the butler and his housekeeper, making for one of the captivating classic book club recommendations. 

Such A Fun Age – Kiley Reid

Alix Chamberlain is a woman who gets what she wants and has made a living teaching women how to do the same. So she is shocked when her babysitter, Emira Tucker, is confronted while watching the Chamberlains’ toddler one night, walking the aisles of their local supermarket. The security guard, spotting the young Black woman with a white child, accuses Emira of abducting two-year-old Briar. A small crowd gathers, bystanders film the altercation, and Emira is furious and humiliated. Alix resolves to make everything right. 

But Emira herself is aimless, broke, and wary of Alix’s desire to help. When the video of her unearths someone from Alix’s past, both women find themselves on a collision course that will upend all they thought they knew about themselves and each other. With empathy and biting social commentary, Such a Fun Age is a book club staple that explores the stickiness of transactional relationships and the complex realities of being a grown-up. 

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The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue – V.E. Schwab

France, 1714: in a moment of desperation, a young woman makes a Faustian bargain to live forever – and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue, and a dazzling adventure that will play out across centuries and continents, across history and art, as a young woman learns how far she will go to leave a mark on the world. 

But everything changes after nearly three hundred years, when Addie happens upon a young man in a hidden bookstore, and he remembers her name. 

The Glass Castle – Jeanette Walls

The Glass Castle is another remarkable memoir, perfect for book clubs about a family that is at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeanette’s brilliant and charismatic father captured his children’s imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn’t want the responsibility of raising a family. 

The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, eventually finding their way to New York. Their parents follow them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prosper. The Glass Castle is a truly astonishing story – permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family. 

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The Help – Kathryn Stockett

Kathryn Stockett’s iconic novel, The Help, is a story of three strong women whose lives change during a turbulent historical era. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating, but she also knows that her mother won’t be pleased with her until she has a ring on her finger. Aibileen is a wise Black maid whose recent loss of her son has made her extremely protective of the little girl she now cares for. Minny is Aibileen’s best friend, whose sharp tongue has seen her lose too many jobs in the past. 

Though they are all very different from each other, the three women soon find themselves working together on a project that will see them push back against the lines and expectations of the society around them. 

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Check Out The Best Books Like The Help

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If We Were Villains – M.L. Rio

Oliver Marks has just served ten years in prison for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he is released, he’s greeted by the man who put him behind bars. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened all those years ago. 

As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes, and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into real life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless. 

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Check Out Our If We Were Villains Book Review

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Broken Country – Clare Leslie Hall

Another one of the best new book club picks from 2025, Broken Country introduces readers to Beth and her gentle, kind husband, Frank. When Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realise that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. The dog belonged to Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager – the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son, Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident. 

As Beth is hauled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise, and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to choose between the woman she was and the woman she has become. A sweeping love story with the pacing and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of passion and impossible decisions, offering up countless lively book club discussions.

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Hidden Valley Road – Robert Kolker

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don’s work brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins, and they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. But how could this happen to one family? 

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family’s unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope. 

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The Midnight Library – Matt Haig

When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change. 

The books in the Midnight Library allow Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she attempts to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger. Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live? 

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Check Out Our The Midnight Library Book Review

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